BiblioVault - Books about Stones

The Book of Stones and Angels

Harold Schweizer

Tupelo Press, 2015

Thematically exploring the contrasts and dynamic interplay between solidity and ephemerality, in his first book of poems Harold Schweizer creates great dramatic tension by poising complex, expansive sentences against the strictures of taut margins. While portraying angels as unfettered, Schweizer doesn’t accept the platonic notion that we ever transcend our physical world. Instead, he imagines angels as immanent, everywhere: “they / inhabit all things.” The Book of Stones and Angels attempts to disclose the angelic lightness of stones in the obstinate materiality of angels, amid the lightness and frailty of our existence.

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Giving Voice to Stones

Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature

By Barbara McKean Parmenter

University of Texas Press, 1994

"A struggle between two memories" is how Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish describes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Within this struggle, the meanings of land and home have been challenged and questioned, so that even heaps of stones become points of contention. Are they proof of ancient Hebrew settlement, or rubble from a bulldozed Palestinian village? The memory of these stones, and of the land itself, is nurtured and maintained in Palestinian writing and other modes of expression, which are used to confront and counter Israeli images and rhetoric. This struggle provides a rich vein of thought about the nature of human experience of place and the political uses to which these experiences are put.

In this book, Barbara McKean Parmenter explores the roots of Western and Zionist images of Palestine, then draws upon the work of Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and other writers to trace how Palestinians have represented their experience of home and exile since the First World War. This unique blending of cultural geography and literary analysis opens an unusual window on the struggle between these two peoples over a land that both divides them and brings them together.

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The Place of Stones

A Novel

Ali Hosseini

Northwestern University Press, 2017

Finalist, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize

The Place of Stones is Ali Hosseini’s newly translated first novel, his second book to appear in English. In it, he paints a vivid portrait of Sangriz, a village in the southern part of Iran where life has been disrupted by industrialization and the revolution of 1979.

Haydar and Jamal are best friends, and their families have always made their living from the land in the foothills of Iran’s Zagros Mountains. Haydar is a dreamer who searches the hills for an ancient treasure called the Black Globe. Jamal is in love with Haydar’s sister, Golandam, and he attempts to accommodate himself to modernization as a way to create a better life for the two of them. The rapacious conversion of farmland to brick factories draws the trio into escalating conflict with the village landlord.

As Jamal, Haydar, and their families confront land reform, industrialization, revolution, and war, their lives are pulled forcefully toward the explosive events that will change them all. In masterfully crafted prose that never sinks into sentimentality, The Place of Stones illuminates how a lost past continues to shape the present.

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Sticks and Stones

Living with Uncertain Wars

Padraig O'Malley

University of Massachusetts Press, 2006

Albert Einstein famously remarked that he did not know what weapons would be used in World War III, but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars, government officials, politicians, journalists, and statesmen examine what can be learned from the wars of the twentieth century and how that knowledge might help us as we step ever so perilously into the twenty-first.

Following an introduction by Padraig O'Malley, the book is divided into four sections: "Understanding the World as We Have Known It"; "Global Uncertainties"; "Whose Values? Whose Justice?"; and "Shaping a New World." The first section reviews what we have learned about war and establishes benchmarks for judging whether that knowledge is being translated into changes in the behavior of our political cultures. It suggests that the world's premier superpower, in its effort to promote Western-style democracy, has taken steps that have inhibited rather than facilitated democratization.

The second section examines the war on terror and the concept of global war. From the essays in this section emerges a consensus that democracy as practiced in the West cannot be exported to countries with radically different cultures, traditions, and values. The third section visits the question of means and ends in the context of varying value systems and of theocracy, democracy, and culture. In the final section, the focus shifts to our need for global institutions to maintain order and assist change in the twenty-first century.

Although each contributor comes from a different starting point, speaks with a different voice, and has a different ideological perspective, the essays reach startlingly similar conclusions. In sum, they find that the West has not absorbed the lessons from the wars of the last century and is inadequately prepared to meet the new challenges that now confront us.

Contributors to the volume include J. Brian Atwood, Susan J. Atwood, John Cooley, Romeo Dallaire, Ramu Damodaran, Valerie Epps, Michael J. Glennon, Stanley Heginbotham, Robert Jackson, Winston Langley, Alfred W. McCoy, Greg Mills, Jonathan Moore, Chris Patten, Gwyn Prins, Jonathan Schell, John Shattuck, Cornelio Sommargua, Brian Urquhart, Stephen Van Evera, and Robert Weiner.

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Stones

A Material and Cultural History

Cally Oldershaw

Reaktion Books, 2023

The story of our deep and multifaceted connections to geological matter—the very bedrock of our lives.

From small beach pebbles to huge megaliths, stones have been revered, collected, enhanced, sculpted, or engraved for practical and artistic purposes throughout the ages. They have been used to delineate boundaries and to build homes and shelters and utilized for cooking, games, and competitions. This surprising and fascinating compendium of stone facts, myths, and stories reveals the impact and importance of stones in our history and culture. Cally Oldershaw introduces the science in an accessible way and covers the aesthetic appeal of stones, their practical uses, and metaphysical properties. With an eclectic mix of examples from the Stone Age to the present, Stones engagingly excavates the story of this essential matter.

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Stones, Bones, and Profiles

Exploring Archaeological Context, Early American Hunter-Gatherers, and Bison

Marcel Kornfeld

University Press of Colorado, 2016

Stones, Bones, and Profiles addresses key and cutting-edge research of three pillars of hunter-gatherer archaeology. Stones and bones—flaked stone tools and the bones of the prey animals—are the objects most commonly recovered from hunter-gatherer archaeological sites, and profiles represent the geologic context of the archeological record. Together they constitute the foundations of much of early archaeology, from the appearance of the earliest humans to the advent of the Neolithic.

The volume is divided into three sections: Peopling of North America and Paleoindians, Geoarchaeology, and Bison Bone Bed Studies. The first section dissects established theories about the Paleoindians, including the possibility that human populations were in North America before Clovis and the timing of the opening of the Alberta Corridor. The second section provides new perspectives on the age and contexts of several well-known New World localities such as the Lindenmeier Folsom and the UP Mammoth sites, as well as a synthesis of the geoarchaeology of the Rocky Mountains' Bighorn region that addresses significant new data and summarizes decades of investigation. The final section, Bison Bone Bed Studies, consists of groundbreaking zooarchaeological studies offering new perspectives on bison taxonomy and procurement.

Stones, Bones, and Profiles presents new data on Paleoindian archaeology and reconsiders previous sites and perspectives, culminating in a thought-provoking and challenging contribution to the ongoing study of Paleoindians around the world.

Contributors: Leland Bement, Jack W. Brink, John Carpenter, Brian Carter, Thomas J. Connolly, Linda Scott Cummings, Loren G. Davis, Allen Denoyer, Stuart J. Fiedel, Judson Byrd Finley, Andrea Freeman, C. Vance Haynes Jr., Bryan Hockett, Vance T. Holliday, Dennis L. Jenkins, Thomas A. Jennings, Eileen Johnson, George T. Jones, Oleksandra Krotova, Patrick J. Lewis, Vitaliy Logvynenko, Ian Luthe, Katelyn McDonough, Lance McNees, Fred L. Nials, Patrick W. O’Grady, Mary M. Prasciunas, Karl J. Reinhard, Michael Rondeau, Guadalupe Sanchez, William E. Scoggin, Ashley M. Smallwood, Iryna Snizhko, Thomas W. Stafford Jr., Mark E. Swisher, Frances White, Eske Willerslev, Robert M. Yohe II, Chad Yost

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Stones, Bones, and the Sacred

Essays on Material Culture and Ancient Religion in Honor of Dennis E.

Alan H. Cadwallader

SBL Press, 2016

A crucial text for any university course on the interaction of archaeology and the Bible

The world of early Christians was not a world lived in texts; it was a world saturated with material reality and concerns: what, where and when to eat or drink; how to present oneself in the space of bodily life and that of death; how to move from one place to another; what impacted status or the adjudication of legal charges. All these and more controlled so much of life in the ancient world. The Christians were not immune from the impact of these realities. Sometimes they absorbed their surrounds; sometimes they quite explicitly rejected the material practices bearing in on them; frequently they modified the practice and the rationale to create a significant Christian alternative. The collection of essays in this volume come from a range of international scholars who, for all their different interests and critical commitments, are yet united in treasuring research into the Greek and Roman worlds in which Christians sought to make their way. They offer these essays in honor of one who has made a lifetime's work in mining ancient material culture to extract nuggets of insight into early Christian dining practices: Dennis E. Smith.

Features

Rich examples of method in the utilization of ancient material culture for biblical interpretation.
Thirteen essays with a response from Dennis E. Smith
Maps, diagrams, and plates

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Stones of Contention

A History of Africa’s Diamonds

Todd Cleveland

Ohio University Press, 2014

Africa supplies the majority of the world’s diamonds, yet consumers generally know little about the origins and history of these precious stones beyond sensationalized media accounts of so-called blood diamonds. Stones of Contention explores the major developments in the remarkable history of Africa’s diamonds, from the earliest stirrings of international interest in the continent’s mineral wealth in the first millennium A.D. to the present day. In the European colonial period, the discovery of diamonds in South Africa ushered in an era of unprecedented greed during which monopolistic enterprises exploited both the mineral resources and the indigenous workforce. In the aftermath of World War II, the governments of newly independent African states, both democratic and despotic, joined industry giant De Beers and other corporations to oversee and profit from mining activity on the continent. The book also considers the experiences of a wide array of Africans—from informal artisanal miners, company mineworkers, and indigenous authorities to armed rebels, mining executives, and premiers of mineral-rich states—and their relationships to the stones that have the power to bring both wealth and misery. With photos and maps, Stones of Contention illustrates the scope and complexity of the African diamond trade as well as its impact on individuals and societies.

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Theophrastus on Stones

E. R. Caley and J. C. Richards

The Ohio State University Press, 1900