Fugue in Ursa Major

Jake is young, and his life seems boring. Phaedrus is old, and his life seems empty. Phaedrus seems to think that a nightmare is about to happen. Jake just wants to go on dreaming. Does Phaedrus really know something? Or is he just a broken old man? Jake must choose. If Phaedrus is right, then Jake’s life is going to change, and Jake will have to rethink everything he ever knew.

Dalton, David

Literature & Fiction

Acorn Abbey Books

Jake is young, and his life seems boring. Phaedrus is old, and his life seems empty. Phaedrus seems to think that a nightmare is about to happen. Jake just wants to go on dreaming. Does Phaedrus really know something? Or is he just a broken old man? Jake must choose. If Phaedrus is right, then Jake's life is going to change, and Jake will have to rethink everything he ever knew.

Oratorio in Ursa Major

A global catastrophe has returned earth to the Iron Age and killed six billion people. Even the billionaires were tricked and eliminated. An Oxford intelligentsia have taken over the planet. Can such smart people rebuild the world in a better way? With help from the galactic federation, perhaps there is hope. But first, earth's new elite must retrieve from the past some things that were destroyed long ago -- ways of thinking and living that can avoid a fatal reawakening of the delusions bequeathed to us by Rome. Jake Janaway -- young, modest, handsome, and scared -- is selected for a dangerous mission into the pre-Roman past. Jake has no idea why he was chosen. Jake has a lot to learn. But perhaps no one in the galaxy ever had better teachers, or was more loved.

After fifty years of progress and the advent of gay marriage, statistics on the well-being of gay men are as grim as ever. Rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse have not budged. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and poor health are just as widespread. Studies have shown that gay men who live in urban gay communities actually are worse off, not better.
The utopia promised by gay marriage has not materialized. Gay men seem to have run out of ideas for future progress. There is little acknowledgment of the fact that something remains badly wrong. Nor is there a diagnosis of what is wrong.
This book proposes that the diagnosis is obvious if we look at the origins of male sexuality and how it was expressed in other cultures. The anti-sex Puritan system in which we are now immersed is relatively recent in human history. Yet in less than 2,000 years, knowledge of how other cultures lived and loved has been systematically wiped out. The forms of male sexuality were remarkably similar from culture to culture. But starting with the early Europeans in the last years of Rome and continuing around the globe as Europeans colonized the continents, natural male sexualities have been cruelly repressed and then obliviated. We are all Puritans now.
The greatest taboo of all in male sexuality remains unchallenged and is still heavily enforced. That is the taboo of male-male sex, which until 2003 was still a crime. This book argues that the plight of gay men is only a piece of a much larger catastrophe -- the Puritanical repression of the sexualities of all men, in an attempt to harness the enormous power of male sexuality for social purposes in the name of moral progress, with promises of greater glories to be found in heaven. The damage that Puritanism caused to human beings and to stable social systems was never noticed. In fact the damage and misery were regarded as good. It was seen as payback to the devil.
This book is not arguing for something new, untested, unknown, and radical. Rather, the challenge is to return to something very old -- the joy of male-male sex -- which took similar forms in most of the cultures that we have knowledge of. In such worlds, it was understood that some men are more masculine than others, that some men are gayer than others, and that heterosexuality and homosexuality are complementary and of equal value. And those old worlds were worlds in which every gay man was able to take for granted what to us today is the impossible dream -- sex with a straight best friend.

Why Straight Guys Love Their Gay Guys: Reviving the Roots of Male Sexuality

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

"The Stampede Trail has become a passageway on which hikers and hunters, seekers and sportsmen, Speedoed mountain bikers and North Slope militiamen cross paths. The Magic Bus is becoming a national shrine, a holy pilgrim site, a modern-day Mecca. And I was determined to see it, too." So writes Ken Ilgunas, who, in the summer of 2011, moved up to Alaska to, like thousands before him, embark on a pilgrimage to explore the storied bus of the Stampede Trail-the very bus in which Chris McCandless of Into the Wild died twenty years before. What was supposed to be little more than a "literary tour" of a book that Ilgunas had "merely enjoyed," would become a humorous, thought-provoking, and, at times, treacherous journey to the very heart of Alaska.

The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail

Travel

Ilgunas, Ken

Travel Writing

A young boy sitting on a piano bench realizes one day that he will never marry. At the time this seems merely a simple, if odd, fact, but as his attraction to boys grows stronger, he is pulled into a vortex of denial. Not just for one year or even ten, but for 25 years, he lives in an inverted world, a place like a photographic negative, where love is hate, attraction is envy, and childhood never ends. He comes to think of himself as a kind of monster--until one day, seemingly miraculously, the world turns itself upright and the possibility of love floods in. Equal parts Oliver Sacks and George Orwell, with a dash of Woody Allen, Jonathan Rauch's memoir is by turns harrowing and funny, a grippingly intimate journey through a bizarre maze of self-torment that ends with an unexpected discovery. Many people, gay and straight, have lived through their own versions of this story, seeking to twist their personality in directions it just wouldn't go. Not all have been lucky enough to escape. First published in 2013, Denial has been revised for this new edition, which includes a new afterword by the author.

Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul

Rauch, Jonathan

Parenting & Relationships

The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan

In Japanese, the word for "foreign country" means "outnation." But to many Americans and Japanese, it is Japan itself, despite its increasing influence in world affairs, that is the outsider-the outnation: a country, as some have said, in the world but not of it. 
How different is this industrial superpower? Why did its fast climb to the pinnacle of the global economy also contain the causes of its subsequent fall? And what can we all-Americans and Japanese alike-learn from the Japanese model? 
In this rigorous, searching, deeply personal journey through Japan's islands and institutions, Jonathan Rauch reveals how different the country really is-and how hauntingly, sometimes eerily, familiar. In 200 numbered, lyrical paragraphs, The Outnation takes readers through Tokyo's nighttime crowds and into quiet country hamlets, to the office of a high-tech industrialist and to a farmer's dinner table. He distills conversations with dozens of Japanese, statesmen and professors as well as sushi chefs and innkeepers. He probes the public values of the Japanese and details the inner workings of their political, economic, and intellectual systems. 
Now an acknowledged classic, republished with a new foreword by Dreux Richard, The Outnation is a perceptive and honest exploration of Japan and its people-and a sometimes disconcerting mirror that reflects America in a fresh light.

History

Asia

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Acorn Abbey Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Acorn Abbey Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Acorn Abbey Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fugue in Ursa Major

Fugue in Ursa Major

Oratorio in Ursa Major

Oratorio in Ursa Major

Why Straight Guys Love Their Gay Guys: Reviving the Roots of Male Sexuality

The McCandless Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Magic Bus of the Stampede Trail

Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul

The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan