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Fundraiser Book: Help Syrian War Refugee Families

Fundraiser-Book

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Most of us wish for a happy, healthy and prosperous new year and it is ever more important here at the refugee camps in Lebanon. Syrian families displaced by war wish for peace and wonder about when the day comes that the war is over, and if they will have a place to go back to.

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For the last two years, Canadian volunteer Charmaine Craig helped war refugees in Greece.  This winter she went to Lebanon were huge tent cities house hundred-thousands of Syrian people, who lost their homes, jobs, schools and often many family members to this five-year war.  The have to live in tents in the middle of winter!
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***This upcoming eBook is intended to raise funds to help families
and to provide them with food and warmth. It shows how volunteers
helped stranded war refugees on the island of Kos, in Greece***

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Charmaine Craig: “Families live in abject poverty here in the Beqaa Valley.
They have barely enough food to survive let alone for proper nutrition. And, children run around in sandals and light jackets when it is freezing outside. So many children and elderly will end up sick this winter.

There are over 1400 informal settlement camps scattered on farmer fields throughout the valley. Not every settlement receives aid. A lot of NGO’s will not work here due to safety concerns. Here at Salam LADC we try to reach the most vulnerable. We have done many distributions in my short time here and the relief and joy it brings to the people are very gratifying. We provide food bags with enough staples for one month for each family and heating fuel to help keep them warm.“

Charmaine wrote: “I am very happy to work with Salam LADC. I can see they do so much good here with their projects. But as they are a small grassroots NGO their funding is provided by us, the volunteers, and our networks.
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Please do also help with a donation to GoFundMe Winter 2016 Campaign:
https://www.gofundme.com/bekindtorefugeeswinter2016

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Interview: Fantasy Writer M.K. Theodoratus

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Kay Theodoratus, is a prolific Fantasy writer and published almost a dozen short stories – and just recently an e-book: The Ghostcrow.  She welcomes readers to her magical, paranormal world and describes it: “Fantasy, a wonderful way to run away from mundane annoyances.”
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I asked Kay: “What inspired you to start writing?”
“I have always told stories, ever since an imaginary friend started coming to play with me when I was about three.  Writing stories didn’t occur to me until the sixth grade when a teacher assigned the class a short story.  Everyone did their three-five pages. I wrote 25 pages of an incomplete story Nancy Drew pastiche, and got a “C”, but finished a full-length middle-grade novel the next summer.  I’ve been writing something, more or less, ever since.  Selling what I wrote is another story, but I’ve done that fairly often when I tried.”

“One of the reasons I like writing Fantasy is that I can design the rules which my characters play with.  It’s a way to leave the mundane world behind and ask “what if?” and then, follow the consequences wherever they take me.  The big difference now is that I am more willing to share my pretend worlds.”
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Kay is there a book review that you especially remember?

One review of Showdown at Crossings, also set in my world of Andor, sticks in my mind:

“This is a fantasy fiction story that was so innovative.  There’s magic, a world that is different from what we know, and plenty of suspense.  The main character isn’t your usual strapping young man; in fact, he’s older and yet we love the hero he strives to become to protect his town.

If you love Fantasy then this is the tale for you.  It is so different from what I have read before and that’s a good thing.  Too many fantasy stories seem to start out the same way or strive to be like the others and this did not – it’s innovative and excellent.”
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Her Latest Book THE GHOSTCROW is Available at Amazon:



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iTunes — https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-ghostcrow-a-tale-of-andor/id973215103?mt=11

iBookstore — http://www.ibookstore.com/products.php?i=B00U5RTMC0

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Visit Kay Theodoratus Online:

Blog – http://kaytheod.blogspot.com

Author Website – http://www.mktheodoratus.com

YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdjWx7V6i04lHyTABHzqVrA

Amazon Author Page —
http://www.amazon.com/M.-K.-Theodoratus/e/B0055EBKVE/

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Meet Kay Theodoratus on Social Media:

Twitter – https://twitter.com/kaytheod

Google+ — https://plus.google.com/114959381917569899950

Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5478544-m-k-theodoratus

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/pages/M-K-Theodoratus/235376633158175?ref=hl

Pinterest – http://www.pinterest.com/kkaytheod/

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100 Best Classic Non-Fiction Books

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Non-Fiction

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Indulge into The Guardian’s top one hundred list of the very best factual writing, organised by category.
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Literature
The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works

An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears

Mathematics
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

Memoir
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
Orwell’s clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Published by her father after the war, this account of the family’s hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940

The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka’s experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations

Mind
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
Freud’s argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture

Music
The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine

Philosophy
The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective

Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Montaigne’s wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant’s attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings

Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness

Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Mill argues that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress

Politics
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being “nasty, brutish and short”

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history

The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits

My favorite:  Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.
A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution.

“Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker we have on the Internet revolution. Here Comes Everybody is more than just a technology book; it’s an absorbing guide to the future of society itself.”

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Get the complete list of the classic 100 non-fiction books, compiled by The Guardian

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