Michael O'Brien

You may be asking yourself, "What exactly makes these tricks easy to master?" The effects in this book are what you call "self working card tricks". This simply means that there is no sleight of hand or skill required to be able to perform these amazing card miracles. The mathematics of the tricks themselves do all of the work for you so that you can focus on your story and presentation. In this book are 13 fun and easy to perform card effects that will mystify and amaze you family, friends, or clients. This book is the perfect place to start if you are a beginner. Never held a deck of cards before in your life? Guess what, you can still do all of the tricks in this book This is a collection of some of my versions of the tricks I loved growing up and helped me fall in love with performing magic. I cannot wait to share these with you so sit back, relax, grab a deck and lets get started

The Face of Texas celebrates the individuality and independent spirit of Texas through compelling portraits of its people by Michael O’Brien, one of America’s premier portrait photographers. In this acclaimed photo essay, he assembles a gallery of noteworthy Texans both native and naturalized, ranging from former president George W. Bush and first ladies and Laura Bush and Lady Bird Johnson, to famous figures such as Willie Nelson, Larry McMurtry, George Strait, Tim Duncan, Kinky Friedman, and Beyoncé, to ordinary folks who’ve made their mark on Texas as ranchers and farmers, cheerleaders and beauty queens, conservationists, church members, bar and restaurant owners, Odd Fellows, schoolteachers, artists and writers, business owners, and athletes.For this new edition of The Face of Texas, O’Brien has added seventeen new portraits and six updated photographs of people from the first edition. Writer and former Life reporter Elizabeth O’Brien offers insightful verbal vignettes to accompany the new portraits and also brings us up to date with the lives of the rest of the subjects. This winning combination of images and stories about a fascinating, eclectic mix of Texans is a fitting homage to a unique state and an essential addition to every Texas bookshelf.

The Face of Texas celebrates the individuality and independent spirit of Texas through compelling portraits of its people by Michael O’Brien, one of America’s premier portrait photographers. In this acclaimed photo essay, he assembles a gallery of noteworthy Texans both native and naturalized, ranging from former president George W. Bush and first ladies and Laura Bush and Lady Bird Johnson, to famous figures such as Willie Nelson, Larry McMurtry, George Strait, Tim Duncan, Kinky Friedman, and Beyoncé, to ordinary folks who’ve made their mark on Texas as ranchers and farmers, cheerleaders and beauty queens, conservationists, church members, bar and restaurant owners, Odd Fellows, schoolteachers, artists and writers, business owners, and athletes.For this new edition of The Face of Texas, O’Brien has added seventeen new portraits and six updated photographs of people from the first edition. Writer and former Life reporter Elizabeth O’Brien offers insightful verbal vignettes to accompany the new portraits and also brings us up to date with the lives of the rest of the subjects. This winning combination of images and stories about a fascinating, eclectic mix of Texans is a fitting homage to a unique state and an essential addition to every Texas bookshelf.

Placing the South offers a selection of work published between 1985 and 2005 by one of the most incisive historians and literary critics of the South. The pieces seek to situate the South in a variety of contexts and offer a compelling defense of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called ""rooted cosmopolitanism."" This is a mode of understanding based on respect for what is local and an awareness that regionalism is not enough. Hybridity, in both culture and literature, is inescapable and desirable. The first section of the book (""Placing"") contains three comparative analyses that look at how regionalism has recently been conceptualized globally, how the modern South has acquired pertinence for those outside the United States, and how the relationship between Britain and the South has worked. The second section (""Ideologies"") scrutinizes political ideas--freedom, imperialism, nationalism, racial ideology--which have transformed American discourse. The third section (""Forms"") examines genre and how the South has been constructed and reconstructed by such literary forms as autobiography, biography, history, and literary history. The final section (""Writers"") contains critical appreciations of political thinkers, novelists, poets, critics, historians, and sociologists important to southern intellectual life. Taken together, the essays offer a robust analysis of a dynamic region. Michael O'Brien is professor of American intellectual history at University of Cambridge and a fellow at Jesus College. He is the author of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 and other books.

After an initial honeymoon with historians, in recent years John F. Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized, resulting in a wide variety of assessments of his presidency and his life. Michael O'Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, has distilled the findings of his heavily detailed biography of a few years ago into a compact life that touches on all the important issues and incorporates the findings and judgments of major works since the president's death. He offers nuanced interpretations of the influence of Kennedy's parents, his early life, his struggles with health problems, his intellectual development, his heroism in World War II, his House and Senate career, and the paramount moments of his presidency, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his stand on civil rights, tax policy, and other domestic matters.

Mike O'Brien's first book of poetry is the result of years of disciplined effort. His work examines the condition of man, starting from when our ancestors' gestural language turned into spoken, and then written, communication. O'Brien's work is wise and thoughtful, concentrating on the human condition in our own epoch, between the first speaker of the language and the last.

Sills gathers together poems from four of O’Brien’s early books and combines them with later work, forming a selection from 1960-1999. O'Brien writes, “The poems dance their dance of stillness and motion. The issue is a quiet, patterned music, animated, disciplined, ecstatic; not closure, but recognition.” This new edition provides the reader with the best introduction to O’Brien’s work, a poet hailed as a modern master of the lyric form and a poet of genuine significance in the American canon.

“Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.” This judgment, rendered in The Education of Henry Adams, may be the most quoted of Adams’s writings on the South. However, it is far from the only one of his beliefs that helped to shape a national outlook on the region from the late antebellum period to the present.Thinking about the South, says Michael O’Brien, was “part of being an Adams.” In this book O’Brien shows how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O’Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history. He begins with the young Henry Adams, who served as his father’s secretary in the House of Representatives during the secession crises of 1860-1861 and in the American embassy in London during and after the Civil War, until 1868.O’Brien then covers a number of topics relevant to Adams’s outlook on the South, including his residency in that deceptively “southern” city, Washington, D.C.; his journalism on the Reconstruction-era South; his biographical or historical works on the Virginians John Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison; and his two novels, especially Democracy. Finally, O’Brien ponders the vein of southern self-criticism—exemplified by Wilbur J. Cash’s Mind of the South—that embraces the notorious slur so often quoted from The Education of Henry Adams.

The publication in 1962 of Lew Binford's paper "Archaeology as Anthropology" is generally considered to mark the birth of processualism--a critical turning point in American archaeology. In the hands of Binford and other young University of Chicago graduates of the 1960s, this "new" archaeology became the mainstream approach in the U.S. The realignment that the processualists proposed was so thorough that its effects are still being felt today. Predictably, processualism also spun off a number of other "isms," several of which grew up to challenge its supremacy. Archaeology as a Process traces the intellectual history of Americanist archaeology in terms of the research groups that were at the forefront of these various approaches, concentrating as much on the archaeologists as it does on method and theory, thus setting it apart from other treatments published in the last fifteen years. Peppered with rare photographs of well-known archaeologists in some interesting settings, the book documents the swirl and excitement of archaeological controversy for the past forty years with over 1,600 references and an in-depth treatment of all the major intellectual approaches. The contributors examine how archaeology is conducted--the ins and outs of how various groups work to promote themselves--and how personal ambition and animosities can function to further rather than retard the development of the discipline.

Utilizing a holistic approach to identifying different birds, a guide to shorebirds explains how to use such characteristics as general color patterns, size, structure, and behavior to determine an avian species, in a handy resource that includes more than 870 full-color captioned photographs.

In this fast-paced, reflective novel, (the second in a trilogy following "Strangers and Sojourners") Michael O'Brien presents the dramatic tale of a family that finds itself in the path of a totalitarian government. Set in the near future, the story describes the rise of a police state in North America in which every level of society is infected with propaganda, confusion and disinformation. Few people are equipped to recognize what is happening because the culture of the Western world has been deformed by a widespread undermining of moral absolutes.Against this background, the Delaney family of Swiftcreek, British Columbia, is struck a severe blow when the father of the family, the editor of a small newspaper which dares to speak the truth, is arrested by the dreaded Office of Internal Security. His older children flee into the forest of the northern interior, accompanied by their great-grandfather and an elderly priest, Father Andrei. Their little brother Arrow also becomes a fugitive as the government seeks to remove any witnesses, and eradicate all evidence of its ultimate goals.As O'Brien draws together the several strands of the story into a frightening yet moving climax, he explores the heart of growing darkness in North America, examining events which have already occurred. The reader will take away from this disturbing book a number of urgent questions: Are we living in the decisive moment of history? How dire is our situation? Do we live in pessimistic dread, or a Christian realism founded on hope? This is a tale about the victory of the weak over the powerful, courage over terror, good over evil, and, above all, the triumph of love.

Traces the life and career of the longtime Penn State football coach, and discusses his approach to coaching

Father Elijah, a Holocaust survivor and convert to Catholicism from Judaism, travels through Europe and the Middle East on a papal mission to find a man who may be the Antichrist and induce him to repent