Bücher von David Barker

A collection of essays about environment and development in the Caribbean. Of note is one chapter where the mature tourism economies of Bermuda and St. Martin are compared.

The days of building a church, hiring a pastor and staff and finding volunteer Sunday school teachers and Bible study leaders, and then opening the doors and people come because that's just what people do-those days are over. The so-called "attractional church" approach to following Jesus and growing the Kingdom that I was taught in seminary as little as 20 years ago simply doesn't work anymore. The church has become marginalized in its influence, often represented in the public square by its most extreme members. Among ever-growing numbers of people, the church is not seen merely as irrelevant and benign but as an active force for misogyny, homophobia, nationalism, and social regression. Among those demographics who in any way represent the church's future, the idea of awaking Sunday mornings, piling the kids in the car, and going to Sunday school and worship… well, that isn't even on their radar. A church can build the biggest buildings with the best preaching and teaching and worship and it pretty much won't matter: people aren't going to come, no matter what the voice promised.

Simon Gregory Williams, known as "the beast" in Sesqua Valley, has been so corrupted by his reading and memorizing every existing edition of the Necronomicon that his tainted psyche cannot enter into Randolph Carter's Dreamland. However, there is another dreamland, "the dreamland of witches," into which Simon can slink because of his brilliance as an alchemist; and it is into that dreamland that Simon accompanies an innocent young woman in her quest for rare magick. Yet even Simon, who is so experienced in eldritch lore, has never been so confronted by such outlandish Lovecraftian lunacy as he finds in this dreamland of witchery. In this fascinating excursion into the Lovecraftian fantasy/horror realm of Dreamland, two veteran authors of weird fiction have written a novel that is by turns horrific and poignant, with vibrant characters and a compelling narrative that carries the reader on from scene to scene to the novel's cataclysmic conclusion. David Barker is a widely published author and poet whose work has appeared in Fungi, Cyäegha, and Shoggoth.net. W. H. Pugmire is a longtime Lovecraftian author whose work has been gathered in many volumes, notably The Tangled Muse and An Ecstasy of Fear. The two authors have collaborated on The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal and In the Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales.

This book presents the results of archaeological research in the extreme south of Madagascar between 1991 and 2003, and provides a synthesis of the region's archaeology. Madagascar is an island with many unique species of fauna and flora; its extreme south is a semi-arid region with remarkable vegetational adaptations. Before the arrival of humans, there were many species of megafauna of which the most extraordinary were the flightless elephant birds, the largest avian species in the world. Today the inhabitants of the south have adapted to this aridity with a vibrant culture and strong traditions. The dating of the first colonisation of Madagascar is not certain, but certain sites in the southwest have provided radiocarbon dates towards the end of the first millennium BC. From the tenth to thirteenth century, there was a well-developed civilisation in the south. During the fourteenth century, population numbers fell in the far south and the majority of settlements from this period are found in locations chosen for their defensive aspects. The way of life that evolved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is similar to that of recent times and today. Europeans arrived at the beginning of the sixteenth century and, by the mid-seventeenth century, the French had established a colony at Fort-Dauphin on the southeast coast. The people of the south are well known today for their large and elaborate stone tombs and standing stones. However, this is not a particularly ancient tradition. Before the appearance of these monumental funerary constructions, burials were marked by arrangements of small stone uprights or by wooden palisades. The large stone tombs that are such a dominant feature of today's landscape have their origins in standing-stone monuments around the end of the eighteenth century.Mike Parker Pearson with Karen Godden, Ramilisonina, Retsihisatse, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Georges Heurtebize, Chantal Radimilahy and Helen Smith.With contributions by Irene de Luis, David Barker, Seth Priestman, Lucien Rakotozafy, Bako Rasoarifetra, Alan Vince, Zoë Crossland and Brian Boyd.