Most Popular Books by Michael Jackson

This is your time to reawaken the dreams you thought were impossible. Success Is Within You reveals the power to create the goals and dreams that reside in all of us, and they are stronger than circumstances that may surround our lives. Therefore, you do not have to feel like a victim. When you harness this power within yourself, the universe yields unto you and gives you the best of what is possible.

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of its brutal civil war, the distinguished anthropologist, poet, and novelist Michael Jackson returned to the country where he had intermittently lived and worked as an ethnographer since 1969. While his initial concern was to help his old friend Sewa Bockarie (S. B.) Marah—a prominent figure in Sierra Leonean politics—write his autobiography, Jackson’s experiences during his stay led him to create a more complex work: In Sierra Leone, a beautifully rendered mosaic integrating S. B.’s moving stories with personal reflections, ethnographic digressions, and meditations on history and violence. Though the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.) ostensibly fought its war (1991–2002) against corrupt government, the people of Sierra Leone were its victims. By the time the war was over, more than fifty thousand were dead, thousands more had been maimed, and over one million were displaced. Jackson relates the stories of political leaders and ordinary people trying to salvage their lives and livelihoods in the aftermath of cataclysmic violence. Combining these with his own knowledge of African folklore, history, and politics and with S. B.’s bittersweet memories—of his family’s rich heritage, his imprisonment as a political detainee, and his position in several of Sierra Leone’s post-independence governments—Jackson has created a work of elegiac, literary, and philosophical power.

Discover the secrets of whiskey''s aromas and flavors, the stories behind great distilleries, and expert tasting notes in this updated edition originated by one of the most highly respected commentators in the whiskey world, Michael Jackson. From grain to glass, Whiskey tells you everything and anything you''ll ever want to know about whiskey, from storing and serving whiskey, to whiskey cocktails, to pairing whiskey with food. In addition to a refreshed design, this updated edition includes the recent names in whiskey today, a new section devoted to American craft distilleries, and the addition of new distilleries from across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.

Experience a game-by-game account of the magical 1979 Houston Oilers season in "Red, White, and Columbia Blue: Chasing the Dream with the 1979 Houston Oilers." Author Jackson Michael interviewed several Oilers for this authoritative and insightful portrait of one of the most beloved NFL teams of the 1970s. Step onto the field with the Oilers during a Thanksgiving Day classic at Dallas, a monumental playoff win at San Diego, and for the famous "Mike Renfro Play" during the 1979 AFC Championship Game at Pittsburgh. Walk into the huddle with quarterback Dan Pastorini and feel the excitement of Earl Campbell''s touchdowns. Learn the Oilers'' defensive schemes with defensive coordinator Ed Biles and linebacker Gregg Bingham. Cheer on the Oilers in a rollicking Astrodome and glow in the memories of Oiler greats such as Elvin Bethea, Robert Brazile, Ken Burrough, and Carl Mauck as they share some of their favorite stories about the team and its legendary coach, Bum Phillips.Certain to be cherished by Oiler fans, "Red, White, and Columbia Blue" guides readers on a journey through a once-in-a-lifetime season by a team that captured the hearts of football fans across the country. You won''t want to miss this wonderful read about an unforgettable team. Jackson Michael is the writer and director of the Houston Oilers documentary "We Were the Oilers: The Luv Ya Blue Era! and author of the acclaimed NFL history book, The Game before the Money." He hosts two football-related podcasts.

The ingenious ways dilemmas are addressed in non-Western traditions Dilemmas explores some of the most pressing existential problems of our times, from climate change, political conflict, and social injustice, to balancing one’s own needs against those of others. Pushing back against the tendency to think of dilemmas as clear-cut binary choices, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson shows us some of the ingenious ways that dilemmas are addressed in non-Western thought and oral traditions, as well as in Western philosophy. Drawing on examples from myth, literature, and his extensive ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, each of thirteen chapters examines a particular dilemma and how it is experienced, circumvented, or reimagined. From the struggles of the Aboriginal people of Central Australia for land rights to Walter Benjamin’s harrowing journey across the Pyrenees as he fled German-occupied France in 1940; from the story of a suburban family in Aotearoa New Zealand adjusting to life in a commune to the dilemmas of migrants from the Global South trying to reconcile their search for a better life with their longing for home—Jackson interweaves philosophical reflections, insights from his anthropological fieldwork, and individual life stories. In striking a balance between our contradictory impulses to be both apart from and together with others, Jackson makes a case against identitarian essentialism, showing us how the oppositional thinking through which we often frame our contemporary dilemmas may be overcome.

The relationship between literature and life can be construed as a counterpoint of fate and freewill. Rather than equating fate to the ‘hand we are dealt’ which is reducible to the social or familial environments into which we are born, this book explores the idea of fate through the books that shape our lives and under whose influence we write. Writing in this sense is seen as beyond its utility of making meaning. It is a way of recovering agency in the face of overwhelming experiences. In juxtaposing factuality and fiction, the author makes a case for a radically empirical approach to human experience.

Four years ago, author Michael Jackson was diagnosed with and cured of cancer. The treatment and aftermath of something no larger than the size of an egg would change his life forever. Jackson had spent so much time on his own pleasures that he never really focused on what God wanted him to be. Sometimes when we ignore God, He allows things to happen to get our attention. For the author, being diagnosed with cancer was his wake-up call. In Beyond The Battle, Jackson gives you a look at his lifestyle before and after he allowed God to take control of his life. He shares how the Lord used a hopeless situation and turned it into a blessing. When life gives you lemons, God can turn them into eternal peace and joy, but only if one is open to what God is doing to see where He wants to take you. The author hopes to inspire others who are going through difficult situations to trust in the heavenly father and find beauty in their life.

""Colonialism is out of favor now, but I believe the ultimate verdict of history will be that this was one of the greatest British contributions to the world."" This was John Martin''s faith. A Scot of strong Christian belief and complete integrity, he was present and played an active role in the analysis, the decision-making and diplomacy involved in the maintenance and, after the war, the ending of British colonial rule. From the Colonial Office to 10 Downing Street to the UN, his tools were his keen intelligence and his capacity for friendship with people of any race or creed.

An ice-bound New England pond utterly still, though racked with sub-glacial groans serves as an image of a mind overwhelmed one moment by troubling memories, the next by the peace that passes all understanding. In his new collection, Michael Jackson explores the impact on a poets consciousness of past and present events both personal and historical - and the possibility of transcendence in love and creative work. Without ever submitting to bland fashion or to clique, Michael Jackson for almost fifty years has written poetry which is that of a man confronting the things happening of his time, poems probing at that recurrent query, where does one take ones place in the terrible parades of history. There is no final reply. But by love, by compassion, by constant attention to what is said and how it is written, the questioning itself, with luck, sustains. What one hears in his readings is the modest, confident, international voice that drives his poems, the conversing of a man who, as ever, is on one road to find another. Vincent OSullivan.

Criminal Law in Hong Kong offers a clear and comprehensive account of the general principles of criminal law in Hong Kong and will be useful to students, practitioners, and all who are responsible for or interested in the administration and practice of the criminal justice system in Hong Kong.

In this sumptuous coffee-table guide from the world''s bestselling whisky writer, Michael Jackson reveals the secrets of the aromas and flavours found in whisky, the stories behind great distilleries around the world, and offers his expert tasting notes for their must-try whiskies. Unrivalled coverage of the world''s best whiskies and bourbon is wrapped up in this definitive guide. This new edition is full to the brim, with more than 75 distilleries added from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Germany, Sweden, India, Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, and other countries in the ''New World of Whisky''. Discover an enticing new 14-page section on the US craft distilleries making a splash in the whisky world. Learn everything there is to know about how to drink whisky, as well as how to make craft whiskies. From grain to glass, Michael Jackson''s Whisky examines the world''s most famous drink in all its fascinating detail.

Following Queen Elizabeth II''s historic Diamond Jubilee in 2012, there is renewed interest in the institution of the Crown in Canada and the roles of the queen, governor general, and lieutenant governor. Author D. Michael Jackson traces the story of the monarchy and the Crown and shows how they are integral to Canada''s parliamentary democracy.

Winning strategies for fantasy football players at all skill levels! This book is aimed at fantasy football players who compete against their family and friends and want a fun, easy-to-read guide on how to win. It teaches simple techniques that anyone can use.

Many a beer sophisticate is surprised by the diversity, individuality and ubiquity of Belgian beer. Here, beer expert Michael Jackson enthusiastically discusses the history and inner workings of this quiet, quirky brewing behemoth of Belgium. He explains the origins of manstic brewing, the good fortune of spiders on Lambic breweries, the reasoning behind using orange peels, coriander seeds and stale hops in the brewing process. Thorough tasting notes are oncluded, providing a reference point for the reader''s own beer hunting. Fully revised with a brand new layout and 300 more photographs than previous editions, this book contains a list of addresses of the most important Belgian brewers, plus all the practical information on brewery visits, overnight accommodation and local restaurants and eateries.

"Between One and One Another is a lively and fascinating exploration of the interplay between being a part of the lives of others, and being apart from them. Michael Jackson, one of the leading and most innovative anthropologists today, draws on a wealth of anthropological, literary, philosophical, and autobiographical resources to make his case on the matter. It''s clear that a lifetime of learning and reflection has gone into the thoughts invested in this text."—Robert Desjarlais, author of Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard

Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.

In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others. Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.

Packed with fascinating information on each region of the beer-producing world and tasting notes that are the product of first-hand research, this pocket guide is one companion discriminating beer drinkers won''t want to be without.

In The Genealogical Imagination Michael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality. Drawing on over fifty years of fieldwork, Jackson recounts the 150-year history of a Sierra Leone family through its periods of prosperity and powerlessness, war and peace, jihad and migration. Jackson also offers a fictionalized narrative loosely based on his family history and fieldwork in northeastern Australia that traces how the trauma of wartime in one generation can reverberate into the next. In both stories Jackson reflects on different modes of being-in-time, demonstrating how genealogical time flows in stops and starts—linear at times, discontinuous at others—as current generations reckon with their relationships to their ancestors. Genealogy, Jackson demonstrates, becomes a powerful model for understanding our experience of being-in-the-world, as nobody can escape kinship and the pull of the past. Unconventional and evocative, The Genealogical Imagination offers a nuanced account of how lives are lived, while it pushes the bounds of the forms that scholarship can take.

In How Lifeworlds Work, distinguished anthropologist of religion Michael Jackson starts from the premise that individual well-being and social viability depend on a vital relationship between inner and outer realities, self and other, desire and constraint. In asking how lifeworlds ''work, '' Jackson wants to trace the production of one''s individual and communal life while also understanding how people create emotionally satisfying lives through reciprocal relations with people, objects, animals, and ideas. In other words, how do the ritual structures of the outer and the emotional structures of the inner meet? Jackson brings his signature phenomenological approach to bear on the issue of how the dynamic, temporally inflected tension between order and affect is negotiated. By mixing ethnography, philosophy, and personal reflection, Jackson produces a work that is in some ways his definitive and most intimate statement on a lifetime of study.

Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without, on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview. Whether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet, or the nation state, we experience them ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as possible threats to our very existence. Closing ourselves off from the world is not an option, for our humanity depends on the ties that bind us to significant others, and others to us. As Jackson shows, the relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all human beings address in one way or another. It is a methodological issue for anthropologists concerned with the complementarity of individual and collective perspectivesethnos and anthropos, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective.

The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments in the anthropology of ethics and migration studies to explore in empirical depth and detail the life experiences of three young men – a Ugandan migrant in Copenhagen, a Burkina Faso migrant in Amsterdam, and a Mexican migrant in Boston – in ways that significantly broaden our understanding of the existential situations and ethical dilemmas of those migrating from the global south. Michael Jackson offers the first biographically based phenomenological account of migration and mobility, providing new insights into the various motives, tactics, dilemmas, dreams, and disappointments that characterize contemporary migration. It is argued that the quandaries of African or Mexican migrants are not unique to people moving between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ worlds. While more intensely felt by the young, seeking to find a way out of a world of limited opportunity and circumscribed values, the experiences of transition are familiar to us all, whatever our age, gender, ethnicity or social status – namely, the impossibility of calculating what one may lose in leaving a settled life or home place; what one may gain by risking oneself in an alien environment; the difficulty of striking a balance between personal fulfillment and the moral claims of kinship; and the struggle to know the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ utopias (the first reasonable and worth pursuing; the second hopelessly unattainable).

This this revised, updated edition of his pocket classic, "the world''s leading beer critic" ("The Wall Street Journal") takes readers on a tour of the international brew scene, giving special emphasis to the fine brews produced on this continent. Maps.

Those who leave their homelands, either under duress or by design, will see them in a different light than those who have stayed put. Michael Jackson argues that the perspective of the expatriate may be compared with what ethnographers call ‘stranger value’. In moving between detachment and deep immersion, this bifocal perspective implicates a bicultural one, which is why Jackson has recourse to Māori traditional knowledge, not in order to impose a Eurocentric interpretation on them, but to show how cross-cultural conversations and interactions can promote new forms of sociality and coexistence.

In this book, ethnographer and poet Michael Jackson addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, he explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation, that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible--a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic''s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer''s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.

Most people have a story to tell about a remarkable coincidence that in some instances changed the course of their lives. These uncanny occurrences have been variously interpreted as evidence of divine influence, fate, or the collective unconscious. Less common are explanations that explore the social situations and personal preoccupations of the individuals who place the most weight on coincidences. Drawing on a variety of coincidence stories, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson builds a case for seeing them as allegories of separation and loss—revealing the hope of repairing sundered lives, reconnecting estranged friends, reuniting distant kin, closing the gap between people and their gods, and achieving a sense of emotional and social connectedness with others in a fragmented world.

Explains how beer is made, describes different kinds and brands made around the world, and tells how to choose and evaluate a beer

This story of the movie by the same name features superstar Michael Jackson and some young friends as they battle the evil Mr. Big in his plan to enslave all the children in the world with drugs.

Jackson''s award-winning books have established him as a world expert on beer, whiskey, and other libations. Now the intrepid Beer Hunter, fresh from a recent coast-to-coast tour of more than 200 pubs and restaurants that make their own beers, and over 100 new-generation microbreweries, offers a report of his findings, including 100 "not-to-be-missed" beer bars. 35 maps. 50 illustrations.