Christine Silk
Author
THE BOOKS
These are books I've authored or co-authored. Use the menu above to access my blog, articles, academic papers, short stories.
Chase the Sun: Nine Short Stories of Passion, Betrayal, and Revenge
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In these pages, nine riveting tales will surprise you, entertain you, and haunt you. They’ll transport you into the past, into the future, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.
• A clever artist takes revenge on cruel teenagers with his pen and drawing pad.
• An Edwardian aristocrat, trapped in a loveless marriage, must find a way to satisfy his pent-up passions without destroying his life.
• On a routine flight to Miami, an off-duty attendant must decide whether she will betray an innocent boy or antagonize his menacing father.
• In the year 2054, a psychiatrist finds himself entangled in dangerous head-games with a murderer, and must embark on a high-stakes mission to a memory-alteration center in Germany to find evidence that will put the killer behind bars.
• A maintenance man’s summer affair with a rich beauty forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about himself -- including whether he is courageous enough to build a future with her.
• At a quirky restaurant in the south of France, the chef and waiters are enchanted with a mysterious, worldly gourmand who seduces gorgeous women with food. Everything changes when one of the waiters learns the truth about the man’s past.
• A Polish woman named Dottie insists on living at a Jewish nursing home, even though the other residents despise her. Is she merely senile, or is there another explanation for her bizarre behavior?
• When an old woman moves in with her daughter and 13-year-old granddaughter, the teenager learns about life, death, and what it means to grow up.
• A man on his honeymoon is terrified to leave the cruise ship to go ashore in Mexico with his wife—and for good reason, considering what happened when he was there last time.
If you enjoy short stories rich in atmosphere and psychological depth, this anthology will delight you.
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Creating a Private Foundation: The Essential Guide for Donors and Their Advisers
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​Today the opportunities in the philanthropic sector are greater and more varied than ever. Private foundations, which offer several estate and tax-planning advantages as well as unparalleled donor control, have become the vehicle of choice for more than sixty thousand individuals and families--and may be ideal for you.
Creating a Private Foundation introduces the issues you need to understand and gives the big picture on how foundations work. It tells you exactly what is involved for you, for the causes you care about, for your finances and taxes, and for your heirs.
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Narrative in Rhetorical Argument: How Stories Have Been Used as Persuasive Devices from Ancient to Modern Times
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Ph.D. dissertation abstract: Scholars from a variety of disciplines have recently taken an interest in narrative, regarding it as a rich source for understanding how humans gather and communicate knowledge. Traditionally, narrative has been viewed primarily, if not exclusively, as a poetic genre. Stories are assumed to be the domain of poets, fiction writers, and literary critics. However, as this dissertation shows, narrative is not exclusively a poetic device. It is also a rhetorical device that has had an important presence in rhetorical argument since antiquity. This dissertation examines selected treatises of rhetoric from the classical era (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian), and the eighteenth-century (George Campbell and Richard Whately) to determine how these rhetoricians regarded the roles of narrative in rhetorical argument. In addition, writings on jury trial argument and firsthand observations of bench trial argument are analyzed to determine how narrative functions in contemporary forensic rhetoric. Two significant findings emerge from this study. First, narratives—which include both fictional and non-fictional accounts—have had important functions in rhetorical argument throughout history. Among other things, they have functioned as autonomous arguments, as evidence in support of larger arguments, and as vehicles for conveying emotional appeals and appeals based on ethos. Second, the functions of narrative in rhetorical argument can be accounted for in terms of three factors: (1) the epistemological assumptions of the larger rhetorical system in which the narrative is utilized, (2) the aims of the rhetor, and (3) the specific portion of the argument in which the narrative appears. Furthermore, in forensic rhetoric, the range of functions a narrative may have in a given trial argument seems to depend on the audience trying the case; that is, whether the audience is a jury or a judge. This dissertation is significant because it fills a void in our knowledge concerning the relationship between rhetoric and narrative. Knowing how narrative functions in rhetorical argument can broaden our perspective on the communicative utility of storytelling, and it can increase our understanding of how rhetorical arguments are constructed and transmitted
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