Japan, as recent history has powerfully illustrated, is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries. Today it is also one of the best prepared to face such seismic risk. This was not always the case.
Earthquake Children is the first book to examine the origins of modern Japan’s infrastructure of resilience. Drawing from a rich collection of previously unexplored sources, Janet Borland vividly illustrates that Japan’s contemporary culture of disaster preparedness and its people’s ability to respond calmly in a time of emergency are the result of learned and practiced behaviors. She traces their roots to the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, which killed over 100,000 people when it struck the Tokyo region.
Beyond providing new perspectives on Japan’s seismic past, the history of childhood, and everyday life in interwar Japan, Borland challenges the popular idea that Japanese people owe their resilience to some innate sense of calm under pressure. Tokyo’s traumatic experiences in 1923 convinced government officials, seismologists, teachers, physicians, and architects that Japan must better prepare for future disasters. Earthquake Children documents how children, schools, and education became the primary tools through which experts sought to build a disaster-prepared society and nation that would withstand nature’s furies.
Egotopia explains why individual political and economic interests have eclipsed aesthetic considerations in the rampant billboards, malls, and urban sprawl of the New American Landscape
Egotopia begins where other critiques of the American landscape end: identifying the physical ugliness that defines and homogenizes America's cities, suburbs, and countryside. Believing that prevailing assessments of the American landscape are inadequate and injudicious, John Miller calls into question the conventional wisdom of environmentalists, urban planners,and architects alike. In this precedent-shattering examination of what he sees as the ugliness that is the American consumer society, Miller contends that our aesthetic condition can be fully understood only by explorers of the metaphoric environment."This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to—anybody at all—because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging."
In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with "female trouble" in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships.
From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the U.S. environment has been recurrently represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Cecelia Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm. Environmental history as cultural studies, her book plumbs the deep and peculiarly American bond between nationalism, the environment, and the human body.
Tichi disputes the United States' reputation of being "nature's nation." U.S. citizens have screened out nature effectively by projecting the bodies of U.S. citizens upon nature. She pursues this idea by pairing Mount Rushmore with Walden Pond as competing efforts to locate the head of the American body in nature; Yellowstone's Old Faithful with the Moon as complementary embodiments of the American frontier; and Hot Springs, Arkansas, with Love Canal as contrasting sites of the identification of women and water. A major contribution to current discussions of gender and nature, her book also demonstrates the intellectual power of wedding environmental studies to the social history of the human body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers. Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher. Emerson in His Sermons is the first major study of the sermons since the publication of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.
Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought. Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.
Roberson focuses on Emerson's reaction to what was perhaps the most signifcant event in his personal life: the death of his young wife, Ellen, of tuberculosis in 1831, after only sixteen months of marriage. Roberson's correlation of the sermons written during that time with the complexity of Emerson's emotional and intellectual response to the tragedy of Ellen's illness and death is the most detailed and sophisticated treatment of that material to date.
Roberson understands Emerson's emergence from the ministry as his rejection of ready-made institutions and sytems of thought. Through her careful readings of the sermons, Roberson finds that Emerson's objective was less the translation of his life into writing than the translation of his life through writing. By considering the sermons in this way, Roberson is able to enrich our understanding of the private and passionte impulses of this seminal thinker.
Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship. Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.
Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, our childhoods have been captured and preserved online, never to go away. But what happens when we can’t leave our most embarrassing moments behind?
Until recently, the awkward moments of growing up could be forgotten. But today we may be on the verge of losing the ability to leave our pasts behind. In The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn explores what happens when images of our younger selves persist, often remaining just a click away.
For today’s teenagers, many of whom spend hours each day posting on social media platforms, efforts to move beyond moments they regret face new and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Unlike a high school yearbook or a shoebox full of old photos, the information that accumulates on social media is here to stay. What was once fleeting is now documented and tagged, always ready to surface and interrupt our future lives. Moreover, new innovations such as automated facial recognition also mean that the reappearance of our past is increasingly out of our control.
Historically, growing up has been about moving on—achieving a safe distance from painful events that typically mark childhood and adolescence. But what happens when one remains tethered to the past? From the earliest days of the internet, critics have been concerned that it would endanger the innocence of childhood. The greater danger, Eichhorn warns, may ultimately be what happens when young adults find they are unable to distance themselves from their pasts. Rather than a childhood cut short by a premature loss of innocence, the real crisis of the digital age may be the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.
About the cover image:
This elegant, dignified figure--Leda Machado, a Cuban old enough to have seen the Revolution--once the center of a vast photo mural, is now a fragment on a ruined wall. Ageism tears down the structures that all humans need to age well; to end it, a symbol of resilience offers us all brisk blue-sky energy.
“Leda Antonia Machado” from “Wrinkles of the City, 2012.”
Piotr Trybalski / Trybalski.com. Courtesy of the artist.
A Declaration of Grievances
"A Declaration of Grievances" was written by Margaret Morganroth Gullette and is excerpted from her book Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (2017, Rutgers University Press). The poster was designed by Carolyn Kerchof.
Print the PDF (make sure to click "fit to page") and hang the Declaration up in your home or place of work. Please share this link with other people you know who care about the rights of older persons. Share on social media with the hashtags #ADeclarationOfGrievances and #EndingAgeismGullette.
For more information, an excerpt, links to reviews, and special offers on this book, go to: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ending-ageism
Related website: (https://www.brandeis.edu/wsrc/scholars/profiles/gullette.html)
Revealing cinema’s place in the coevolution of media technology and the human
Cinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest cinema laid the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. In Endless Intervals, he introduces a theory of semiotechnics that explains how discrete intervals of machines came to represent something like a mind—and why they were feared for their challenge to the uniqueness of human intelligence.
Examining histories of early cinematic machines, Kirkwood locates the foundations for a scientific vision of the psyche as well as the information age. He theorizes an epochal shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that demonstrates how cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche—a model that was at once mechanical and semiotic, discrete and continuous, physiological and psychological, analog and digital.
Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. Kirkwood considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.
"Contemporary Composition is still inflected by the epistemic turn taken in the 1980s, convincing me that we need to remember what we've forgotten—namely, how impassioned resolves and thrilling discoveries were abandoned and why. I'd like to retrace the road not taken in Composition Studies, to salvage what can still be recovered... I want to inspect the wreckage, in order to show what was the promise of the Happenings for Composition, as well as the huge gray longueur of its pale replacement, Eighties Composition. In so doing, I hope to begin a reconfiguration of our field's pre- and after history."
What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer's 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer's inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper.
Folklore studies brings important and useful perspectives to understanding cultural responses to the outbreak of disease. Through this etiological study Lee shows the similarities between the narratives of the SARS outbreak and the narratives of other contemporary disease outbreaks like AIDS and the H1N1 virus. His analysis suggests that these disease narratives do not spring up with new outbreaks or diseases but are in continuous circulation and are recycled opportunistically. Lee also explores whether this predictability of vernacular disease narratives presents the opportunity to create counter-narratives released systematically from the government or medical science to stymie the negative effects of the fearful rumors that so often inflame humanity.
With potential for practical application to public health and health policy, An Epidemic of Rumors will be of interest to students and scholars of health, medicine, and folklore.
Epilepsy and the Family: A New Guide updates Richard Lechtenberg’s classic handbook for people with seizure disorders and those closest to them. It offers coping strategies for the wide range of practical and emotional challenges that epilepsy can introduce into the family: marital and sexual difficulties, concerns about pregnancy and inheritance, drug compliance and abuse among teenagers, personality changes and suicide. This new guide addresses the personal questions that adults with epilepsy may be reluctant to ask their physician, and it offers chapters tailored to the special stresses of spouses, parents, and siblings who, like the patient, must live with a seizure disorder.
As many as two and a half million Americans have epilepsy. Thirty percent of them are children under the age of 18. And there are 125,000 newly diagnosed cases each year. A practicing neurologist with decades of clinical experience, Lechtenberg clearly and concisely explains the biology behind this complex and relatively widespread class of diseases. He discusses the various medical conditions that can cause seizures in children and adults and points out that the cause of many seizure disorders is never discovered. Patients and those who care about them will find authoritative but accessible advice on various medications and surgical approaches and the information they need to ask informed questions of their doctors. For the medical professional, this book offers important information on how to better treat the patient with epilepsy by recognizing the needs of the entire family.
This revised edition addresses:
— New drugs and surgical techniques that have been developed in the past 15 years
— Pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatment strategies
— New clinical data on drug combinations and side effects
— Up-to-date statistics for mortality, reproduction, violent behavior, divorce, and suicide
Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity’s challenges.
“The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book…is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social…Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people…The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture—no matter how vicious or stupid.”
—Richard Rorty, London Review of Books
A study of how doing field research submerged in a different culture impacts one's sense of identity.
Originally published in 1961, this shrewd, smartly written novel follows two American men traveling in Europe. Though both have struck out for the same continent, each man’s methods of and motives for travel lead him to have a very different experience than the other. Underlying it all is the premise that Europe--the contrast, the otherness of it--can be a refiner’s fire, deeply affecting a person’s character. Europe represents a crucial step in Stern’s development as a writer and stands as a witty, sharp point of entry into his writings and the writings of novelists who rose to prominence in the 1960s.
Presented with accounts of genocide and torture, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped.
Drawing on firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), James Dawes leads us into the frightening territory where soldiers perpetrated some of the worst crimes imaginable: murder, torture, rape, medical experimentation on living subjects. Transcending conventional reporting and commentary, Dawes’s narrative weaves together unforgettable segments from the interviews with consideration of the troubling issues they raise. Telling the personal story of his journey to Japan, Dawes also lays bare the cultural misunderstandings and ethical compromises that at times called the legitimacy of his entire project into question. For this book is not just about the things war criminals do. It is about what it is like, and what it means, to befriend them.
Do our stories of evil deeds make a difference? Can we depict atrocity without sensational curiosity? Anguished and unflinchingly honest, as eloquent as it is raw and painful, Evil Men asks hard questions about the most disturbing capabilities human beings possess, and acknowledges that these questions may have no comforting answers.
Every year hundreds of defendants are convicted on little more than the say-so of a fellow citizen. Although psychologists have suspected for decades that an eyewitness can be highly unreliable, new evidence leaves no doubt that juries vastly overestimate the credibility of eyewitness accounts. It is a problem that the courts have yet to solve or face squarely.
In Eyewitness Testimony, Elizabeth Loftus makes the psychological case against the eyewitness. Beginning with the basics of eyewitness fallibility, such as poor viewing conditions, brief exposure, and stress, Loftus moves to more subtle factors, such as expectations, biases, and personal stereotypes, all of which can intervene to create erroneous reports. Loftus also shows that eyewitness memory is chronically inaccurate in surprising ways. An ingenious series of experiments reveals that memory can be radically altered by the way an eyewitness is questioned after the fact. New memories can be implanted and old ones unconsciously altered under interrogation.
These results have important implications for court reform, police interrogation methods, defense strategy, and many other aspects of criminal and civil procedure. Eyewitness Testimony is a powerful book that should be required reading for trial lawyers, social psychologists, and anyone who considers the chilling prospect of confronting an eyewitness accusation in a court of law.
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