Recent decades have seen tremendous changes in Latin America's agricultural sector, resulting from a broad program of liberalization instigated under pressure from the United States, the IMF, and the World Bank. Tariffs have been lifted, agricultural markets have been opened and privatized, land reform policies have been restricted or eliminated, and the perspective has shifted radically toward exportation rather than toward the goal of feeding local citizens. Examining the impact of these transformations, the contributors to Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America paint a somber portrait, describing local peasant farmers who have been made responsible for protecting impossibly vast areas of biodiversity, or are forced to specialize in one genetically modified crop, or who become low-wage workers within a capitalized farm complex. Using dozens of examples such as these, the deleterious consequences are surveyed from the perspectives of experts in diverse fields, including anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology.
From Kathy McAfee's "Exporting Crop Biotechnology: The Myth of Molecular Miracles," to Liz Fitting's "Importing Corn, Exporting Labor: The Neoliberal Corn Regime, GMOs, and the Erosion of Mexican Biodiversity," Food for the Few balances disturbing findings with hopeful assessments of emerging grassroots alternatives. Surveying not only the Latin American conditions that led to bankruptcy for countless farmers but also the North's practices, such as the heavy subsidies implemented to protect North American farmers, these essays represent a comprehensive, keenly informed response to a pivotal global crisis.
Vegan, low fat, low carb, slow carb: Every diet seems to promise a one-size-fits-all solution to health. But they ignore the diversity of human genes and how they interact with what we eat.
In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.
Nabhan traces food traditions around the world, from Bali to Mexico, uncovering the links between ancestry and individual responses to food. The implications go well beyond personal taste. Today’s widespread mismatch between diet and genes is leading to serious health conditions, including a dramatic growth over the last 50 years in auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.
Readers will not only learn why diabetes is running rampant among indigenous peoples and heart disease has risen among those of northern European descent, but may find the path to their own perfect diet.
Corn, squash, and beans from the Native Americans; barbecue sauces from the Spanish; potatoes and sausages from the Germans: Missouri's foods include a bountiful variety of ingredients. In Food in Missouri: A Cultural Stew, Madeline Matson takes readers on an enticing journey through the history of this state's food, from the hunting and farming methods of the area's earliest inhabitants, through the contributions of the state's substantial African American population, to the fast-food purveyors of the microwave age.
Tracing the history of food preparation, preservation, and marketing, while highlighting the cultural traditions that engendered each change, Matson shows how advances in farming methods, the invention of the electric range, the development of cookbooks, and three waves of immigration have profoundly influenced what Missourians eat today. Along the way, she highlights some of the key people, places, and institutions in Missouri's food history: Irma S. Rombauer, author of Joy of Cooking; Stark Bro's Nurseries and Orchards in Louisiana, Missouri, the largest family-owned fruit-tree nursery in the world and the home of Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Gala apples; St. Louis's Soulard Market, established in 1779 and said to be the oldest public market west of the Mississippi; and Stone Hill Winery, a leader in Hermann's nationally recognized wine- making industry.
By bringing to life the traditions behind the foods we eat every day, Food in Missouri provides a unique perspective on the people who explored and settled the state, showing that Missouri's rich heritage truly is a cultural stew.
Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.
Contributors: Laurence Allard, Joceline Andersen, Emily Buddle, Robin Caldwell, Emily J. H. Contois, Sarah E. Cramer, Gaby David, Deborah A. Harris, KC Hysmith, Alex Ketchum, Katherine Kirkwood, Zenia Kish, Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, Jonathan Leer, Yue-Chiu Bonni Leung, Yi-Chieh Jessica Lin, Michael Z. Newman, Tsugumi Okabe, Rachel Phillips, Sarah Garcia Santamaria, Tara J. Schuwerk, Sarah E. Tracy, Emily Truman, Dawn Woolley, and Zara Worth
A rallying cry to link the food justice movement to broader social justice debates
The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system.
In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice.
Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies—a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.
In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.
Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.
The seemingly inhospitable Sonoran Desert has provided sustenance to indigenous peoples for centuries. Although it is to all appearances a land bereft of useful plants, fully one-fifth of the desert's flora are edible.
This volume presents information on nearly 540 edible plants used by people of more than fifty traditional cultures of the Sonoran Desert and peripheral areas. Drawing on thirty years of research, Wendy Hodgson has synthesized the widely scattered literature and added her own experiences to create an exhaustive catalog of desert plants and their many and varied uses.
Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert includes not only plants such as gourds and legumes but also unexpected food sources such as palms, lilies, and cattails, all of which provided nutrition to desert peoples. Each species entry lists recorded names and describes indigenous uses, which often include nonfood therapeutic and commodity applications. The agave, for example, is cited for its use as food and for alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, syrup, fiber, cordage, clothing, sandals, nets, blankets, lances, fire hearths, musical instruments, hedgerows, soap, and medicine, and for ceremonial purposes. The agave entry includes information on harvesting, roasting, and consumption—and on distinguishing between edible and inedible varieties.
No other source provides such a vast amount of information on traditional plant uses for this region. Written to be easily accessible to general readers, the book is an invaluable compendium for anyone interested in the desert's hidden bounty.
Through creative combinations of ethnohistoric evidence, iconography, and contextual analysis of faunal remains, this work offers new insight into the mechanisms involved in food provisioning for complex societies. Contributors combine zooarchaeological and historical data from global case studies to analyze patterns in centralization and bureaucratic control, asymmetrical access and inequalities, and production-distribution-consumption dynamics of urban food provisioning and animal management.
Taking a global perspective and including both prehistoric and historic case studies, the chapters in the volume reflect some of the current best practices in the zooarchaeology of complex societies. Embedding faunal evidence within a broader anthropological explanatory framework and integrating archaeological contexts, historic texts, iconography, and ethnohistorical sources, the book discerns myriad ways that animals are key contributors to, and cocreators of, complex societies in all periods and all places. Chapters cover the diverse sociopolitical and economic roles wild animals played in Bronze Age Turkey; the production and consumption of animal products in medieval Ireland; the importance of belief systems, politics, and cosmologies in Shang Dynasty animal provisioning in the Yellow River Valley; the significance of external trade routes in the kingdom of Aksum (modern Sudan); hunting and animal husbandry at El Zotz; animal economies from two Mississippian period sites; and more.
Food Provisioning in Complex Societies provides an optimistic roadmap and heuristic tools to explore the diverse, resilient, and contingent processes involved in food provisioning. The book represents a novel and productive way forward for understanding the unique, yet predictably structured, provisioning systems that emerged in the context of complex societies in all parts of the world. It will be of interest to zooarchaeologists and archaeologists alike.
Contributors: Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales, Fiona Beglane, Roderick Campbell, Kathryn Grossman, Patricia Martinez-Lira, Jacqueline S. Meier, Sarah E. Newman, Terry O'Connor, Tanya M. Peres, Gypsy C. Price, Elizabeth J. Reitz, Kim Shelton, Marcus Winter, Helina S. Woldekiros
Food Studies in Latin American Literature presents a timely collection of essays analyzing a wide array of Latin American narratives through the lens of food studies. Topics explored include potato and maize in colonial and contemporary global narratives; the role of cooking in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetics; the centrality of desire in twentieth-century cooking writing by women; the relationship among food, recipes, and national identity; the role of food in travel narratives; and the impact of advertisements on domestic roles.
The contributors included here—experts in Latin American history, literature, and cultural studies—bring a novel, interdisciplinary approach to these explorations, presenting new perspectives on Latin American literature and culture.
Blue Ridge tacos, kimchi with soup beans and cornbread, family stories hiding in cookbook marginalia, African American mountain gardens—this wide-ranging anthology considers all these and more. Diverse contributors show us that contemporary Appalachian tables and the stories they hold offer new ways into understanding past, present, and future American food practices. The poets, scholars, fiction writers, journalists, and food professionals in these pages show us that what we eat gives a beautifully full picture of Appalachia, where it’s been, and where it’s going.
Contributors: Courtney Balestier, Jessie Blackburn, Karida L. Brown, Danille Elise Christensen, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Michael Croley, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Robert Gipe, Suronda Gonzalez, Emily Hilliard, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Abigail Huggins, Erica Abrams Locklear, Ronni Lundy, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Mann, Daniel S. Margolies, William Schumann, Lora E. Smith, Emily Wallace, Crystal Wilkinson
Inspired by a classic walking guidebook of the area, Foodloose in Washtenaw County takes readers on tours to discover food-related treasures throughout the county. What better way to get to know this place—or experience something new—than to bike, bus, carpool, walk, even kayak your way through food-filled Washtenaw County?
From centennial farms to trendy upscale restaurants, the self-guided tours of Foodloose offer an opportunity to explore where our food is grown, produced, distributed, and enjoyed in Washtenaw County. Within these pages lies a chance to celebrate the local food community, learn more about our unique food system, and maybe even find a new favorite place to dine.
Byzantine rule over Anatolia ended in the eleventh century, leaving the population and its Turkish rulers to build social and economic institutions throughout the region. The emerging Anatolian society comprised a highly heterogeneous population of Christians and Muslims whose literati produced legal documents in Arabic, literary texts in Persian, and some of the earliest written works in the Turkish language. Yet the cultural landscape that emerged as a result has received very little attention—until now.
Investigating daily life in Anatolia during the fourteenth century, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia draws on a creative array of sources, including hagiographies, archaeological evidence, Sufi poetry, and endowment deeds, to present an accessible portrait of a severely under-documented period. Grounded in the many ways food enters the human experience, Nicolas Trépanier’s comprehensive study delves into the Anatolian preparation of meals and the social interactions that mealtime entails—from a villager’s family supper to an elaborately arranged banquet—as well as the production activities of peasants and gardeners; the marketplace exchanges of food between commoners, merchants, and political rulers; and the religious landscape that unfolded around food-related beliefs and practices. Brimming with enlightening details on such diverse topics as agriculture, nomadism, pastoralism, medicine, hospitality, and festival rituals, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia presents a new understanding of communities that lived at a key juncture of world history.
Foodways in Roman Republican Italy explores the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in Republican Italy to illuminate the nature of cultural change during this period. Traditionally, studies of the cultural effects of Roman contact and conquest have focused on observing changes in the public realm: that is, changing urban organization and landscape, and monumental construction. Foodways studies reach into the domestic realm: How do the daily behaviors of individuals express their personal identity, and How does this relate to changes and expressions of identity in broader society? Laura M. Banducci tracks through time the foodways of three sites in Etruria from about the third century BCE to the first century CE: Populonia, Musarna, and Cetamura del Chianti. All were established Etruscan sites that came under Roman political control over the course of the third and second centuries BCE. The book examines the morphology and use wear of ceramics used for cooking, preparing, and serving food in order to deduce cooking methods and the types of foods being prepared and consumed. Change in domestic behaviors was gradual and regionally varied, depending on local social and environmental conditions, shaping rather than responding to an explicitly “Roman” presence.
What was a carpetbagger? Albion W. Tourgée was called one, and he wrote, “To the southern mind it meant a scion of the North, a son of an ‘abolitionist,’ a creature of the conqueror, a witness to their defeat, a mark of their degradation: to them he was hateful, because he recalled all of evil or of shame they had ever known … To the Northern mind, however, the word had no vicarious significance. To their apprehension, the hatred was purely personal, and without regard to race or nativity. They thought (foolish creatures!) that it was meant to apply solely to those, who, without any visible means of support, lingering in the wake of a victorious army, preyed upon the conquered people.”
Tourgée’s novel, originally published in 1879 anonymously as A Fool’s Errand, By One of the Fools, is not strictly autobiographical, though it draws on Tourgée’s own experiences in the South. In the story Comfort Servosse, a Northerner of French ancestry, moves to a Southern state for his health and in the hope of making his fortune. These were also Tourgée’s motives for moving South. Servosse is caught up in a variety of experiences that make apparent the deep misunderstanding between North and South, and expresses opinions on the South’s intolerance, the treatment of the Negro, Reconstruction, and other issues that probably are the opinions of Tourgée himself. “Reconstruction was a failure,” he said, “so far as it attempted to unify the nation, to make one people in fact of what had been one only in name before the convulsion of Civil War. It was a failure, too, so far as it attempted to fix and secure the position and rights of the colored race.”
Though the discussion of sectional and racial problems is an important element in the book, A Fool’s Errand has merit as a dramatic narrative—with its love affair, and its moments of pathos, suffering, and tragedy. This combination of tract and melodrama made it a bestseller in its day. Total sales have been estimated as 200,000, a remarkable record in the l880’s for a book of this kind.
Though Tourgée later disavowed his early optimism about the role national education could play in remedying the race problem in the South, calling this a “genuine fool’s notion,” he might have been less pessimistic had he been alive in 1960, when the student sit-in movement began in the South. At any rate, today in what has been called the second phase of the modern revolution in race relations in this country, Tourgée’s novel about the first phase has an added relevance and interest for thinking American readers.
In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state. “These manifestations demand a vast study,” Craveirinha wrote, “which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography.”
In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.
In a style reminiscent of the master storytellers of yore, Charless Caraway recounts the story of his life, as a man and a boy, on small farms in Saline and Jackson counties, particularly around Eldorado, Makanda, and Etherton Switch. He makes no bones about the hardships of those "old days," first helping his father eke out a living from the land, then scrambling for a living as a sharecropper and fruit picker, as he scrimped and saved for the day when he and his young wife, Bessie Mae Rowan Caraway, could buy a piece of land of their own.
The one-room school, the general store, the trips by wagon over roads that choked you in summer and swallowed you in winter, the home that burned: all are described in a matter-of-fact yet moving way. Many of the locations, buildings, and people are represented in equally unromanticized photographs from the family’s collection. Some of the stories and photos recall the common disasters of the frontier: drought, flood, and the tornado of 1925.
It is clear from these stories that each aspect of life exacted a price, but the Caraways paid that price without regret and rallied to go on their way. Charless and his family and friends fill this book with courage, strength, and an unshakable faith in the value of human endeavor.
Footpaths and Bridges celebrates the vitality and diversity of Native American women, collecting plays ranging from ETHNOSTRESS—a humorous take on art and identity politics—to the biographical musical Te Ata to a retelling of the Thanksgiving story from the Wampanoag perspective. The dramatic works are accompanied by critical commentary that illuminates Native American women’s theater practices and perspectives, highlighting the issues of heritage, identity, and changing lifestyles that the plays imaginatively tackle.
Featuring work from a wide array of tribes and geographic regions, the collection affords the artist, scholar, and general reader access to previously unheard voices that communicate the complexity and the diversity of the Native American experience. The far-ranging genres and content of the plays suggest the many possibilities for communicating the past and the present, the personal and the political, and the stunning kaleidoscope of Native American life and art.
“Often thoughtful provocateurs, Native American playwrights are frequently overlooked . . . eminently readable, and possibly performable, the plays [in this collection] examine colonization, generational differences, ‘ethnostress,’ and cultural identity.”
—Choice
Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.
In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.
Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.
George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).
In 1933 Antarctica was essentially unexplored. Admiral Richard Byrd launched his Second Expedition to chart the southernmost continent, primarily relying on the muscle power of dog teams and their drivers who skied or ran beside the loaded sledges as they traveled. The life-threatening challenges of moving glaciers, invisible crevasses, and horrific storms compounded the difficulties of isolation, darkness, and the unimaginable cold that defined the men’s lives.
Stuart Paine was a dog driver, radio operator, and navigator on the fifty-six-man expedition, the bold and complex venture that is now famous for Byrd’s dramatic rescue from Bolling Advance Weather Base located 115 miles inland. Paine’s diaries represent the only published contemporary account written by a member of the Second Expedition. They reveal a behind-the-scenes look at the contentiousness surrounding the planned winter rescue of Byrd and offer unprecedented insights into the expedition’s internal dynamics.
Equally riveting is Paine’s breathtaking narrative of the fall and summer field operations as the field parties depended on their own resources in the face of interminable uncertainty and peril. Undertaking the longest and most hazardous sledging journey of the expedition, Paine guided the first American party from the edge of the Ross Sea more than seven hundred miles up the Ross Ice Shelf and the massive Thorne (Scott) Glacier to approach the South Pole. He and two other men skied more than fourteen hundred miles in eighty-eight days to explore and map part of Antarctica for the first time.
Footsteps on the Ice reveals the daily struggles, extreme personalities, and the matter-of-fact bravery of early explorers who are now fading into history. Detailing the men’s frustrations, annoyances, and questioning of their leader, Paine’s entries provide rare insight into how Byrd conducted his expeditions. Paine exposes the stresses of living under the snow in Little America during the four-month-long winter night, trapped in dim, crowded huts and black tunnels, while the men uneasily mulled over their leader’s isolation at Advance Base. The fates of Paine’s dogs, which provided some of his most difficult and rewarding experiences, are also described—his relationship with Jack, his lead dog, is an entrancing story in itself.
Featuring previously unpublished photographs and illustrations, Footsteps on the Ice documents the period in Antarctic exploration that bridged the “heroic era” and the modern age of mechanized travel. Depicting almost incomprehensible mental and physical duress and unhesitating courage, Paine’s tale is one of the most compelling stories in polar history, surpassing other accounts with its immediacy and adventure as it captures the majesty and mystery of the untouched Antarctic.
A vivid look at a radical activist and her times, For a Just and Better World illuminates the lives and work of Mexican women battling for labor rights and gender equality in the early twentieth century.
For the first time in English, a key work of critical geography
Originally published in 1978 in Portuguese, For a New Geography is a milestone in the history of critical geography, and it marked the emergence of its author, Milton Santos (1926–2001), as a major interpreter of geographical thought, a prominent Afro-Brazilian public intellectual, and one of the foremost global theorists of space.
Published in the midst of a crisis in geographical thought, For a New Geography functioned as a bridge between geography’s past and its future. In advancing his vision of a geography of action and liberation, Santos begins by turning to the roots of modern geography and its colonial legacies. Moving from a critique of the shortcomings of geography from the field’s foundations as a modern science to the outline of a new field of critical geography, he sets forth both an ontology of space and a methodology for geography. In so doing, he introduces novel theoretical categories to the analysis of space. It is, in short, both a critique of the Northern, Anglo-centric discipline from within and a systematic critique of its flaws and assumptions from outside.
Critical geography has developed in the past four decades into a heterogenous and creative field of enquiry. Though accruing a set of theoretical touchstones in the process, it has become detached from a longer and broader history of geographical thought. For a New Geography reconciles these divergent histories. Arriving in English at a time of renewed interest in alternative geographical traditions and the history of radical geography, it takes its place in the canonical works of critical geography.
In this new century, born in hope but soon thereafter cloaked in terror, many see religion and politics as a volatile, if not deadly, mixture. For All Peoples and All Nations uncovers a remarkable time when that was not so; when together, those two entities gave rise to a new ideal: universal human rights.
John Nurser has given life to a history almost sadly forgotten, and introduces the reader to the brilliant and heroic people of many faiths who, out of the aftermath of World War II and in the face of cynicism, dismissive animosity, and even ridicule, forged one of the world's most important secular documents, the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These courageous, persistent, visionary individuals—notable among them an American Lutheran Seminary professor from Philadelphia, O. Frederick Nolde—created the Commission on Human Rights. Eventually headed by one of the world's greatest humanitarians, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration has become the touchstone for political legitimacy.
As David Little says in the foreword to this remarkable chronicle, "Both because of the large gap it fills in the story of the founding of the United Nations and the events surrounding the adoption of human rights, and because of the wider message it conveys about religion and peacebuilding, For All Peoples and All Nations is an immensely important contribution. We are all mightily in John Nurser's debt." If religion and politics could once find common ground in the interest of our shared humanity, there is hope that it may yet be found again.
Something about Big Bend National Park draws visitors again and again. Maybe it's the spare beauty of the mountains and desert, the dawn chorus of birds, or the vivid stars in the velvet night. All of these things have made it Roland Wauer's favorite place. In this book, he shares his love of the Big Bend through journal entries that chronicle a year in the life of the park.
Wauer worked as Chief Park Naturalist from 1966 to 1972 and has visited the park frequently ever since. His journal entries span these thirty years, providing not only a composite portrait of a typical year but also a clear sense of how the park's natural history has changed over three decades. He spices his account with anecdotes, often humorous, ranging from stumbling across a herd of javelinas to being trailed by a mountain lion in the dark to discovering new species of plants and animals.
Few authors know the Big Bend as Roland Wauer does or have written about it in a more engaging way. This beautifully illustrated book is the perfect companion for a visit to the park, whether in person or by armchair.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in early modern ecostudies, many devoted to Shakespearean drama. Yet in this burgeoning discipline, travel writing appears moored in historicization, inorganic subjects are far less prevalent than organic ones, and freshwater sites are hardly visited. For All Waters explores these uncharted wetscapes.
Lowell Duckert shows that when playwrights and travel writers such as Sir Walter Raleigh physically interacted with rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps, they composed “hydrographies,” or bodily and textual assemblages of human and nonhuman things that dissolved notions of human autonomy and its singular narrativity. With a playful, punning touch woven deftly into its theoretical rigor, For All Waters disputes fantasies of ecological solitude that would keep our selves high and dry and that would try to sustain a political ecology excluding water and the poor. The lives of both humans and waterscapes can be improved simultaneously through direct engagement with wetness.
For All Waters concludes by investigating waterscapes in peril today—West Virginia’s chemical rivers and Iceland’s vanishing glaciers—and outlining what we can learn from early moderns’ eco-ontological lessons. By taking their soggy and storied matters to heart, and arriving at a greater realization of our shared wetness, we can conceive new directions to take within the hydropolitical crises afflicting us today.
For Badiou serves both as an introduction to the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou’s thought and as an in-depth examination of his work. Ruda begins with a thorough and clear outline of the sometimes difficult main tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. He then traces the philosophers throughout Western thought who have influenced Badiou’s project—especially Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Marx—and on whose work Badiou has developed his provocative philosophy. Ruda draws from Badiou’s oeuvre a series of directives with regard to renewing philosophy for the twenty-first century. For Badiou continues the interrogations of its subject and raises new materialistic and dialectical questions for the next generation of engaged philosophers.
A fascinating memoir about a Holocaust survivor's loss of and journey back to faith. In 1939, Baruch Goldstein was a religiously observant adolescent resident of the Jewish community in Mlawa, a town that was then in East Prussia. After war broke out, the Jewish community there was relatively sheltered, as that region was incorporated into the German Reich rather than into the General Government (the German run-fragment of pre-war Poland, where conditions were harsh for everyone). However in 1942, Goldstein was sent to Auschwitz, where he stayed two-and-a-half years. His family was scattered all to their deaths, but he survived the war--barely. For Decades I Was Silent is an account of life in a small Polish-German town and provides information on the religious life of the Jewish citizens. This book creates a direct sense of the random, mystifying personal violence individuals felt at the hands of Germans--not the anonymous industrial death machine, but immediate, face-to-face violence.
After the war, Goldstein drifted as a refugee to UNRR camps in Italy. Over time, young Goldstein had to face the fact that all of his extended family was lost and he had only the possibilities of Palestine or help from distant relatives in the United States as a future. His American relatives urged him to enter the United States as a yeshiva student, and eventually he became a rabbi and started a family. As a young rabbinical student, and then as a rabbi, Goldstein was forced to confront the events of the Holocaust and the damage done to his faith.
Running the gamut from traditional to radical forms, Timothy Liu’s sixth collection of poems, For Dust Thou Art, continues the trajectory of his previous books but extends his lyrical range. The centerpiece of the volume’s tripartite structure is a meditation on the events surrounding 9/11 and its aftermath. In his poems, Liu explores what a twenty-first century American “poetry of witness” might look like and protests the charge that the poetic generation to which Liu belongs is stymied by a kind of jaded amorality. Whether taking on public spectacle or contemplating the fallout of a private life, these meditations move forward and backward through time, seeking spiritual consolation within a material world.
The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed throughout her childhood the white cruelty, political exclusion, and relentless economic exploitation that defined African American existence in the Delta.
In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South. Lee looks at Hamer's early work as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, her dramatic appearance at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and her ongoing work as a militant grassroots leader in her own community.
She was a friend, lover, and confidante of charismatic Spanish American independence hero Simón Bolívar and, after her death, a nationalist icon in her own right. Yet authors generally have chosen either to romanticize Manuela Sáenz or to discount her altogether. For Glory and Bolivar: The Remarkable of Life of Manuela Sáenz, by contrast, offers a comprehensive and clear-eyed biography of her. Based on unprecedented archival research, it paints a vivid portrait of the Quito-born "Libertadora," revealing both an exceptional figure and a flesh-and-blood person whose life broadly reflected the experiences of women during Spanish America's turbulent Age of Revolution.
Already married at the time of her meeting with the famous Liberator, Sáenz abandoned her husband in order to become not only Bolívar's romantic companion, but also his official archivist, a member of his inner circle, and one of his most loyal followers. She played a central role in Spanish South America's independence drama and eventually in developments leading to the consolidation of new nations. Pamela Murray, for the first time, closely examines Sáenz's political trajectory including her vital, often-overlooked years in exile. She exposes the myths that still surround her. She offers, in short, a nuanced and much-needed historical perspective, one that balances recognition of Sáenz's uniqueness with awareness of the broader forces that shaped this dynamic nineteenth-century woman.
In many modern armies the religious soldier is suspect. Civilians and officers alike wonder if such a soldier might represent a potential fifth column. This concern is especially prominent in the public discourse over the presence of religious Orthodox Jews serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Will they obey their commanding officer or their rabbi? With research collected over almost a decade, including hundreds of hours of interviews, Elisheva Rosman examines this question of loyalties and reveals how religious soldiers negotiate a place for themselves in an institution whose goals and norms sometimes conflict with those of Orthodox Judaism.
For God and Country? focuses on the pre-service study programs available to religious conscripts. Many journalists and scholars in Israel are suspicious of the student-soldiers who participate in these programs, but in fact, as Rosman’s research demonstrates, the pre-service study programs serve as mediating structures between the demands of Religious Zionism and the demands of the Israel Defense Forces and do not encourage their students to disobey orders. This was especially apparent during the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Many in Israeli society predicted student-soldiers would defy their orders, per the instruction of their religious leaders, but this did not happen as expected. In high profile cases such as this and in matters encountered daily by religious soldiers—the mixing of the sexes, for instance—Rosman has discovered that the pre-service study programs can successfully serve as agents of civil society, both able to curb the military’s efforts to meddle in civilian affairs and vice versa.
More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to a slave and a freed woman, Taylor became the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
Orphaned as a child at the peak of the Civil War, Taylor spent several years homeless before boarding a Mississippi riverboat that dropped him in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Taken in by an African American farm family, Taylor attended a private school and eventually rose to prominence as the owner/editor of a labor newspaper and as a vocal leader in Wisconsin’s People’s Party. At a time when many African Americans felt allegiance to the Republican Party for its support of abolition, Taylor’s sympathy with the labor cause drew him first to the national Democratic Party and then to an African American party, the newly formed National Liberty Party, which in 1904 named him its presidential candidate. Bruce L. Mouser follows Taylor’s life and career in Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Florida, giving life to a figure representing a generation of African American idealists whose initial post-slavery belief in political and social equality in America gave way to the despair of the Jim Crow decades that followed.
Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
Second Place, Biography, Society of Midland Authors
Honorable Mention, Benjamin F. Shambough Award, the State Historical Society of Iowa
Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity.
To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising.
America has more than 130,000 lakes of significant size. Ninety percent of all Americans live within fifty miles of a lake, and our 1.8 billion trips to watery places make them our top vacation choice. Yet despite this striking popularity, more than 45 percent of surveyed lakes and 80 percent of urban lakes do not meet water quality standards. For Love of Lakes weaves a delightful tapestry of history, science, emotion, and poetry for all who love lakes or enjoy nature writing. For Love of Lakes is an affectionate account documenting our species’ long relationship with lakes—their glacial origins, Thoreau and his environmental message, and the major perceptual shifts and advances in our understanding of lake ecology. This is a necessary and thoughtful book that addresses the stewardship void while providing improved understanding of our most treasured natural feature.
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