A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Feared by the government, adored by workers, celebrated by Lenin and Trotsky. The head of British Military Intelligence called John Maclean (1879–1923) “the most dangerous man in Britain.”
This new biography explores the events that shaped the life of a momentous man—from the Great War and the Great Unrest to the Rent Strike and the Russian Revolution. It examines his work as an organizer and educator, his imprisonment and hunger strike, and his rise to the position of Britain’s most famous revolutionary. At a moment when radical politics is drawing renewed attention and support, Maclean’s example of activism and commitment is as timely as ever.
A vivid portrait of the man credited as a driving force behind the most successful of the Confederate raiders, the legendary C.S.S. Alabama.
John McIntosh Kell was an experienced, proven military man, a graduate of Annapolis, a veteran of the Mexican War and of Admiral Perry’s voyage to Japan. As a Confederate officer, Kell served first on the raider Sumter and then on the Alabama. At sea for only 22 months, the Alabama engaged nearly 300 northern merchant vessels, burning 55 of these transport ships along with their million-dollar cargoes.
Though First Lieutenant ("Luff") Kell was apparently content to let his captain, Raphael Semmes, take credit for their accomplishments, Semmes acknowledged that his successes were due largely to the energy and resourcefulness of his second in command. Life on the commerce cruisers was hard and tedious, and much of the responsibility for running the day-to-day operations, including the disciplining of a largely mercenary crew, rested on Kell, whose sense of duty and loyalty did not waver.
Norman C. Delaney bases his account of this remarkable naval officer’s experiences on the interviews Kell granted to news reporters during the 1880s and 1890s (previously neglected by historians) and his memoirs, published in 1900 as Recollections of a Naval Life. He supplements these materials with records from Kell’s earlier years, including letters, journals, diaries, and contemporary observations. First published in 1973 by The University of Alabama Press, this new edition of an award-winning biography will be welcomed by Civil War historians and enthusiasts around the world, naval institutions and museums, and general readers alike.
Privileged beyond other members of his race, yet sharing their disadvantages, the young John Mercer Langston stood in an uncertain position in the years before the Civil War. His confrontation with a critical personal question was tempered by a crucial national reality: from what sources could he derive his model of manhood and human dignity? This book explores John Mercer Langston's decisions to work out his destiny through the resources and fortunes of the northern black community.
Although Langston, who died in 1897, was a black Politician, orator, lawyer, intellectual, diplomat, and congressman, he has never before been accorded fullscale biographical treatment. Born free on a Virginia plantation, Langston graduated from Oberlin College in 1849, gained admission to the Ohio bar, and by the age of twenty-five, became the first black American to hold elective office. Still in the years of his political apprenticeship, he promoted black civil rights, helped shape the nascent Republican party, aided in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and John Brown's raid, and recruited black soldier for the Union cause. In 1864 he became the first president of the National Equal Rights League.
From an extensive search of primary sources, the authors construct a richly textured picture of the beginnings of Langston's career as a national black leader. More than a biography, the work also incorporates social and political history. Embedded firmly in a study of northern black community life and activism, it reveals the degree to which Langston and his cohorts set the terms of the fight for freedom and citizenship.
When John Muir died in 1914, the pre-eminent American naturalist, explorer, and conservationist had not yet written the second volume of his autobiography, in which he planned to cover his Yosemite years. Editors Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling have here provided a remedy.
Their account begins in 1863, the year Muir left the University of Wisconsin for what he termed the "University of the Wilderness." Following an accident in 1867 that nearly left him blind, he vowed to turn from machines and continue to study nature. That led, in 1868, to his first visit to Yosemite Valley, where he began his glacier studies. Muir spent much time exploring the Yosemite region, Tuolumne, and both the southern and northern Sierras, publishing articles, and keeping extensive journals through 1875, when he began to write for the San Francisco Bulletin and expanded his travels to areas throughout the west.
Mining a rich vein of sources—Muir’s letters, journals, articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as selections drawn from biographical pieces written about Muir by people who met him in Yosemite in the early 1870s—Engberg and Wesling have assembled what they term a "composite autobiography," providing brief interpretive and transitional passages throughout the book. This work is especially valuable because it documents Muir’s formative years, when he is maturing away from "conventional cultural paradigms of work and materialism toward new ways of thinking about nature and its impact on human development."
"I am now writing up some notes, but when they will be ready for publication I do not know... It will be a long time before anything is arranged in book form." These words of John Muir, written in June 1912 to a friend, proved prophetic. The journals and notes to which the great naturalist and environmental figure was referring have languished, unpublished and virtually untouched, for nearly a century. Until now. Here edited and published for the first time, John Muir's travel journals from 1911-12, along with his associated correspondence, finally allow us to read in his own words the remarkable story of John Muir's last great journey.
Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. Although this epic journey has received almost no attention from the many commentators on Muir's work, Muir himself considered it among the most important of his life and the fulfillment of a decades-long dream.
John Muir's Last Journey provides a rare glimpse of a Muir whose interests as a naturalist, traveler, and conservationist extended well beyond the mountains of California. It also helps us to see John Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged, and as a private person and family man with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears, not just an iconic representative of American wilderness.
With an introduction that sets Muir's trip in the context of his life and work, along with chapter introductions and a wealth of explanatory notes, the book adds important dimensions to our appreciation of one of America's greatest environmentalists. John Muir's Last Journey is a must reading for students and scholars of environmental history, American literature, natural history, and related fields, as well as for naturalists and armchair travelers everywhere.
Born in 1852, Nelligan rose through the lumberjack ranks, starting out as a humble laborer and working his way up to foreman. He worked and lived in Maine, Pennsylvania, and even Canada before coming to Wisconsin in 1871. Learn what surviving and sawing wood for a living was like many years ago—from the story of one Wisconsin man who lived it!
Otfried Hans Freiherr von Meusebach chose a life of hardship and freedom in Texas rather than a life of comfort and influence in his native Germany, where he had lived his formative years within a framework of unconstitutional government.
In 1845 the young liberal relinquished his hereditary German title, left behind his close family ties and his various intellectual and political associations, and arrived in Texas as John O. Meusebach, commissioner-general for the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants. His background enabled him to assume an enlightened leadership of fellow immigrants who were pouring in from Germany. Lacking adequate financial backing, he nevertheless led the settling of some five thousand people in a land that was largely occupied by Indians.
Irene Marschall King presents the full sweep of Meusebach's vigorous life: Meusebach as the young liberal in Germany, as the colonizer in the 1840s, as a Texas senator and, later, an observer of the Civil War, and as a Texan who devoted his later years to bringing the Texas soil to fruition—all set against a background of the immigration movement and frontier life.
"Freedom is not free; it is costly," Meusebach believed. In Texas he found for himself and others freedom worth the price he paid.
Rich in historic detail, King's story recounts the founding of Fredericksburg, the crippling effect of the Mexican War upon the mass of immigrants huddled in illness on the coast, the signing of the Indian Treaty, which opened to settlement over three million acres of land, and the final collapse of the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants. Also depicted is the colonists' influence on the land—the gardens and orchards of south central Texas, the "Easter Fires" that blaze on the hills surrounding Fredericksburg, the mixture of German custom with American necessity that created a unique culture. Throughout the narrative Mrs. King presents a fascinating cast of characters: the noble Prince Solms, who tries to establish a German military outpost in Texas; Henry Fisher, who attempts by devious methods to control the colonists and their land and finally incites a mob which tries to hang Meusebach; Philip Cappes, a special commissioner and Meusebach's assistant, who plots through intriguing correspondence with Count Castell, the executive secretary in Germany, to overthrow Meusebach; and the colorful and courageous Indian fighter and Texas Ranger, Colonel Jack Hays.
Primarily, however, this is the story of a man who found strength in his family's motto, "Perseverance in Purpose," and gave of his energies to build Texas.
![front cover of John of St. Thomas [Poinsot] on Sacred Science](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-1-58731-410-0-thumb.jpg)
This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas’s Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity’s continual coming to terms with the “Third Entry” of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture – specifically the Aristotelian notion of ‘science’ and sacra doctrina’s satisfaction of those requirements – the Thomistic-commentary tradition, and the larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula’s flourishing “Second Scholasticism.”
In this latter context, John of St. Thomas applies the theological principles of Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic disputes preoccupying Thomist, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians, such as Cajetan, Bañez, Luis de Molina, Vazquez, Suárez – to name only a few – in a tour de force of theological thinking throughout the entire period of Scholasticism. In the process – and not insignificantly – the status quaestionis of theology’s scientific character is clearly framed and answered according to John’s satisfaction.
Key to John of St. Thomas’s resolution of the question is his understanding of the continuity of the power of human reason with the super-intelligibility of divine revelation spelled out in terms of what he calls “virtual revelation.” This text presented in this volume is a quintessential example of the deep and abiding harmony that flourished between faith and reason as well as grace and nature within the golden era of Baroque Scholasticism.
The sixty extant journals and numerous notes in this volume were written from 1867 to 1911. They start seven years after the time covered in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir’s uncompleted autobiography. The earlier journals capture the essence of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska landscapes. The changing appearance of the Sierras from Sequoia north and beyond the Yosemites enthralled Muir, and the first four years of the journals reveal his dominating concern with glacial action. The later notebooks reflect his changes over the years, showing a mellowing of spirit and a deep concern for human rights.
Like all his writings, the journals concentrate on his observations in the wilderness. His devotion to his family, his many warm friendships, and his many-sided public life are hardly mentioned. Very little is said about the quarter-century battle for national parks and forest reserves. The notebooks record, in language fuller and freer than his more formal writings, the depth of his love and transcendental feeling for the wilderness. The rich heritage of his native Scotland and the unconscious music of the poetry of Burns, Milton, and the King James Bible permeate the language of his poetic fancy.
In his later life, Muir attempted to sort out these journals and, at the request of friends, published a few extracts. A year after his death in 1914, his literary executor and biographer, William Frederick Badè, also published episodes from the journals. Linnie Marsh Wolfe set out to salvage the best of his writings still left unpublished in 1938 and has thus added to our understanding of the life and thought of a complex and fascinating American figure.
John O'Hara - American Writers 80 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
John P. Marquand - American Writers 46 was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
It was by far the most controversial document to emerge from Vatican II — Dignitatis Humanae, or the Declaration on Religious Freedom. Drafted largely by prominent Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, it represented a departure from previous Catholic teachings in that it acknowledged and accepted as normative the separation between Church and State and declared religious freedom a fundamental human right. In doing this, it set forth guidelines for the role of the Catholic Church in secular liberal and pluralistic societies.
Nearly four decades later, Hermínio Rico examines the continued relevance of this declaration in today's world, compares its most paradigmatic interpretations, and proposes a reconsideration of its import for contemporary church-society relationships. He offers a detailed analysis of how Pope John Paul II has appropriated, interpreted, and developed the main themes of the document, and how he has applied them to such contentious modern issues as the fall of Communism and the rise of secular pluralism. In addition, Rico sets forth his own vision of the future of Dignitatis Humanae, and how the profound themes of the declaration can be applied in years to come to help the church find a way to engage effectively with, and within, pluralistic societies.
Of interest to students of Catholic thought, church-society relationships, the legacy of John Courtney Murray, and the teachings of John Paul II, this book offers a fresh perspective on one of the most important documents in the modern history of the Catholic church.
With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.
In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.
In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
An engaging account of the titan of political philosophy and the development of his most important work, A Theory of Justice, coming at a moment when its ideas are sorely needed.
It is hard to overestimate the influence of John Rawls on political philosophy and theory over the last half-century. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is one of the few philosophers whose work is known in the corridors of power as well as in the halls of academe. Rawls is most famous for the development of his view of “justice as fairness,” articulated most forcefully in his best-known work, A Theory of Justice. In it he develops a liberalism focused on improving the fate of the least advantaged, and attempts to demonstrate that, despite our differences, agreement on basic political institutions is both possible and achievable.
Critics have maintained that Rawls’s view is unrealistic and ultimately undemocratic. In this incisive new intellectual biography, Andrius Gališanka argues that in misunderstanding the origins and development of Rawls’s central argument, previous narratives fail to explain the novelty of his philosophical approach and so misunderstand the political vision he made prevalent. Gališanka draws on newly available archives of Rawls’s unpublished essays and personal papers to clarify the justifications Rawls offered for his assumption of basic moral agreement. Gališanka’s intellectual-historical approach reveals a philosopher struggling toward humbler claims than critics allege.
To engage with Rawls’s search for agreement is particularly valuable at this political juncture. By providing insight into the origins, aims, and arguments of A Theory of Justice, Gališanka’s John Rawls will allow us to consider the philosopher’s most important and influential work with fresh eyes.
John Reed (1887-1920) is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and as champion of the communist movement in the United States. Still, Reed remains a writer almost systematically ignored by the literary critical establishment, even if alternately vilified and lionized by historians and by films like Warren Beatty’s Reds.
John Reed and the Writing of Revolution examines Reed’s writing from a different critical perspective—one informed by a theoretical and practical understanding of literary nonfiction. In both politics and writing, John Reed defied fashion. In his short career, Reed transcended the traditional creative arts of fiction, poetry, and drama in favor of deeply researched histories composed with the cadence of fiction and the power of fact. Reed thereby alienated literary critics who had idealized timeless artistry against the rough-and-tumble world of historical details and political implications.
Working from a close investigation of rare articles, manuscripts, and the Reed papers at Harvard as well as from Reed’s published work, Daniel W. Lehman offers the first detailed literary study of the man who followed Pancho Villa into battle; wrote literary profiles of such characters as Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday; explicated the Byzantine factionalism of Eastern Europe; and witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace and the birth of Soviet Russia.
The Mason County “Hoo Doo” War in Texas began as a war over range rights, but it swiftly deteriorated into blood vengeance and spiraled out of control as the body count rose. In this charnel house Ringo gained a reputation as a dangerous gunfighter and man killer. He was proclaimed throughout the state as a daring leader, a desperate man, and a champion of the feud. Following incarceration for his role in the feud, Ringo was elected as a lawman in Mason County, the epicenter of the feud’s origin.
The reputation he earned in Texas, further inflated by his willingness to shoot it out with Victorio’s raiders during a deadly confrontation in New Mexico, preceded him to Tombstone in territorial Arizona. Ringo became immersed in the area’s partisan politics and factionalized violence. A champion of the largely Democratic ranchers, Ringo would become known as a leader of one of these elements, the Cowboys. He ran at bloody, tragic odds with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday, finally being part of the posse that hounded these fugitives from Arizona. In the end, Ringo died mysteriously in the Arizona desert, his death welcomed by some, mourned by others, wrongly claimed by a few. Initially published in 1996, John Ringo has been updated to a second edition with much new information researched and uncovered by David Johnson and other Ringo researchers.
In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.
A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.
Ballantyne examines a crucial aspect of Ruskin’s thinking: the notion that art and architecture have moral value. Telling the story of Ruskin’s childhood and enduring devotion to his parents—who fostered his career as a writer on art and architecture—he explores the circumstances that led to Ruskin’s greatest works, such as Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, and Unto This Last. He follows Ruskin through his altruistic ventures with the urban poor, to whom he taught drawing, motivated by a profound conviction that art held the key to living a worthwhile life. Ultimately, Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s story into a larger one about Victorian society, a time when the first great industrial cities took shape and when art could finally reach beyond the wealthy elite and touch the lives of everyday people.
Until 1860 John Ruskin's writings were primarily about art and architecture; but his belief that good art can flourish only in a society that is sound and healthy led him inevitably to a preoccupation with social and economic problems, the dominant concern of his later writings. James Clark Sherburne provides in this volume a detailed and long overdue re-examination of Ruskin's social and economic perceptions and, for the first time, systematically places these perceptions in their nineteenth-century intellectual context.
Ruskin's eloquence and the strength of his moral, aesthetic, and social convictions established him as one of the most influential of Victorian writers. His writings, however, are not easily categorized and many of his important insights occur as digressions in discussions of other topics. Mr. Sherburne succeeds in ordering and clarifying the rich chaos of Ruskin's social thought without denying that wholeness which is, paradoxically, its salient feature. He discovers the source of Ruskin's social criticism in his early writings. He then follows Ruskin's interest as it shifts from economic theory to the problems of exploitation, war, imperialism, the means of social reform, and the construction of the welfare state.
Ruskin's remarkably early vision of the possibility of economic abundance, his anticipation of its social and personal implications, his much disparaged critique of classical economics, his pioneering attention to the role of the consumer and the quality of consumption, his anxious portrayal of the effects of industrialism on the environment, his critique of English educational methods, and his farsighted proposals for public management of industry and transport are among the many aspects of Ruskin's thought examined by Mr. Sherburne. What emerges is an original and exhaustive study of a dimension of Ruskin's work which, though much neglected, is particularly relevant to contemporary concerns.
John Singleton Copley is a richly illustrated, two-volume study of the major colonial American artist who subsequently became a leading English painter.
Volume I deals with Copley's life and career in America. Containing 334 illustrations and a checklist, it combines all the available biographical data with an authoritative analysis of the artist's stylistic development, from his earliest ventures in 1753 to the achievements of his later American years. This volume also presents a detailed statistical study of Copley's American sitters that provides unusual insights into the artist-client relationship.
Volume II presents the first comprehensive investigation of Copley's career after he left America in 1774. In it, his study trip to Italy and the ensuing, highly productive years in England are thoroughly explored. This volume contains 334 illustrations, including a number of pictures never before published, and provides the only complete catalogue of Copley's post-American work.
This is the first publication in a new series, The Ailsa Mellon Bruce Studies in American Art, to be published by Harvard University Press for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
John Spring first saw Arizona from an encampment on the west side of the Colorado River at "a small town called Yuma . . . then called Arizona City . . . it did a thriving fandango and saloon business during the period of continual going and coming of troops and teamsters." Southern Arizona, as Spring first saw and described it, was "a country where every highway, every path, every hamlet, and nearly every rancho could tell (had they the gift of speech) of devilish deeds, of crafty ambuscade, murdered settlers and travellers."
Supported by knowledge of several languages and wide reading, John Spring was able to extend his reporting to geographical and botanical description, to detailed reports of agriculture in the Santa Cruz Valley, and mercantile activity in Tucson. But he returned always to people--an irresistible center of interest for John Spring.
The lively and authentic serial reports of John Spring to the National Tribune in Washington, D.C., have been assembled and edited in this volume by A. M. Gustafson.
John Steinbeck - American Writers 94 was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people.
The Moon is Down created an immediate sensation among American literary critics; fierce debate erupted over Steinbeck’s uncommonly sympathetic portrayal of the enemy and the novel’s power as a vehicle for propaganda. Fifty years later, Coers continues the debate, relying heavily on unpublished letters and personal interviews with the lawyers, book dealers, actors, publishers, and housewives associated with the resistance movements in Western Europe. Clandestine translations of The Moon Is Down quickly appeared and were widely circulated under the noses of the Gestapo. Coers documents the fate of Steinbeck’s novel in the hands of World War II resistance fighters and deepens our appreciation of Steinbeck’s unique ability to express the feelings of oppressed peoples.
The contribution of Mill’s most authoritative biographer, Nicholas Capaldi, is a singular and unmatched highlight. The tenor of St. Augustine’s Press volumed on Mill is distinct in its intention to place his work in the framework of political philosophy and the conversation of the viability of liberalism as a tradition of thought.
If one can use a somewhat exaggerated language, Mill’s writings are to liberal-democracy what Marx and Engels’ writings were to Communism. Both systems gave expression to 19th century man’s longing for equality and justice, both promised to liberate him from the shackles of oppression, authority and tradition. Instead of liberating man, Communism created the most brutal system in human history, and its spectacular fall in 1989 is one of history’s greatest events. Western world today shows that liberal-democracy is no longer a benign doctrine, which advocates free market, minimum state and individual liberties, but, like Communism, is an all-encompassing ideology which forces an individual to abdicate his freedom and soul in favor of a Communist-like collective.
As many critics of real Socialism could see the seeds of totalitarianism in the writings of Marx and Engels, so one can see the seeds of liberal totalitarianism in Mill’s writings. This new edition is intended to help readers to understand why democratic-liberalism came so close to its 19th century ideological rival.
John Updike - American Writers 79 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
One of the most enduring and prolific American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century, John Updike has long been recognized by critics for his importance as a social commentator. Yet, John Updike and the Cold War is the first work to examine how Updike's views grew out of the defining context of American culture in his time—the Cold War. Quentin Miller argues that because Updike's career began as the Cold War was taking shape in the mid-1950s, the world he creates in his entire literary oeuvre—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose—reflects the optimism and the anxiety of that decade.
Miller asserts that Updike's frequent use of Cold War tension as a metaphor for domestic life and as a cultural reality that affects the psychological security of his characters reveals the inherent conflict of his fictional world. Consequently, this conflict helps explain some of the problematic relationships and aimless behavior of Updike's characters, as well as their struggles to attain spiritual meaning.
By examining Updike's entire career in light of the historical events that coincide with it, Miller shows how important the early Cold War mind-set was to Updike's thinking and to the development of his fiction. The changes in Updike's writing after the 1950s confirm the early Cold War era's influence on his ideology and on his celebrated style. By the Cold War's end in the late 1980s, Updike's characters look back fondly to the Eisenhower years, when their national identity seemed so easy to define in contrast to the Soviet Union. This nostalgia begins as early as his writings in the 1960s, when the breakdown of an American consensus disillusions Updike's characters and leaves them yearning for the less divisive 1950s.
While underscoring how essential history is to the study of literature, Miller demonstrates that Updike's writing relies considerably on the growth of the global conflict that defined his time. Cogent and highly readable, John Updike and the Cold War makes an important contribution to Updike scholarship.
Early in his career, John Updike announced his affinity with the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others. Because of this, many of Updike's critics have interpreted his work from within a Christian existentialist context. Yet Kierkegaard and Barth provide Updike with much more than a mere context, for their dialectical thinking serves as the springboard for Updike's own unique dialectical vision, a complex matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic principles that governs nearly all of his literary output. Nowhere else in his immense corpus is this vision more clearly and thoroughly expressed than in his four Rabbit novels, which were gathered into the single volume Rabbit Angstrom in 1995. However, because Updike's critics have chosen to read the Rabbit novels as discrete, freestanding texts, they have by and large failed to extract the precepts of this private vision.
In John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, Marshall Boswell redresses this imbalance by treating the Rabbit tetralogy as a single, unified "mega-novel." He demonstrates that, taken together as a single work, the four discrete sections of the tetralogy not only provide a coherent and complete articulation of Updike's unique existential vision but also compose a unified work of remarkable formal complexity. Boswell brings to Updike's work the concept of "mastered irony," a term coined by Kierkegaard to describe the presentation of two legitimate but contradictory sides of an issue. In the Rabbit novels, these issues range from adultery to drug addiction, from race to redemption, with each issue examined through the refracting lens of Updike's own ironic method. Boswell shows that although each of the four individual Rabbit novels confirms this dialectical strategy in a unique way, the completed tetralogy comprises an additional series of dialectical pairs that sustain, rather than resolve, thematic and formal tension. Ultimately, the structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale.
To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel, Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole. Honoring the full complexity of Updike's provocative thinking without losing sight of the tetralogy's popular appeal, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy makes a valuable addition to the study of Updike's work.
John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group.
This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.
This illustrated biography traces Vinci’s origins as a child of Italian immigrants on Chicago’s South Side and his coming of age at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was then under the direction of the legendary Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It follows his career through his subsequent immersion in the historic preservation movement and the work of such early Chicago architects as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Wellborn Root.
Vinci’s pioneering restoration projects include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Home Studio, Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and the Carson Pirie Scott Building, and Root’s Monadnock Building. His original work, meanwhile, includes notable buildings such as the Arts Club of Chicago, numerous award-winning residences, and more than fifty major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums.
John Vinci: Life and Landmarks also features portraits and profiles of Vinci’s friends and mentors over the years, including the architectural photographer Richard Nickel, the landscape designer Alfred Caldwell, the Art Institute curators James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, the architects Crombie Taylor and Myron Goldsmith, and the City of Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson.
The book includes new photos of twenty projects by noted architectural photographer William Zbaren as well as more than one hundred vintage photos and floorplans from Vinci’s personal archives, many never before published. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné rounds out this handsome and definitive work.
In a film career that spanned five decades, John Wayne became a U.S. icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity. His widespread popularity, however, was not limited to the United States: he was beloved among moviegoers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. In John Wayne’s World, Russell Meeuf considers the actor’s global popularity and makes the case that Wayne’s depictions of masculinity in his most popular films of the 1950s reflected the turbulent social disruptions of global capitalism and modernization taking place in that decade.
John Wayne’s World places Wayne at the center of gender- and nation-based ideologies, opening a dialogue between film history, gender studies, political and economic history, and popular culture. Moving chronologically, Meeuf provides new readings of Fort Apache, Red River, Hondo, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and The Alamo and connects Wayne’s characters with a modern, transnational masculinity being reimagined after World War II. Considering Wayne’s international productions, such as Legend of the Lost and The Barbarian and the Geisha, Meeuf shows how they resonated with U.S. ideological positions about Africa and Asia. Meeuf concludes that, in his later films, Wayne’s star text shifted to one of grandfatherly nostalgia for the past, as his earlier brand of heroic masculinity became incompatible with the changing world of the 1960s and 1970s. The first academic book-length study of John Wayne in more than twenty years, John Wayne’s World reveals a frequently overlooked history behind one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars.
John Wesley North and the Reform Frontier was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This biography is the absorbing and significant story of a frontier life in America in the nineteenth century. John Wesley North was a carpetbagger in the best sense of the word, and professor Stonehouse points out that no fallacy is more persistent in American history than the generalization that carpetbaggers were evil opportunists peculiar to the southward movement after the Civil War. North's aims, ambitions, and ideas were typical of many carpetbaggers whose common aspiration was the evangelical humanism that flourished in all of the English-speaking world at that time except in the slave-holding South.
Born in upstate New York in 1815, North migrated westward. For the rest of his life he pursued business and political interests with equal zest and championed many social causes. He went to Minnesota, Nevada, and California without enough money to live on, yet contributed significantly to their early history. He was a founder of Minneapolis, proprietor of Fairbault and Northfield, a founder of the University of Minnesota and of the Republican party in Minnesota, and a leader in the state's constitutional convention. In Nevada he helped shape land policy and mining law and found its cities and was president of the 1863 constitutional convention. He helped develop Southern California, where he established Oleander and Riverside. These three states welcomed him as a penniless dreamer, and he added much to the development of each. But in Tennessee, where he arrived with a fortune, eager to help rebuild the war-torn state, his best efforts resulted only in recrimination and his financial ruin. Thus North's life illustrates the sorry truth of General Sherman's comment that the carpetbaggers built the West but were not permitted to build the South.
“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is impossible to ignore any facet of Powell’s life. Powell was a polymath, one whose “divergent interests resemble one of those braided streambeds in his beloved canyon country, branching out in many directions, but ultimately beginning and ending in the same stream."
Aton beautifully tells the multidimensional stories of Powell’s childhood, his military and teaching careers, his famous and exciting explorations of the Colorado River, and the battles he waged from his influential positions within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey. This new edition of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, first printed as an issue of the Boise State University Western Writers Series, includes the original biography, but also features Aton’s new interpretations of Powell’s writings on exploration, land-planning, anthropology, and irrigation, and incorporates the author’s distinguished faculty lecture on Powell and cash-register dams in the Colorado River Basin.
A biography of Alabama’s first Senator, this book is also the fascinating story of Southern frontier life as portrayed in contemporary letters and documents. When Madison County, Alabama, was still wilderness, Walker trekked across the mountains from Georgia with his bride, Matilda Pope, his slaves, and all his household possessions, to build a plantation near Huntsville. Here he began his extraordinary political career: member of the first territorial legislature; speaker of the house in the second; U.S. territorial judge; president of Alabama’s Constitutional Convention; and when statehood was won, first U.S. Senator.
Combining accessible writing with thorough scholarship, and rigorous historical accounts with insightful readings, John Williams’s Film Music explores why Williams is so important to the history of film music. Beginning with an overview of music from Hollywood’s Golden Age (1933–58), Emilio Audissino traces the turning points of Williams’s career and articulates how he revived the classical Hollywood musical style. This book charts each landmark of this musical restoration, with special attention to the scores for Jaws and Star Wars, Williams’s work as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and a full film/music analysis of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The result is a precise, enlightening definition of Williams’s “neoclassicism” and a grounded demonstration of his lasting importance, for both his compositions and his historical role in restoring part of the Hollywood tradition.
Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
In the first in-depth study of Winthrop since 1958, James G. Moseley provides a fascinating new look at this extraordinary man, paying careful attention to the connections between Winthrop’s political activity and his writing. Moseley first examines Winthrop as a writer, using the journal to analyze Winthrop as a man resolving challenges based as much on his acutely pragmatic intelligence as on his deeply felt religious convictions. Second, Moseley traces how historians have responded to Winthrop—how his famous journal has been read and misread by those who have filtered the man and his cultural context through many lenses.
By examining Winthrop’s ancestors and early life in England, especially the religious changes he experienced, Moseley removes the blinders of modernism, portraying Winthrop as never before. He shows how Winthrop’s successful struggle to accept the deaths of his first two wives led him away from moralistic views of Christianity, himself, and his world to more magnanimous views.
Arguing that writing was the medium through which Winthrop developed his capacity for leadership, Moseley shows how the journal enabled Winthrop to reflect objectively on his situation and to adjust his behavior. Winthrop was, Moseley suggests, not only a politician but a historian, and his interpretations of foundational events in American history in his journal are an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of leadership and the meaning of liberty in Puritan America.
Winthrop’s World is a very graceful, well-written, and engaging narrative that provides new insight into the Puritan way of life and into the man who provided a window between our world and his.
From his station at Ft. Tejon in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, Xántus carried on a lengthy correspondence with Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian, to whom he shipped the specimens he had trapped or shot in the surrounding sierra and deserts. A prolific letter writer, Xántus faithfully reported his findings as he bemoaned his circumstances and worried about his future.
Working from Smithsonian archives, natural history writer Ann Zwinger has assembled Xántus’s unpublished letters into a book that documents his trials and triumphs in the field and reveals much about his dubious character. The letters also bring to life a time and place on the western frontier from which Xántus was able to observe a broad panorama of American history in the making.
Zwinger’s lively introduction sets the stage for Xántus’s correspondence and examines the apparent contradictions between the man’s personal and professional lives. Her detailed notes to the letters further clarify his discoveries and shed additional light on his checkered career.
The man popularly credited with planting apple trees throughout the Midwest, John "Appleseed" Chapman epitomizes the American folk hero and pioneer: a man of humble origins who headed west to seek his destiny.
The essays in this collection bring to life the real Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845). A courageous, God-fearing, peaceful, and spartan figure, Chapman was welcomed by settlers and Native Americans alike. He was an unusual businessman -- one who believed that his "wealth" was sown in the trees he planted rather than in banks.
But most of all, Johnny Appleseed was a lover of nature whose respect for all living things was born of his faith. An itinerant "missionary," he provided settlers with "news fresh from heaven" -- pages from the works of eighteenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.
Editor William Ellery Jones has updated historical essays that explore how Chapman's legend grew both during and after his life.
2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize, winner
Across all imaginable borders, Johnny Cash fans show the appeal of a thoroughly American performer who simultaneously inspires people worldwide. A young Norwegian shows off his Johnny Cash tattoo. A Canadian vlogger sings “I Walk the Line” to camel herders in Egypt’s White Desert. A shopkeeper in Northern Ireland plays Cash as his constant soundtrack. A Dutchwoman coordinates the activities of Cash fans worldwide and is subsequently offered the privilege of sleeping in Johnny’s bedroom. And on a more global scale, millions of people watch Cash’s videos online, then express themselves through commentary and debate.
In Johnny Cash International, Hinds and Silverman examine digital and real-world fan communities and the individuals who comprise them, profiling their relationships to Cash and each other. Studying Johnny Cash’s international fans and their love for the man reveals new insights about music, fandom, and the United States.
The actor's image is studied in terms of its ambiguities and its many strange nuances: Depp's ethnicity, his smoking, his tranquility, his unceasing motion, his links to the Gothic, the Beats, Simone de Beauvoir, the history of rationality, Impressionist painting, and more. In a series of treatments of his key roles, including Rafael in The Brave, Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, Jack Kerouac in The Source, and the long list of acclaimed performances from Gilbert Grape to Cap'n Jack Sparrow, we learn of Johnny onscreen in terms of male sexuality, space travel, optical experience, nineteenth-century American capitalism, Orientalism, the vulnerability of performance, the perils of sleep, comedy, the myth of the West, Scrooge McDuck, Frantois Truffaut, and more.
Johnny's face, Johnny's gaze, Johnny's aging, and Johnny's understatement are shown to be inextricably linked to our own desperate need to plumb performance, style, and screen for a grounding of reality in this ever-accelerating world of fragmentation and insecurity. Both deeply intriguing and perpetually elusive, Depp is revealed as the central screen performer of the contemporary age, the symbol of performance itself.
No thinker has meditated on Johnny Depp this way before-and surely not in a manner worthy of the object of scrutiny.
John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, is seen through the eyes of a lost child in this short work of historical fiction.
Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnson’s death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nation’s most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnson’s life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnson’s friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnson’s relations with Smollett and Thomas Hollis, a speculative essay on “Johnson and the Meaning of Life,” and a provocative examination of “Johnson, Traveling Companion, in Fancy and Fact.”
Other essays reinterpret basic assumptions in Johnson’s criticism and examine “The Antinomy of Style” in Augustan poetics, Hume’s critique of criticism, and the broad Anglo-Scots inquiry on subjectivity in literature. A section on major figures of the age discusses Gray and the problems of literary transmissions, Hogarth’s book illustrations for friends, Gibbon’s oratorical “silences,” Blake’s concept of God, and Burke’s attempt to forestall Britain’s ruinous policy toward the American colonies. A section on the novel examines that genre from Richardson and Sterne to Austen.
Among the contributors are Bertrand H. Bronson, Jean H. Hagstrum, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Robert Haisband, Howard D. Weinbrot, Mary Hyde, Ralph W. Rader, Lawrence Lipking, Gwin J. Kolb, John H. Middendorf, W. B. Carruichan, and Max Byrd.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
A century later, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters Ben Bragdon and Nina Collins set out to interview 103-year-old Ellen for Ben’s feature article on the flood. When asked the secret to her longevity, Ellen simply attributes it to “restlessness.” As we see, that restlessness is fueled by Ellen’s innate belief that her twin sister Mary, who went missing in the flood, is somehow still alive. Her story intrigues Ben, but it haunts Nina, who is determined to help Ellen find her missing half.
Novelist Kathleen George masterfully blends a history of the Johnstown flood into her heartrending tale of twin sisters who have never known the truth about that fateful day in 1889—a day that would send their lives hurtling down different paths. The Johnstown Girls is a remarkable story of perseverance, hard work, and never giving up hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s also a tribute to the determination and indomitable spirit of the people of Johnstown through one hundred years, three generations, and three different floods.
This eye-opening personal history tells the story of an American college professor’s twenty-year engagement with a thriving Africa rarely encountered by Western visitors, including an extraordinary connection to poets across the continent. At once adventurous, spiritual, political, dreamlike, and humorous, Joining Africa is a unique documentary of a journey through the continent, including an intense five-year encounter with economically struggling but culturally fertile Eritrea. The Africa presented here is neither a postcolonial study nor an exotic tourist destination. It is rich with the voices of its people, whose languages, Cantalupo argues, have greater potential to effect change than any NGO or high-profile celebrity. In vibrant prose, Cantalupo’s book extends a stirring invitation to reevaluate how we engage—both individually and collectively—with this remarkable part of the world.
Avoiding the male-authored model of competing orations, French and Italian women of the Renaissance framed their dialogues as informal conversations, as letters with friends that in turn became epistles to a wider audience, and even sometimes as dramas. No other study to date has provided thorough, comparative view of these works across French, Italian, and Latin. Smarr's comprehensive treatment relates these writings to classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms of dialogue, and to other genres including drama, lyric exchange, and humanist invective -- as well as to the real conversations in women's lives -- in order to show how women adapted existing models to their own needs and purposes.
Janet Levarie Smarr is Professor of Theatre and Italian Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Chopra shows how the European and Indian engineers, architects, and artists worked with each other to design a city—its infrastructure, architecture, public sculpture—that was literally constructed by Indian laborers and craftsmen. Beyond the built environment, Indian philanthropists entered into partnerships with the colonial regime to found and finance institutions for the general public. Too often thought to be the product of the singular vision of a founding colonial regime, British Bombay is revealed by Chopra as an expression of native traditions meshing in complex ways with European ideas of urban planning and progress.
The result, she argues, was the creation of a new shared landscape for Bombay’s citizens that ensured that neither the colonial government nor the native elite could entirely control the city’s future.
This book devises a general and comprehensive, but brief, theory of jokes. The author begins with critiques of other writers’ views on the subject. 1) Ted Cohen thinks that such a theory is impossible. 2) Ronald Berk, on the other hand, provides just such a theory. And 3) John Morreall provides a general theory of laughter, which may include some things which can be used in a general theory of jokes. 4) Neil Schaeffer, too, provides a general theory of laughter, which makes a big point out of what he calls the “ludicrous context”; but he does include a chapter on jokes. 5) Christopher Wilson offers a general theory of jokes in which he focuses on form and content. And 6) Thomas Werge, in reflecting on the comic, suggests a general theory of jokes which identifies their matter, form, agents, purposes, and beyond these, the underlying shared relational context, which makes it possible for jokes to arise. 7) Bill Fuller’s message is that there is more funniness coming out of two or more heads than out of one, just as Socrates’ message was that there is more clarity coming out of two or more heads than out of one. 8) Umberto Eco feels that monks should laugh, just as ordinary people do; for laughter not only refreshes our seeking spirits, it also illuminates the truth we seek. 9) Simon Critchley, in his reflections on humor, notes that jokes bring on a kind of everyday anamnesis, that they are anti-story stories, that they are like prayers, that they are like philosophy; and that they require a certain underlying context, which is implicitly recognized by both teller and listener, and which renders possible the tension needed to make the punch line work. 10) Martha Wolfenstein, pursuing a psychological analysis of children’s humor, proposes that the underlying motive for telling jokes remains the same from childhood to adulthood, i.e., to transform painful and frustrating experiences so as to extract pleasure from them; and that the agent or productive cause of jokes is the repressing unconscious, as suggested by Freud.
As John Morreall has argued, neither the Superiority Theory (as in Plato, Aristotle and Hobbes), nor the Relief Theory (as in Spencer and Freud), nor the Incongruity Theory (as in Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard) appears to work as a general and comprehensive theory. Moreover, these writers talk more about humor and laughter than about jokes. To be sure, a joke is a type of humor. Thus, to say something about humor is to say something, though of a generic sort, about jokes. Similarly, to say something about the laughter caused by humor is to say something, though generic, about the laughter caused by jokes. Most of the authors considered in chapter one are concerned with jokes, and not only with humor as such. Section 11 of chapter one puts together, out of the combined contributions of these authors, what can be considered the beginnings of, some thoughts toward, a general and comprehensive theory of jokes. This task the author illustrates in a concrete way, by looking at individual jokes of different sorts; not, however, without inviting the reader to enjoy these jokes. The author looks particularly at Jewish jokes, Christian jokes, and Islamic jokes (jokes in three major religious traditions), jokes about philosophy and philosophers (philosophers ought to be able to laugh at themselves and at what they do), yo mama jokes (out of a healthy curiosity), Italian jokes and Slovak jokes, all of which makes for a clearer understanding of exactly what a joke is.
The analysis of general theory is then followed by some views on the morality of jokes and joke-telling, and an analysis of the connection between jokes and life after death, on the one hand, and God, on the other. Throughout the book Bobik offers innumerable examples to heighten our understanding and entertain us.
Sol sits on the sidewalk bench and waits patiently for nearly half an hour. Finally, Abe reappears.
"Well," asks Sol, "what are they up to? Who are they trying to convert? Why do they care? Did you get the $1,000?"
Indignantly Abe replies, "Money. That's all you people care about."
Ted Cohen thinks that's not a bad joke. But he also doesn't think it's an easy joke. For a listener or reader to laugh at Abe's conversion, a complicated set of conditions must be met. First, a listener has to recognize that Abe and Sol are Jewish names. Second, that listener has to be familiar with the widespread idea that Jews are more interested in money than anything else. And finally, the listener needs to know this information in advance of the joke, and without anyone telling him or her. Jokes, in short, are complicated transactions in which communities are forged, intimacy is offered, and otherwise offensive stereotypes and cliches lose their sting—at least sometimes.
Jokes is a book of jokes and a book about them. Cohen loves a good laugh, but as a philosopher, he is also interested in how jokes work, why they work, and when they don't. The delight at the end of a joke is the result of a complex set of conditions and processes, and Cohen takes us through these conditions in a philosophical exploration of humor. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes, and their morality, all with plenty of examples that will make you either chuckle or wince. Jokes: more humorous than other philosophy books, more philosophical than other humor books.
"Befitting its subject, this study of jokes is . . . light, funny, and thought-provoking. . . . [T]he method fits the material, allowing the author to pepper the book with a diversity of jokes without flattening their humor as a steamroller theory might. Such a book is only as good as its jokes, and most of his are good. . . . [E]ntertainment and ideas in one gossamer package."—Kirkus Reviews
"One of the many triumphs of Ted Cohen's Jokes-apart from the not incidental fact that the jokes are so good that he doesn't bother to compete with them-is that it never tries to sound more profound than the jokes it tells. . . . [H]e makes you feel he is doing an unusual kind of philosophy. As though he has managed to turn J. L. Austin into one of the Marx Brothers. . . . Reading Jokes makes you feel that being genial is the most profound thing we ever do-which is something jokes also make us feel-and that doing philosophy is as natural as being amused."—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books
"[A] lucid and jargon-free study of the remarkable fact that we divert each other with stories meant to make us laugh. . . . An illuminating study, replete with killer jokes."—Kevin McCardle, The Herald (Glasgow)
"Cohen is an ardent joke-maker, keen to offer us a glimpse of how jokes are crafted and to have us dwell rather longer on their effects."—Barry C. Smith, Times Literary Supplement
"Because Ted Cohen loves jokes, we come to appreciate them more, and perhaps think further about the quality of good humor and the appropriateness of laughter in our lives."—Steve Carlson, Christian Science Monitor
A folklorist drawn to the study of humor, Oring developed his formulation of “appropriate incongruity” as a frame to understand what jokes must do to produce humor. He tests appropriate incongruity against other major positions in the field, including the general theory of verbal humor, conceptual integration theory, benign violation theory, and false-belief theory. Oring draws on the work of scholars from several disciplines—anthropology, folklore, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature—to ask basic questions about the construction and evolution of jokes, untangle the matter of who the actual targets of a joke might be, and characterize the artistic qualities of jokes and joke performances.
Although Oring guides the reader through a forest of jokes and joke genres, this is not a joke book. A major work from a major scholar, Joking Asides is a rigorous exploration of theoretical approaches to jokes and their functions and is filled with disquieting questions, penetrating criticisms, and original observations. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will prove valuable to any scholar or student who takes matters of jokes and joking seriously.
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