front cover of Lifebirds
Lifebirds
Levine, George
Rutgers University Press, 1995

In the tradition of Annie Dillard, this book is a set of meditations on nature, in this case specifically on the way birds and birding are entangled with life, with work, family, and friends. While it delicately narrates loving engagement with birds, it is not a field guide. Its author is a birder, not a professional ornithologist. Although the book does in fact offer a surprising amount of detail about birds, it is primarily a consideration of the experience and human significance of seeing birds, rather than of the birds in themselves as objects of systematic study. It attempts to convey something of the extraordinary variety and excitement of birding, the complications and subtleties of bird identification, the implication of birding in the imagination and the world against which it is usually defined.

While one doesn’t have to be interested in birds to read it with pleasure, it attempts to seduce the reader into the birding experience through a series of autobiographical memoirs with birds at their center. It is not meant for experts, except as experts might be interested in how a journeyman experiences their more significantly constructed world. In the end the book is about a lot more than birds. It is about “lifebirds,” with all the many meanings that word might seem to imply.

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Lifeblood
Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
Matthew T. Huber
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.

How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.

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Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women
Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe
Timothy Burke
Duke University Press, 1996
How do people come to need products they never even knew they wanted? How, for example, did indigenous Zimbabweans of the 1940s begin to believe that they required Lifebuoy soap? Offering a glimpse into the intimate workings of modern colonialism and global capitalism, Timothy Burke takes up these questions in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, a study of post-World War II commodity culture in Zimbabwe.
With particular attention to cosmetic products and the contrast between colonial and pre-colonial ideas of cleanliness, Burke examines the role played by commodity culture, changing patterns of consumption, and the spread of advertising in the making of modern Zimbabwe. His work combines history, anthropology, and political economy to show how the development of commodification in the region relates to the social history of hygiene. Within this framework, and drawing on a wide variety of historical sources, Burke explores dense interactions between commodity culture and embodied aspects of race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, health, and aesthetics in a colonial society. Rather than viewing the production of needs simply as an imposition from above, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women shows what heterogeneous and complex processes, involving the aims and histories of both colonizers and colonized, produced these changes in Zimbabwean society.
Integrating political economy, cultural studies, and a wide range of the social sciences, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women will find readers among scholars of colonialism, African history, and ethnography as well those for whom the problem of commodification is a significant theoretical issue.
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Life-Destroying Diagrams
Eugenie Brinkema
Duke University Press, 2021
In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.
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The Life-Giving Stone
Ethnoarchaeology of Maya Metates
Michael T. Searcy
University of Arizona Press, 2011
In The Life-Giving Stone, Michael Searcy provides a thought-provoking ethnoarchaeological account of metate and mano manufacture, marketing, and use among Guatemalan Maya for whom these stone implements are still essential equipment in everyday life and diet.

Although many archaeologists have regarded these artifacts simply as common everyday tools and therefore unremarkable, Searcy’s methodology reveals how, for the ancient Maya, the manufacture and use of grinding stones significantly impacted their physical and economic welfare. In tracing the life cycle of these tools from production to discard for the modern Maya, Searcy discovers rich customs and traditions that indicate how metates and manos have continued to sustain life—not just literally, in terms of food, but also in terms of culture. His research is based on two years of fieldwork among three Mayan groups, in which he documented behaviors associated with these tools during their procurement, production, acquisition, use, discard, and re-use.

Searcy’s investigation documents traditional practices that are rapidly being lost or dramatically modified. In few instances will it be possible in the future to observe metates and manos as central elements in household provisioning or follow their path from hand-manufacture to market distribution and to intergenerational transmission. In this careful inquiry into the cultural significance of a simple tool, Searcy’s ethnographic observations are guided both by an interest in how grinding stone traditions have persisted and how they are changing today, and by the goal of enhancing the archaeological interpretation of these stones, which were so fundamental to pre-Hispanic agriculturalists with corn-based cuisines.
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Life-Like
Toby Litt
Seagull Books, 2014
Emotionally compelling and formally innovative, Life-Like is Toby Litt’s most ambitious collection of short stories to date, bringing to fruition themes first aired in his previous books, Adventures in Capitalism, Exhibitionism, and I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay. Life-Like is a book about our globalizing and atomizing world—with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia, and Iran—that also looks at how we meet and fail to meet and what connects us to one another, as well as waste and communication, and, in turn, communication through waste.

The twenty-six stories begin with Paddy and Agatha, an English couple last seen in Litt’s Ghost Story. Following the stillbirth of their second child, their marriage has gently begun to collapse. Paddy and Agatha both meet someone else. First, Paddy meets Kavita, and Agatha meets John. Then each of these four engages with a different new person—and so on, through a doubling and redoubling of intimately interconnected stories. The remaining short stories exemplify Litt’s impressive, unflinching prose. 
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Lifelines
The Case For River Conservation
Tim Palmer
Island Press, 1994
In Lifelines, Tim Palmer addresses the fate of our waterways. While proposals for gigantic federal dams are no longer common, and some of the worst pollution has been brought under control, myriad other concerns have appeared—many of them more subtle and complex than the threats of the past.

Palmer examines the alarming condition of rivers in today's world, reports on the success in restoring some of our most polluted streams and in stopping destructive dams, and builds the case for what must be done to avoid the collapse of riparian ecosystems and to reclaim qualities we cannot do without. He documents the needs for a new level of awareness and suggests ways to avert the plunder of our remaining river legacy.

Lifelines offers a fresh perspective on:

  • the values of natural rivers
  • current threats to streams and possibilities for reform
  • the continuing challenge of hydropower development
  • water quality, instream flows, and riparian habitat
  • ecosystem management and watershed protection
  • the need for vision, hope, and action
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Lifelines
The Traffic of Trauma
Harris Solomon
Duke University Press, 2022
In Lifelines Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied movement that determine survival. In reflecting on the centrality of traffic to life, Lifelines explores a fundamental question: How does medicine move us?
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Life's a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
University Press of Colorado, 2004
A beautiful and haunting tale of love, betrayal, knowledge, and power, Life's a Dream (La vida es sueño, 1636) is the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681). Calderón's long life witnessed both the pinnacle and collapse of Spanish political power as well as the great flowering of Spanish classical literature. Michael Kidd's new prose translation renders Calderón's masterpiece into a transparent, modern American idiom that preserves the beauty and complexity of Calderón's Baroque Spanish. The result is a highly readable and adaptable text that is enhanced by a generous selection of supporting materials, including a thorough critical introduction and glossary.
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Life's Journey—Zuya
Oral Teachings from Rosebud
Albert White Hat Sr
University of Utah Press, 2012

“Our people are very lucky to be here,” says Albert White Hat Sr. He has lived through a time when Indians were sent to boarding schools and were not permitted to practice their own rituals. Although the Lakota people can practice their beliefs openly once again, things have changed and old ways have been forgotten. As a teacher at Sinte Gleska University in South Dakota, White Hat seeks to preserve the link the Lakota people have with their past. In Life’s Journey—Zuya, White Hat has collected and translated the stories of medicine men, retaining the simplicity of their language so as not to interpret their words through a Western lens. This is Zuya, oral history that is lived and handed down over the generations.

White Hat also shares stories from his own experience. Using anecdotes he shows not only how the Lakota lifestyle has been altered but also how Lakota words have begun to take on new meanings that lack their original connotations and generate a different picture of Lakota philosophy. Language, interwoven with history, tells the people where they came from and who they are. By gathering the traditions and ceremonies in a single volume, with the history of how they evolved, he has secured the meaning of these practices for futre generations. Filled with warmth and humor, Life’s Journey—Zuya is an enjoyable and enlightening read.

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Life's Splendid Drama
Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry, 1860-1940
Peter J. Bowler
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The story of life's splendid drama has captivated generations of the general public, just as it has intrigued biologists, especially those who began to try to solve evolutionary puzzles in the years immediately after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Yet histories of the Darwinian revolution have paid far more attention to theoretical debates and have largely ignored the researchers who struggled to comprehend the deeper evolutionary significance of fossil bones and the structures of living animals. Peter J. Bowler recovers some of this lost history in Life's Splendid Drama, the definitive account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and bio-geography.

"Intriguing and insightful."—William Kimler, American Scientist

"[A] volume of impressive scholarship and extensive references."—Library Journal

"One of Bowler's best."—Kevin Padian, Nature

"[Bowler's] comprehensive review of the various debates and ideas in taxonomy, morphology, and vertebrate evolution . . . deserves the attention of biologists and other scholars interested in the history of ideas."—Choice

"The persistence of pre-Darwinian modes of thought in contemporary biology underlines the importance of Bowler's book. Its value is not only in the history it provides, but also in the way it illumines the present."—Peter J. Causton, Boston Book Review
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Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands
New Approaches to Archaeology in the Yucatán Peninsula
Edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Bethany A. Morrison
University of Arizona Press, 2006
The flat, dry reaches of the northern Yucatán Peninsula have been largely ignored by archaeologists drawn to the more illustrious sites of the south. This book is the first volume to focus entirely on the northern Maya lowlands, presenting a broad cross-section of current research projects in the region by both established and up-and-coming scholars. To address the heretofore unrecognized importance of the northern lowlands in Maya prehistory, the contributors cover key topics relevant to Maya studies: the environmental and historical significance of the region, the archaeology of both large and small sites, the development of agriculture, resource management, ancient politics, and long-distance interaction among sites. As a volume in the series Native Peoples of the Americas, it adds a human dimension to archaeological findings by incorporating modern ethnographic data.

By exploring various social and political levels of Maya society through a broad expanse of time, Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands not only reconstructs a little-known past, it also suggests the broad implications of archaeology for related studies of tourism, household economies, and ethnoarchaeology. It is a benchmark work that pointedly demonstrates the need for researchers in both north and south to ignore modern geographic boundaries in their search for new ideas to further their understanding of the ancient Maya.
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Lifeworlds
Essays in Existential Anthropology
Michael Jackson
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Michael Jackson’s Lifeworlds is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research.
 
Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths.
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Life-Writing in the History of Archaeology
Critical perspectives
Edited by Clare Lewis and Gabriel Moshenska
University College London, 2023
A study of life-writing as a vital part of the history of archaeology and a growing field of scholarship within the discipline.

Travels and adventures of the “great archaeologists” have generated centuries worth of bestselling books that, in turn, have shaped the public perception of archaeology. The lives of archaeologists are entangled with histories of museums and collections, developments in science and scholarship, and narratives of nationalism and colonialism into the present. In recent years, life-writing has played an important role in the surge of new research in the history of archaeology, including ground-breaking studies of discipline formation, institutionalization, and social and intellectual networks. Sources such as diaries, wills, film, and the growing body of digital records are powerful tools for highlighting the contributions of hitherto marginalized archaeological lives including many pioneering women, hired laborers, and other “hidden hands.”

This book brings together critical perspectives on life-writing in the history of archaeology from leading figures in the field. These include studies of archive formation and use, the concept of “dig-writing” as a distinctive genre of archaeological creativity, and reviews of new sources for already well-known lives. Several chapters reflect on the experience of life-writing, review the historiography of the field, and assess the intellectual value and significance of life-writing as a genre. Together, they work to problematize underlying assumptions about this genre, foregrounding methodology, social theory, ethics, and other practice-focused frameworks in conscious tension with previous practices.
 
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Lift Every Voice
African American Oratory, 1787-1901
Philip S. Foner
University of Alabama Press, 1997

This comprehensive anthology will be the standard source for the
study of African American public address for years to come.

For Americans of the 19th century, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, eloquent
speeches were 'the shining lights of civilization' that both expressed
and sought to improve the lives and communities from which they sprang.
Through political speeches, sermons, lectures, oral testimonies, and ceremonial
addresses, African Americans offered diverse responses to the issues and
events of their times, including not only slavery and racial equality but
also women's rights, education, religion, immigration, socialism, war,
Indian policy, and labor organization, among others. The speeches in this
collection are among the most powerful expressions of African American
opinions on these issues and were delivered on occasions and before audiences
where the speakers believed their words might be transformative.

Lift Every Voice is a completely revised, updated, and expanded
version of Philip Foner's 1972 classic Voice of Black America, which Library
Journal hailed as "indispensable.""This well-edited and
richly inclusive work," wrote Benjamin Quarles, "unveils the
full sweep of Black expression as found in platform addresses" by
"men and women who join eloquence with reason in articulating their
grievances and their aspirations and in arousing their listeners with their
ringing and prophetic challenges." This new collection includes over
60 additional texts and revised and expanded introductory essays that provide
historical, biographical, and critical information for each speech.

Containing more than 150 speeches, this anthology represents the most
extensive and diverse collection of African American oratory of the 18th
and 19th centuries ever published. Lift Every Voice makes readily
accessible not only the classic orations of such well-known figures
as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington but also
dozens of lesser-known but important speeches deserving greater recognition
and study. Many of these speeches are previously unpublished, uncollected,
or long out of print.



 
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Lift High the Cross
Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge
Ann Burlein
Duke University Press, 2002
Both the Christian right and right-wing white supremacist groups aspire to overcome a culture they perceive as hostile to the white middle class, families, and heterosexuality. The family is threatened, they claim, by a secular humanist conspiracy that seeks to erase all memory of the nation’s Christian heritage by brainwashing its children through sex education, multiculturalism, and pop culture. In Lift High the Cross Ann Burlein looks at two groups that represent, in one case, the “hard” right, and in the other, the “soft” right—Pete Peters’s “Scriptures for America” and James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family”—in order to investigate the specific methods these groups rely on to appeal to their followers.
Arguing that today’s right engenders its popularity not by overt bigotry or hatred but by focusing on people’s hopes for their children, Burlein finds a politics of grief at the heart of such rhetoric. While demonstrating how religious symbols, rituals, texts, and practices shape people’s memories and their investment in society, she shows how Peters and Dobson each construct countermemories for their followers that reframe their histories and identities—as well as their worlds—by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations. By employing the techniques of niche marketing, the politics of scandal, and the transformation of political issues into “gut issues” and by remasculinizing the body politic, Burlein shows, such groups are able to move people into their realm of influence without requiring them to agree with all their philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions.
Lift High the Cross will appeal to students and scholars of religion, American cultural studies, women’s studies, sociology, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as to non-specialists interested in American politics and, specifically, the right.
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Lifted Masks and Other Works
Susan Glaspell
University of Michigan Press, 1993
A singular collection of short stories unveiling aspects of the human condition
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Lifting the Fog of Peace
How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War
Janine Davidson
University of Michigan Press, 2011
Lifting the Fog of Peace puts the U.S. military’s frustrating experiences in Iraq into context and reveals how the military was able to turn the tide during the so-called surge in 2007–8.“Lifting the Fog of Peace is a captivating study of an agile and adaptive military evolving through the chaos of the post-9/11 world. In what is certain to be regarded as the definitive analysis of the reshaping of American combat power in the face of a complex and uncertain future, Dr. Janine Davidson firmly establishes herself as a rising intellectual star in government and politics. A thoroughly captivating study of organizational learning and adaptation—a ‘must read’ for leaders in every field.”
—LTG William B. Caldwell IV, Commanding General, NATO Training Mission—Afghanistan “In Lifting the Fog of Peace, Dr. Janine Davidson explains how the American military has adapted itself to succeed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are the most likely future face of combat. The book is informed by her experience of these wars in the Department of Defense, where she now plays a critical role in continuing the process of learning that has so visibly marked the military’s performance in today’s wars. Highly recommended.”
—John A. Nagl, President, Center for a New American Security“. . . a ‘must read’ on the E-Ring of the Pentagon and in security studies programs across the nation.”
—Joseph J. Collins, Professor, National War College, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations
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Lifting the Shadow
Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums
Amy Sodaro
Rutgers University Press
Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.
 
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Light
Michael I. Sobel
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Rainbows and exploding stars, ancient Greek optics and modern lasers—these are but a few facets of this entertaining exploration of light in all areas of science and technology.

"Like the denizens of some brilliant ocean, humans are awash in light. Surrounded by illuminations both natural and artificial, we remain blissfully unaware of how light determines most of life's rhythms and rituals or how it dominates every field of modern science. Michael I. Sobel, a professor of physics at Brooklyn College, has attempted no less a task than to enlighten us (see how it pervades our language) about the many facets of this ubiquitous phenomenon, from its earliest stirrings of emotion and wonder in ancient savants to its modern applications in lasers and silicon chips. His broader objective, however, is to show the unity of the natural sciences by using light as a central theme. . . . As a guide along the path of light Mr. Sobel is excellent."—James Cornell, New York Times Book Review
 
"At long last, here is a book about a technical subject that anyone can read with interest and understand. . . . The author's technical genius and communication skills are combined with excellent lucid sketches, concise meaty captions, and fascinating photographs."—Jason R. Taylor, Science Books and Films

“The title says it all. It is simply a magnificent dissertation on every aspect of light. Its lucid and attractive prose may be read for pleasure and wonder, yet the book is also a reference book of authority. I doubt whether any question about light cannot be answered by consulting it, whether the question is about glow-worms or the aurora borealis, black bodies of the structure of the eye, mirages or fluorescence. This is a marvelous book, one of the best paperbacks I have ever encountered.”—New Scientist
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Light and Glory
The Transfiguration of Christ in Early Franciscan and Dominican Theology
Aaron Canty
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Light and Glory offers an engaging comparison of the teachings of seven thirteenth-century theologians -- three Franciscans and four Dominicans -- on the subject of the transfiguration of Christ.
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Light As Light
Poems
Simon J. Ortiz
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

The poems in Light As Light travel far across both space and memory, landing everywhere from the New Mexico of the speaker’s childhood, to California, Tucson, and present-day Beijing, and many airports, highways, and way stations in between. The central concern uniting this collection is language itself: the weight and significance of English and Keres, as well as the nature and power of poetry as a way of life. No collection of Indigenous literature is complete without the work of Simon Ortiz, and this book is a powerful journey through the poet’s life—both a love letter to the future, and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.
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The Light Club
On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia"
Josiah McElheny
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture, Scheerbart’s satirical fantasies envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass.

In 1912, Scheerbart published The Light Club of Batavia, a Novelle about the formation of a club dedicated to building a spa for bathing—not in water, but in light—at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work.

The Light Club
makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart’s tale represent a part of modernism’s lost project: a world based on political and spiritual ideals rather than efficiency and logic. In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart’s life as well as his own enchantment with the writer, and he explains the ways in which The Light Club of Batavia inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. The Light Club also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, The Light Club is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in absolute illumination.
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The Light Crust Doughboys Are on the Air
Celebrating Seventy Years of Texas Music
John Mark Dempsey
University of North Texas Press, 2002

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Light Filaments
Structures, challenges and applications
Jean-Claude Diels
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
A laser of sufficient intensity traveling through air will - by itself - engineer a narrow channel over which light will propagate for tens or even hundreds of meters. Such filaments of laser light were first created at the end of the twentieth century, and investigators are now beginning to explore new applications for them.
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Light for the Nations
The Scriptures on the Universal Mission of Israel and the Church
Luis Sanchez-Navarro
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Universality belongs to the very being of the Catholic Church. This claim of the Gospel is rooted in the ministry of Jesus, witnessed to by the canonical Gospels and the other books of the New Testament, all of which present the universal openness of salvation as a fulfillment of the Scriptures of Israel. In this book, after addressing the universality of salvation in the writings of the Old Covenant, we examine the differentiated and concordant witness of the synoptic Gospels, John and Paul, as well as the Letter to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse. In this way, we intend to show how this apostolic witness responds to the will of the Lord Jesus, while highlighting its harmony with Torah, Prophets and Writings. Light for the Nations, by reviewing the main biblical passages on the universal dimension of salvation, aims to show how the fact that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has a claim to universality does not diminish, but rather enhances, the importance of the people of the first Covenant: Israel is called to be an active mediator of salvation. The canonical perspective is based on a differentiated exegetical study of each testimony. The scope is broad, since this theme of biblical theology is also relevant for Christology and soteriology, for anthropology and for ecclesiology. The main contribution lies in showing how the various biblical testimonies, in their diversity (which is fully taken into account), offer at the same time a concurring testimony on this fundamental question of Christian theology, forming a true symphony within its polyphony.
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Light from the East
Abbasid Freethinking in the Genealogies of Universal Humanism
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Harvard University Press

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Light Image Imagination
Edited by Martha Blassnigg
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
The essays in this collection consider the creation, perception, and projection of images, both mental and material, and their specific relationship with light and imagination. With contributions from scholars working at the interdisciplinary intersections of art, science, and the humanities, Light Image Imagination extends disciplinary boundaries in order to amplify and enrich the current thinking about mediated images. The unique layout of the book, which juxtaposes text and image essays, is intended to stimulate dialogue and associative connections.  
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Light in Germany
Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment
T. J. Reed
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment.
           
Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century. 
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LIGHT IN MY DARKNESS
HELEN KELLER
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2000

One of Time's women of the century, Helen Keller, reveals her mystical side in this best-selling spiritual autobiography. Writing that her first reading of Emanuel Swedenborg at age fourteen gave her truths that were "to my faculties what light, color and music are to the eye and ear," she explains how Swedenborg's works sustained her throughout her life.

This new edition includes a foreword by Dorothy Herrmann, author of the acclaimed Helen Keller: A Life, and a new chapter, "Epilogue: My Luminous Universe."

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Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro
Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality
Gloria E. Anzaldua
Duke University Press, 2015
Light in the Dark is the culmination of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's mature thought and the most comprehensive presentation of her philosophy. Focusing on aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, it contains several developments in her many important theoretical contributions.
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The Light of Christ
An Introduction to Catholicism
Thomas Joseph White, OP
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
The Light of Christ provides an accessible presentation of Catholicism that is grounded in traditional theology, but engaged with a host of contemporary questions or objections. Inspired by the theologies of Iranaeus, Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, and rooted in a post-Vatican II context, Fr. Thomas Joseph White presents major doctrines of the Christian religion in a way that is comprehensible for non-specialists: knowledge of God, the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the atonement, the sacraments and the moral life, eschatology and prayer.

At the same time, The Light of Christ also addresses topics such as evolution, the modern historical study of Jesus and the Bible, and objections to Catholic moral teaching. Touching on the concerns of contemporary readers, Fr. White examines questions such as whether Christianity is compatible with the findings of the modern sciences, do historical Jesus studies disrupt or confirm the teaching of the faith, and does history confirm the antiquity of Catholic claims.

This book serves as an excellent introduction for young professionals with no specialized background in theology who are interested in learning more about Catholicism, or as an introduction to Catholic theology. It will also serve as a helpful text for theology courses in a university context.

As Fr. White states in the book’s introduction: “This is a book that offers itself as a companion. I do not presume to argue the reader into the truths of the Catholic faith, though I will make arguments. My goal is to make explicit in a few broad strokes the shape of Catholicism. I hope to outline its inherent intelligibility or form as a mystery that is at once visible and invisible, ancient and contemporary, mystical and reasonable.”
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The Light of Desire
La Luz del Deseo
Marjorie Agosín
Swan Isle Press, 2009

Marjorie Agosín’s intensely personal long poem The Light of Desire is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the Song of Songs and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in The Light of Desire is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers’ bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and “mantle of stars,” all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal.

The poem was written over a four-year span in Jerusalem’s Mishkenot Sha’ananim neighborhood, overlooking the wall of the Second Temple, and these hallowed surroundings imbued Agosín’s poetic voice. Lori Marie Carlson’s sensitive translation maintains the spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.

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Light of Reason, Light of Faith
Joseph Ratzinger and the German Enlightenment
Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai
St. Augustine's Press, 2021
Fr. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai, a native of Cameroon, has written a fresh, exciting new study of the lifelong engagement of Josef Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, with the German Enlightenment and its contemporary manifestations and heirs. Contemporary European disdain for organized religion and the rise in secularism on that continent has deep roots in the German Enlightenment. To understand contemporary Europe, one must return to this crucial epoch in its history, to those who shaped the European mind of this era, and to a study of the ideas they espoused and propagated. These ideas, for good or for ill, have taken hold in other parts of the modern world, being incarnated in many minds and institutions in contemporary society and threatening to enthrone a disfigured rationality without faith or a sense of Transcendence.

Ratzinger’s extraordinary and sympathetic understanding of the sources of contemporary secularism equipped him to appreciate the gains of the Enlightenment, while still being a fierce critic of the losses humanity has suffered when reason falsely excludes faith. Fr. Agbaw-Ebai’s account reveals Ratzinger, in relation to his various interlocutors, to be the truly “enlightened” one because he demonstrates a truly balanced understanding of the human mind. To be truly rational one must be able to hold to faith and reason both, reason informed by faith in Jesus Christ.

A particular merit of this book is Agbaw-Ebai’s presentation of Ratzinger’s treatment of the  German Enlightenment’s greatest contributors: Kant, Nietzche, Hegel and Habermas, among others. In the postscript George Weigel characterizes what this study accomplishes in the larger framework of scholarship. “[Ratzinger’s] position remains too often misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately misinterpreted, throughout the whole Church. And to misunderstand, or misinterpret, Ratzinger is to misunderstand or misinterpret both the modern history of theology and the Second Vatican Council.” Agbaw-Ebai masterfully positions Ratzinger correctly in the history of ideas, and exhibits why Ratzinger will be remembered as one of its main players. Pure rationalists and true believers are equally indebted to him.
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The Light of the Home
An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America
Harvey Green
University of Arkansas Press, 2003
From the greatest collection of American Victoriana comes a wonderful evocation of the lives of women 100 years ago. Harvey Green culls from letters and diaries, quotes from magazines, and looks at the clothes, samplers, books, appliances, toys, and dolls of the era to provide a rare portrait of daily life in turn-of-the-century America.
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Light on the Devils
Coming of Age on the Klamath
Louise Wagenknecht
Oregon State University Press, 2011

When Louise Wagenknecht’s family arrived in the remote logging town of Happy Camp in 1962, a boundless optimism reigned. Whites and Indians worked together in the woods and the lumber mills of northern California’s Klamath country. Logging and lumber mills, it seemed, would hold communities together forever.

But that booming prosperity would come to an end. Looking back on her teenage years spent along the Klamath River, Louise Wagenknecht recounts a vanishing way of life. She explores the dynamics of family relationships and the contradictions of being female in a western logging town in the 1960s. And she paints an evocative portrait of the landscape and her relationship with it.

Light on the Devils is a captivating memoir of place. It will appeal to general readers interested in the rural West, personal memoir, history, and natural history.

[more]

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Light on the Path
The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians
Thomas J. Pluckhahn
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Social history of the native peoples of the American South, bridging prehistory and history
 
The past 20 years have witnessed a change in the study of the prehistory and history of the native peoples of the American South. This paradigm shift is the bridging of prehistory and history to fashion a seamless social history that includes not only the 16th-century Late Mississippian period and the 18th-century colonial period but also the largely forgotten--and critically important--century in between.  The shift is in part methodological, for it involves combining methods from anthropology, history, and archaeology. It is also conceptual and theoretical, employing historical and archaeological data to reconstruct broad patterns of history--not just political history with Native  Americans as a backdrop, nor simply an archaeology with added historical specificity, but a true social history of the Southeastern Indians, spanning their entire existence in the American South.

The scholarship underlying this shift comes from many directions, but much of the groundwork can be attributed to Charles Hudson. The papers in this volume were contributed by Hudson’s colleagues and former students (many now leading scholars themselves) in his honor.  The assumption links these papers is that of a historical transformation between Mississippian societies and the Indian societies of the historic era that requires explanation and critical analysis.

In all of the chapters, the legacy of Hudson’s work is evident. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians are storming the bridge that connects prehistory and history in a manner unimaginable 20 years ago.  While there remains much work to do on the path toward understanding this transformation and constructing a complete social history of the Southeastern Indians, the work of Charles Hudson and his colleagues have shown the way.
 
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The Light People
A Novel
Gordon Henry
Michigan State University Press, 1994

The Light People is a multi-genre novel that includes a series of nested stories about a tribal community in Northern Minnesota. Major themes include Oskinaway’s search for his parents and the legal wrangling over the possession of a leg that has been removed from a tribal elder. Each story is linked to previous and successive stories to form a discourse on identity and cultural appropriation, all told with humor and wisdom.
     Taking inspiration from traditional Anishinabe stories and drawing from his own family's storytelling tradition, Gordon Henry, Jr., has woven a tapestry of interlocking narratives in The Light People, a novel of surpassing emotional strength. His characters tell of their experiences, dreams, and visions in a multitude of literary styles and genres. Poetry, drama, legal testimony, letters, and essays combine with more conventional narrative techniques to create a multifaceted, deeply rooted, and vibrant portrait of the author's own tribal culture. Keenly aware of Eurocentric views of that culture, Henry offers a "corrective history" where humor and wisdom transcend the political. 
    In the contemporary Minnesota village of Four Bears, on the mythical Fineday Reservation, a young Chippewa boy named Oskinaway is trying to learn the whereabouts of his parents. His grandparents turn for help to a tribal elder, one of the light people, Jake Seed. Seed's assistant, a magician who performs at children's birthday parties, tells Oskinaway's family his story, which gives way to the stories of those he encounters. Narratives unfold into earlier narratives, spinning back in time and encompassing the intertwined lives of the Fineday Chippewas, eventually revealing the place of Oskinaway and his parents in a complex web of human relationships.

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The Light the Dead See
Selected Poems of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford
University of Arkansas Press, 1991

Between 1972, when he published his first book, The Signing Knives, and 1978, when he died at the age of twenty-nine, Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry. Within a year of his death, two posthumous collections were published. At the time of this death, as Leon Stokesbury asserts in his introduction, “Stanford was the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.”

The Light the Dead See collects the best work from those nine volumes and six previously unpublished poems. In the earlier poems, Stanford creates a world where he could keep childhood alive, deny time and mutability, and place a version of himself at the center of great myth and drama.

Later, the denial of time and mutability gives way to an obsessive and familiar confrontation with death. Although Stanford paid an enormous price for his growing familiarity with Death as a presence, the direct address to that presence is a source of much of the striking originality and stunning power in the poetry.

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Light Through the Trees
Photographs at The Morton Arboretum
Peter J. Vagt
University of Illinois Press, 2022

“I don’t compose pictures, I find them in the colors, patterns, and shadows of the trees in front of me. While I walk, I let my feelings well up in my consciousness. My feelings guide me to find what I’m seeing and feeling and distill it into a picture.”

A beloved and popular Illinois institution, The Morton Arboretum welcomes one million annual visitors to walk its trails and view the 4,200 tree species on the grounds. Peter Vagt has photographed the Arboretum for over twenty years. This collection showcases eighty-five of his favorite works, each one in full color. Vagt's close attention to place and time reflects both his profound connection to the Arboretum and its preeminence as a sanctuary for anyone in search of transcendence in nature.

A celebration of The Morton Arboretum in its centenary year, Light Through the Trees is the perfect keepsake or gift for anyone who admires trees and believes in their restorative power.

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Light without Heat
Stories
Matthew Kirkpatrick
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Matthew Kirkpatrick’s debut, Light without Heat, is an inventive, surprising collection of short stories full of odd, marginal characters rendered with surreal humor and lyrical, often beautiful language.
 
Formally playful, these stories take the shape of biographies, instructions, glossaries, and diagrams, all ultimately in the service of depicting characters with emotional intensity.
 
Stories in the collection explore the flawed nature of memory, workplace malaise, the isolation of home, and the last throes of ending love. No two stories in Light without Heat are the same, yet all of them work toward sharing human experience in new, innovative ways.
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The Light-Green Society
Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000
Michael Bess
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in postwar France, argues Michael Bess in this penetrating new history. On one hand, a preoccupation with natural qualities and equilibrium has increasingly infused France's economic and cultural life. On the other, human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment, whether through the intrusion of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of ecological management.

The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.
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Lighthouse
Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism
Ronald V. Huggins
Signature Books, 2022
While some may view Jerald and Sandra Tanner only as despised critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is impossible to trace the course of Mormon history over the past sixty years without acknowledging their contribution. Many both inside and outside of Mormonism respect them for their unflinching quest for truth no matter the cost, as when Jerald declared Mark Hofmann’s notorious Salamander Letter a forgery months before some experts declared it authentic. Their Utah Lighthouse Ministry has operated for decades only blocks from church headquarters, where their many works on Mormonism are still printed and sold. Jerald died in 2006 but Sandra continues to oversee the ministry. 

The Tanners consistently challenged the church’s position on many historical issues. Utah Lighthouse was long the only source for Mormon scholars to obtain crucial historical reprints, which they still happily or begrudgingly purchase; for others, the Tanners’ writings have been the source of disillusionment with the church. Despised or beloved, the influence of Jerald and Sandra Tanner cannot be underestimated or ignored.
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Lighting Candles in the Dark
Marnie Clark, et al.
QuakerPress, 2012

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Lighting Candles Study Guide
Donna Bisset
QuakerPress, 2001

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Lighting in Early Byzantium
Laskarina Bouras and Maria G. Parani
Harvard University Press, 2008
This book stands alone as the first general survey of lighting in Byzantium. Although relatively well known by specialists, Byzantine lighting devices have not been treated independently, but rather presented and discussed in connection with other Byzantine minor arts. The first part of the book discusses the technology and types of lighting devices and explains their decorative symbolism and social function. The second half illustrates this narrative by drawing on a Dumbarton Oaks exhibition, “Lighting in Early Byzantium,” which presented to the public some of the finest surviving late Roman and early Byzantine lighting devices. Some of these are now published for the first time.
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Lighting the Shadow
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Four Way Books, 2015
Lighting the Shadow is about a woman’s evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive—wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a woman’s transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirit’s own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world—a world that is both bright and dark.
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Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567 - 1642
R. B. Graves
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642,R. B. Graves examines the lighting of early modern English drama from both historical and aesthetic perspectives. He traces the contrasting traditions of sunlit amphitheaters and candlelit hall playhouses, describes the different lighting techniques, and estimates the effect of these techniques both indoors and outdoors.

Graves discusses the importance of stage lighting in determining the dramatic effect, even in cases where the manipulation of light was not under the direct control of the theater artists. He devotes a chapter to the early modern lighting equipment available to English Renaissance actors and surveys theatrical lighting before the construction of permanent playhouses in London. Elizabethan stage lighting, he argues, drew on both classical and medieval precedents.

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Lightning Birds
An Aeroecology of the Airwaves
Jacob Smith
University of Michigan Press, 2021

The aerosphere is a literal and figurative contact zone for birds and media. Transmission towers become obstacles in birds’ flight paths; radar systems emit signals that reveal the large-scale movements of birds; parabolic microphones directed at the sky detect avian flight calls; and miniature radio transmitters are attached to birds to track their global travels.

Lightning Birds is a multi-media project that consists of a five-episode, podcast-style audiobook, a curatorial essay, and a bibliography.  It tells a new story about radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and explores a mode of ecocriticism that combines traditional forms of text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling. At a moment when 13% of all bird species are threatened with extinction, Smith writes not only to those working in media studies, environmental studies, and ornithology, but also to a broader public. He argues that by knowing more about how birds use the sky, we might begin to minimize the damage that our buildings, media, and environmental degradation do to the aerosphere. 

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Lightning Electromagnetics
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2012
Lightning research is an interdisciplinary subject where several branches of engineering and physics converge. Lightning Electromagnetics is a book that caters for the needs of both physicists and engineers. It provides: The physicist with information on how to simulate: the charge generation in thunderclouds, different discharge processes in air that ultimately lead to a lightning flash, and the mechanism through which energetic radiation in the form of X-rays and Gamma rays are produced by lightning flashes; The power engineer with several numerical tools to study the interaction of lightning flashes with power transmission and distribution systems; The telecommunication engineer with numerical procedures with which to calculate the electromagnetic fields generated by lightning flashes and their interactions with overhead and underground telecommunication systems; The electromagnetic specialist with the basic theory necessary to simulate the propagation of lightning electromagnetic fields over the surface of the Earth; The atmospheric scientist with numerical procedures to quantify interactions between lightning flashes and the Earth's atmosphere, including the production of NOx by lightning flashes occurring in the atmosphere. This book also contains a chapter on the stimulation of visual phenomena in humans by electromagnetic fields of lightning flashes, which is essential reading for those who are interested in ball lightning.
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Lightning Electromagnetics
Electrical processes and effects, Volume 2
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Lightning is important for all scientists and engineers involved with electric installations. It is gaining further relevance since climate warming is causing an increase in lightning strikes, and since the rising numbers of renewable power generators, the electricity grid, and charging infrastructure are susceptible to lightning damage. This is the second edition to this comprehensive work.
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Lightning Electromagnetics
Return stroke modelling and electromagnetic radiation, Volume 1
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
Lightning is important for all scientists and engineers involved with electric installations. It is gaining further relevance since climate warming is causing an increase in lightning strikes, and since the rising numbers of renewable power generators, the electricity grid, and charging infrastructure are susceptible to lightning damage. This is the second edition to this comprehensive work.
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The Lightning Flash
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
This updated and expanded new edition of Cooray's classic text provides the reader with a thorough background in almost every aspect of lightning and its impact on electrical and electronic equipment. The contents range from basic discharge processes in air through transient electromagnetic field generation and interaction with overhead lines and underground cables, to lightning protection and testing techniques. New to this edition are discussions of high-speed video recordings of lightning; rocket-and-wire triggered lightning experiments; tower initiated lightning discharges; upper atmospheric electrical discharges; attachment of lightning flashes to grounded structures; energetic radiation from thunderstorms and lightning; global lightning nitrogen oxides production; and lightning and global temperature change.
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The Lightning Flash
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2003
This unique book provides the reader with a thorough background in almost every aspect of lightning and its impact on electrical and electronic equipment. The contents range from basic discharge processes in air through transient electromagnetic field generation and interaction with overhead lines and underground cables, to lightning protection and testing techniques. This book is of value to anyone designing, installing or commissioning equipment which needs to be secured against lightning strikes, as well as being a sound introduction to research students working in the field.
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Lightning from the Depths
An Anthology of Albanian Poetry
Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
Northwestern University Press, 2008

If a people

Have no poets

And no poetry of their own

For a National Anthology

Then treachery and barking

Will do the trick

With these words, a challenge is laid down in this new volume of Albanian poetry. Albania, however, has a dynamic tradition of literature. Lightning from the Depths is the first English collection to present the full range of Albanian verse. Albanian literature has had many lives. The early Christian traditions disappeared as Islam and the Ottoman Empire took over. Muslim literature, too, withered when the nation strove to become an independent European country. The beginnings of a modern tradition were quashed by the Stalinists. All along this rocky path, poets have turned the political strife, poverty, and isolation their nation has often experienced into culture, both celebrating and questioning the society in which they live. Lightning from the Depths opens readers’ eyes to a new political and cultural world populated artists who can spin despair into poetry.

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Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents
The Public Sculpture of El Tajín
By Rex Koontz
University of Texas Press, 2009

El Tajín, an ancient Mesoamerican capital in Veracruz, Mexico, has long been admired for its stunning pyramids and ballcourts decorated with extensive sculptural programs. Yet the city's singularity as the only center in the region with such a wealth of sculpture and fine architecture has hindered attempts to place it more firmly in the context of Mesoamerican history. In Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents, Rex Koontz undertakes the first extensive treatment of El Tajín's iconography in over thirty years, allowing us to view its imagery in the broader Mesoamerican context of rising capitals and new elites during a period of fundamental historical transformations.

Koontz focuses on three major architectural features—the Pyramid of the Niches/Central Plaza ensemble, the South Ballcourt, and the Mound of the Building Columns complex—and investigates the meanings of their sculpture and how these meanings would have been experienced by specific audiences. Koontz finds that the iconography of El Tajín reveals much about how motifs and elite rites growing out of the Classic period were transmitted to later Mesoamerican peoples as the cultures centered on Teotihuacan and the Maya became the myriad city-states of the Early Postclassic period.

By reexamining the iconography of sculptures long in the record, as well as introducing important new monuments and contexts, Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents clearly demonstrates El Tajín's numerous iconographic connections with other areas of Mesoamerica, while also exploring its roots in an indigenous Gulf lowlands culture whose outlines are only now emerging. At the same time, it begins to uncover a largely ignored regional artistic culture of which Tajín is the crowning achievement.

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Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin
Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art
Jan Wim Buisman
Leiden University Press, 2023
Thunder and lightning have been seen from time immemorial as God’s instruments of punishment. Until the invention of the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In Lightning in the Age of Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have changed our scientific, religious and artistic image of natural violence forever. In the eighteenth century, thunderstorms are experienced less and less as a threat and more and more as something extraordinary. The image of God and the image of nature changed radically. The religion of enlightened people, for example, was more determined by joy than by fear. And nature was almost experienced as a girlfriend. That had significant consequences because those who no longer had to be afraid of the thunderstorm could play with it without hesitation. That’s what poets, painters and musicians did to their heart’s content. Never before the beauty of the storm was depicted as much in the western culture as during the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.
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Lightning Interaction with Power Systems
Alexandre Piantini
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
The need to improve the reliability and robustness of power systems and smart grids makes protection of sensitive equipment and power transmission and distribution lines against lightning-related effects a primary concern. Renewable electricity generation capacity has been increasing all over the world, and lightning can cause failures either by hitting the turbines or panels directly or inducing transients on the control systems that lead to equipment failure, malfunction or degradation.
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Lightning Interaction with Power Systems
Alexandre Piantini
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
The need to improve the reliability and robustness of power systems and smart grids makes protection of sensitive equipment and power transmission and distribution lines against lightning-related effects a primary concern. Renewable electricity generation capacity has been increasing all over the world, and lightning can cause failures either by hitting the turbines or panels directly or inducing transients on the control systems that lead to equipment failure, malfunction or degradation.
[more]

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Lightning Interaction with Power Systems
Applications, Volume 2
Alexandre Piantini
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
The need to improve the reliability and robustness of power systems and smart grids makes protection of sensitive equipment and power transmission and distribution lines against lightning-related effects a primary concern. Renewable electricity generation capacity has been increasing all over the world, and lightning can cause failures either by hitting the turbines or panels directly or inducing transients on the control systems that lead to equipment failure, malfunction or degradation.
[more]

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Lightning Interaction with Power Systems
Fundamentals and modelling, Volume 1
Alexandre Piantini
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
The need to improve the reliability and robustness of power systems and smart grids makes protection of sensitive equipment and power transmission and distribution lines against lightning-related effects a primary concern. Renewable electricity generation capacity has been increasing all over the world, and lightning can cause failures either by hitting the turbines or panels directly or inducing transients on the control systems that lead to equipment failure, malfunction or degradation.
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The Lightning Jar
Christian Felt
University of Iowa Press, 2018

The Lightning Jar is about lonely children. It may be more about lonely children than any other book. These children are good at making imaginary friends but have trouble keeping them. For instance, there’s the Morra, who plunges the world into eternal winter. But she also teaches Mons the meaning of love and helps him burn down his house after some Gypsies turn it into a middle school. 

Then there’s the Gorbel. Amanda invented it to scare the Guest, but it ended up liking him best. A bit like a cat but more like a spider, it turned out a lot cuter than she’d intended. 

And the Wisps—they’re pretty unhappy about being dead. Karl accidentally turned his smallest cousin into a Wisp. They were trying to catch some lightning in a jar, but they caught the smallest cousin’s ghost instead. Karl had to drown it for its own good. Something similar happened with his grandma Astrid and a rock named Melisande. 

But the loneliest character is probably Christian. He insists on being from Jämtland, where Karl and Amanda live. When his cousin Eskild got married, Christian rewrote their past so it’s like The Little Mermaid, except Eskild drowns and Christian doesn’t earn a soul. 

In the spirit of Tove Jansson, William Blake, and Calvin & Hobbes, The Lightning Jar contains a volatile mix of innocence and experience, faith and doubt, nostalgia and a sense of all there is to gain by accepting reality on fresh terms. 

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Lightning
Nature and Culture
Derek M. Elsom
Reaktion Books, 2015
Few phenomena inspire more awe than lightning. Streaking across the sky, it daunts us with its power and amazes us with its beauty. In Lightning, Derek M. Elsom explores this natural phenomenon and traces the long history of our study of it. From early civilizations’ assumptions that it was the work of gods, through eighteenth-century scientific analyses (and, yes, Ben Franklin’s kite), Elsom tells about our efforts to understand and explain lightning. He explores the many surprising folklore beliefs about lightning protection and contrasts these with today's scientific approaches. Alongside scientific explorations, he also tracks the path of lightning through our culture, from myths and legends to art and design. In addition, Elsom offers handy tips for avoiding getting struck by lightning.
           
Beautifully illustrated with stunning photographs and artistic renderings, this striking book will appeal equally to weather buffs and folklorists, scientists and artists. 
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Lightning Protection
Vernon Cooray
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
Lightning is a natural phenomenon that has always fascinated humans. It is also a destructive force, and the science of protecting humans and their belongings on earth is called lightning protection. This book provides the reader with a thorough background in almost every aspect of lightning protection. The contents of the book, distributed over 23 chapters, covers all aspects of lightning protection including lightning parameters of engineering interest, the evaluation of the risk imposed by lightning strikes, the art of installing lightning protection systems on various structures, basic principles and procedures necessary to protect electronic equipment in buildings from lightning flashes, grounding in lightning protection, the function of surge protection devices, protection of power transmission lines and telecommunication towers from lightning, the interaction of lightning flashes with wind turbines, various aspects of lightning strikes to trees, medical and engineering aspects of lightning strikes to humans, and lightning warning systems. In addition to providing essential information on lightning protection for engineers and scientists, the book is intended for use as a textbook on lightning protection at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
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The Lightning Stick
Arrows, Wounds, And Indian Legends
H. Henrietta Stockel
University of Nevada Press, 1995

More than simply a history of the bow and arrow, The Lightening Stick brings together a broad range of significant people and events, spiritual usages, medicinal treatments, and an unusual array of subject matter related to the weapon itself. Henrietta Stockel conveys a host of information derived from primary documents and provides readers with a fascinating book. Her descriptive storytelling—serious, humorous, and even gory at times—takes the reader from modern uses of bows and arrows (including a previously little-known incident in the atomic city of Los Alamos, New Mexico) to an early era of western history, before guns changed the frontier forever.

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The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House
Nick Lantz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Nick Lantz explores the transformative power of tragic and miraculous experiences, through these poems that illuminate near misses of tragedy and transcendence. His gaze is both roving and microscopic—the Challenger explosion, Bigfoot, a love letter written from inside a missile silo, a mother naming and re-naming a family’s short-lived pets, and a plea for post-9/11 redemption. Lantz never lets his subjects or his readers off the hook, plunging head first into worlds that are both eccentric and familiar, alarming and hopeful.

Finalist, Foreword Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year
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Lightning through the Clouds
?Izz al-Din al-Qassam and the Making of the Modern Middle East
By Mark Sanagan
University of Texas Press, 2020

Lightning through the Clouds is the first English-language life-and-times biography of ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a preeminent figure who helped to reshape the political and religious landscape of the region. A Syrian-born, Egyptian-educated cleric, he went from the battlefields of World War I to join the anticolonialist fight against the French in Syria. Sentenced to be executed by the French military, he managed to escape to Palestine, where he became an increasingly popular presence, moved by the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Outraged by British rule and the encroachment of Zionism, he formed a secret society to resist the colonization of Palestine first by the British and then by Jewish immigrants from Europe, once again taking up arms and advocating for a moral, political, and military jihad as the only solution. His death at the hands of Palestine Police in 1935 drew thousands to his funeral and sparked the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt.

His influence continues to be felt in the region; for example, the military wing of the Palestinian Hamas organization is named the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Al-Qassam is either revered or reviled, depending on the observers’ perspective, but he is without doubt a fascinating and historically significant individual whose influence on the past, and our present, makes this examination of his life both important and timely.

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Lightning Warrior
Maya Art and Kingship at Quirigua
By Matthew G. Looper
University of Texas Press, 2003
The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient Maya spirituality and political practice within a specific historical context. Using epigraphic, iconographic, and stylistic analyses, this study explores the integrated political-religious meanings of Quirigua’s monumental sculptures during the eighth-century A.D. reign of the city’s most famous ruler, K’ak’ Tiliw. In particular, Matthew Looper focuses on the role of stelae and other sculpture in representing the persona of the ruler not only as a political authority but also as a manifestation of various supernatural entities with whom he was associated through ritual performance. By tracing this sculptural program from its Early Classic beginnings through the reigns of K’ak’ Tiliw and his successors, and also by linking it to practices at Copan, Looper offers important new insights into the politico-religious history of Quirigua and its ties to other Classic Maya centers, the role of kingship in Maya society, and the development of Maya art.
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Lightning-Induced Effects in Electrical and Telecommunication Systems
Yoshihiro Baba
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2021
Power and telecommunications systems are growing increasingly complex. This increases their vulnerability to lightning-related effects.
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Lights! Camera! Arkansas!
From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton
Robert Cochran
University of Arkansas Press, 2015

Lights! Camera! Arkansas! traces the roles played by Arkansans in the first century of Hollywood’s film industry, from the first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, to Mary Steenburgen, Billy Bob Thornton, and many others. The Arkansas landscape also plays a starring role: North Little Rock’s cameo in Gone with the Wind, Crittenden County as a setting for Hallelujah (1929), and various locations in the state’s southeastern quadrant in 2012’s Mud are all given fascinating exploration.

Robert Cochran and Suzanne McCray screened close to two hundred films—from laughable box-office bombs to laudable examples of filmmaking -- in their research for this book. They’ve enhanced their spirited chronological narrative with an appendix on documentary films, a ratings section, and illustrations chosen by Jo Ellen Maack of the Old State House Museum, where Lights! Camera! Arkansas! debuted as an exhibit curated by the authors in 2013. The result is a book sure to entertain and inform those interested in Arkansas and the movies for years to come.

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Lights in the Forest
Rabbis Respond to Twelve Essential Jewish Questions
Rabbi Paul Citrin
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2014

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Lightwork
Texts on and from Collaborative Multimedia Theatre
Edited by Alex Mermikides and Andy Lavender
Intellect Books, 2021
Insight into the collaborative, multi-layered, and sometimes messy business of theater.

The artist-led theater company Lightwork specializes in collaborative multimedia performance. The company experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century including devised and improvisation-led approaches. This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by Lightwork and one play-text from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions. The twelve-year span covered by the work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, and text and “non-text” were being radically rethought.
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Like a Brother
Grenville Goodwin’s Apache Years, 1928-1939
Neil Goodwin
University of Arizona Press, 2004
When the anthropologist Grenville Goodwin died in 1940 at the age of 32, he had published several papers and one book, Myths and Tales of the White Mountain Apache, and had already achieved a stature that has only continued to grow. His posthumous landmark monograph, The Social Organization of the Western Apache, was hailed by anthropologist Edward Spicer as "one of the most detailed and best-documented studies of Indian social organization". Yet, although he was highly regarded by colleagues within the profession, Goodwin himself was largely self-taught, with neither formal training nor academic degrees. This volume is the latest in series of books derived from his unpublished papers. It helps broaden our understanding of Goodwin's life and work. It includes selections from his field notes, diaries, and letters, along with those of his wife Jan and other family members. Assembled by Goodwin's son Neil, who never knew his father, these writings are gathered in thematic chapters that extend Neil Goodwin's earlier work, The Apache Diaries, and shed light on Grenville Goodwin's deepening understanding of the Apache people and their culture, and of the wrenching problems which reservation life forced on them. In two of the chapters Neil tells how he retraced his father's search for the Sierra Madre Apache, re-discovering abandoned Apache campsites and conveying even more personally than his father's diaries what was for both father and son the adventure of a lifetime. Other chapters trace Goodwin's interest in children of the Sierra Madre Apaches who were captured in Mexican raids on these camps during the early decades of the twentieth century. The full stories of the lives of three of these children are for the first time pieced together from newly gathered research. Grenville was quiet, self-effacing and rarely revealed his inner life, but one chapter affords a closer look: a portrait of his marriage to Neil's mother, Jan. Her diary entries, juxtaposed with her vivid poetry and her paintings and drawings, illuminate her relationship with Grenville and throw his elusive personality into deeper relief than his own writings do. Here too are letters from Goodwin's Apache friends that paint a powerful and poignant portrait of their daily lives and of their relationship with him. Goodwin's daily diary excerpts relate his own experiences on the San Carlos Apache reservation from 1928 to 1936: what was happening at the store, how the cattle were doing, who was in jail, and thousands of other details that give readers a sharp sense of what the reservation was like in the 1930s. As these writings also show, Goodwin was powerfully drawn to Apache spirituality and became steeped in their sacred knowledge. His simple description of a day in the life of an Apache family captures the expression of this spirituality in the rhythms of everyday life, whether greeting the rising sun, curing an injury, plowing the earth, or simply being good to one's family. More than half a century after his death, Grenville Goodwin continues to be regarded as one of the most enigmatic and romantic figures in American anthropology. Like a Brother gives us a fuller understanding of the man and his work as it broadens our knowledge of Apache history and culture.
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Like a Captive Bird
Gender and Virtue in Plutarch
Lunette Warren
Lever Press, 2023

The full extent of Plutarch’s moral educational program remains largely understudied, at least in those aspects pertaining to women and the gendered other. As a result, scholarship on his views on women have differed significantly in their conclusions, with some scholars suggesting that he is overwhelmingly positive towards women and marriage and perhaps even a “precursor to feminism,”  and others arguing that he was rather negative on the issue. Like a Captive Bird: Gender and Virtue in Plutarch is an examination of these educational methods employed in Plutarch’s work to regulate the expression of gender identity in women and men. In six chapters, author Lunette Warren analyzes Plutarch’s ideas about women and gender in Moralia and Lives. The book examines the divergences between real and ideal, the aims and methods of moral philosophy and psychagogic practice as they relate to identity formation, and Plutarch’s theoretical philosophy and metaphysics. 

Warren argues that gender is a flexible mode of being that expresses a relation between body and soul, and that gender and virtue are inextricably entwined. Plutarch’s expression of gender is also an expression of a moral condition that signifies relationships of power, Warren claims, especially power relationships between the husband and wife. Uncovered in these texts is evidence of a redistribution of power, which allows some women to dominate other women and, in rare cases, men too. Like a Captive Bird offers a unique and fresh interpretation of Plutarch’s metaphysics which centers gender as one of the organizational principles of nature. It is aimed at scholars of Plutarch, ancient philosophy, and ancient gender studies, especially those who are interested in feminist studies of antiquity.

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Like a Fiery Meteor
The Life of Joseph F. Smith
Stephen C. Taysom
University of Utah Press, 2023

Joseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the LDS Church, including the post of president from 1901 until his death in 1918. Joseph F. Smith laid the theological groundwork for modern Mormonism, especially the emphasis on temple work. This contribution was capped off by his “revelation on the redemption of the dead,” a prophetic glimpse into the afterlife. Taysom’s book traces the roots of this vision, which reach far more deeply into Joseph F. Smith’s life than other scholars have previously identified.
 
In this first cradle-to-grave biography of Joseph F. Smith, Stephen C. Taysom uses previously unavailable primary source materials to craft a deeply detailed, insightful story of a prominent member of a governing and influential Mormon family. Importantly, Taysom situates Smith within the historical currents of American westward expansion, rapid industrialization, settler colonialism, regional and national politics, changing ideas about family and masculinity, and more. Though some writers tend to view the LDS Church and its leaders through a lens of political and religious separatism, Taysom does the opposite, pushing Joseph F. Smith and the LDS Church closer to the centers of power in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

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Like a Loaded Weapon
The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America
Robert Williams Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned “like a loaded weapon” in the Supreme Court’s Indian law decisions. 

Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. 

Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in international law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians. 

Robert A. Williams Jr. is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. A member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, he is author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest and coauthor of Federal Indian Law.
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Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”

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Like a Natural Woman
Spectacular Female Performance in Classical Hollywood
Pullen, Kirsten
Rutgers University Press, 2014
 Bathing beauty Esther Williams, bombshell Jane Russell, exotic Carmen Miranda, chanteuse Lena Horne, and talk-show fixture Zsa Zsa Gabor are rarely hailed as great actors or as naturalistic performers. Those terms of praise are given to male stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, whose gritty dramas are seen as a departure from the glossy spectacles in which these stars appeared. Like a Natural Woman challenges those assumptions, revealing the skill and training that went into the work of these five actresses, who employed naturalistic performance techniques, both onscreen and off.

Bringing a fresh perspective to film history through the lens of performance studies, Kirsten Pullen explores the ways in which these actresses, who always appeared to be “playing themselves,” responded to the naturalist notion that actors should create authentic characters by drawing from their own lives. At the same time, she examines how Hollywood presented these female stars as sex objects, focusing on their spectacular bodies at the expense of believable characterization or narratives.

Pullen not only helps us appreciate what talented actresses these five women actually were, but also reveals how they sought to express themselves and maintain agency, even while meeting the demands of their directors, studios, families, and fans to perform certain feminine roles. Drawing from a rich collection of classic films, publicity materials, and studio archives, Like a Natural Woman lets us take a new look at both Hollywood acting techniques and the performance of femininity itself.
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Like a Sea
Samuel Amadon
University of Iowa Press, 2010

   Drawing equally from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, and Robert Frost, Samuel Amadon’s award-winning Like a Sea is a collection of poems where personality is foregrounded and speech is both bizarre and familiar. Central to this weirdly talky work is “Each H,” a sequence of eleven monologues and dialogues wherein an unknown number of speakers examine their collective and singular identities while simultaneously distorting them. From a sequence of pared-down sonnets to a more traditional lyric to a procedural collage inspired by J. D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Eugenio Montale, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Like a Sea is a book of significant variation and originality.
     Amadon’s electric collection begins with the line “I could not sound like anyone but me,” and through a wide range of forms and styles and voices he tests the true limits of that statement. The image of a half-abandoned Hartford, Connecticut, remains in the background of these poems, casting a tone of brokenness and haplessness. Ultimately Amadon’s poems present the confusion and fear of the current moment, of Stevens’s “river that flows nowhere, like a sea,” equally alongside its joyful ridiculousness and possibility. Rather than create worlds, they point out what a strange world already exists.

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Like Andy Warhol
Jonathan Flatley
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonné, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol’s oeuvre as a whole—until now.

Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist’s likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens but across Warhol’s whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol’s art is an illustration of the artist’s own talent for “liking.” He argues that there is in Warhol’s productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.
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Like Beads on a String
A Culture History of the Seminole Indians in North Peninsular Florida
Brent Richards Weisman
University of Alabama Press, 1989

Florida's Seminole Indians are exerting an ever increasing influence on crucial issues in state politics, economy, and law. From a position of near obscurity less than a century ago, these Native Americans have staged a remarkable comeback to take an active hand in shaping Florida society, present and future. Anthropologists have long been fascinated with the Seminoles and have often remarked upon their ability to adapt to new circumstances while preserving the core features of their traditional culture. Early observers of the Seminoles also commented on the dynamic tension that existed for the individual, clan, and tribe, that drew them together, "like beads on a string," into a resilient and viable society. This study traces the emergence of these qualities in the late prehistoric and early historic period in the Southeast and demonstrates their influence on the course of Seminole culture history.

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Like Bits of Wind
Selected Poetry and Poetic Prose, 1974-2014
Pierre Chappuis
Seagull Books, 2016
One of the central figures from a remarkable generation of French-language poets, Pierre Chappuis has thus far only been represented in English translation in fragments: a few poems here and there in magazines, online reviews, and anthologies. Like Bits of Wind rights that wrong, offering a generous selection of Chappuis’s poetry and prose from the past forty years, drawn from several of his books. In these pages, Chappuis delves into long-standing questions of the essence of life, our relationship to landscape, the role of the perceiving self, and much more. His skeletal, haiku-like verse starkly contrasts with his more overtly poetic prose, which revels in sinuous lines and interpolated parentheticals. Together, the different forms are invigorating and exciting, the perfect introduction for English-language readers.
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Like Blood in Water
Five Mininovels
Yuriy Tarnawsky
University of Alabama Press, 2007
A surrealist account of the creative and descriptive arts.

In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments—mininovels—that require the reader’s active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs.

A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed.

Tarnawsky’s language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.

 

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Like Cattle and Horses
Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927
S. A. Smith
Duke University Press, 2002
In Like Cattle and Horses Steve Smith connects the rise of Chinese nationalism to the growth of a Chinese working class. Moving from the late nineteenth century, when foreign companies first set up factories on Chinese soil, to 1927, when the labor movement created by the Chinese Communist Party was crushed by Chiang Kai-shek, Smith uses a host of documents—journalistic accounts of strikes, memoirs by former activists, police records—to argue that a nationalist movement fueled by the effects of foreign imperialism had a far greater hold on working-class identity than did class consciousness.
While the massive wave of labor protest in the 1920s was principally an expression of militant nationalism rather than of class consciousness, Smith argues, elements of a precarious class identity were in turn forged by the very discourse of nationalism. By linking work-related demands to the defense of the nation, anti-imperialist nationalism legitimized participation in strikes and sensitized workers to the fact that they were worthy of better treatment as Chinese citizens. Smith shows how the workers’ refusal to be treated “like cattle and horses” (a phrase frequently used by workers to describe their condition) came from a new but powerfully felt sense of dignity. In short, nationalism enabled workers to interpret the anger they felt at their unjust treatment in the workplace in political terms and to create a link between their position as workers and their position as members of an oppressed nation. By focusing on the role of the working class, Like Cattle and Horses is one of very few studies that examines nationalism “from below,” acknowledging the powerful agency of nonelite forces in promoting national identity.
Like Cattle and Horses will interest historians of labor, modern China, and nationalism, as well as those engaged in the study of revolutions and revolt.
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Like Family
Narratives of Fictive Kinship
Margaret K. Nelson
Rutgers University Press, 2020
For decades, social scientists have assumed that “fictive kinship” is a phenomenon associated only with marginal peoples and people of color in the United States.  In this innovative book, Nelson reveals the frequency, texture and dynamics of relationships which are felt to be “like family” among the white middle-class. Drawing on extensive, in-depth interviews, Nelson describes the quandaries and contradictions, delight and anxiety, benefits and costs, choice and obligation in these relationships. She shows the ways these fictive kinships are similar to one another as well as the ways they vary—whether around age or generation, co-residence, or the possibility of becoming “real” families. Moreover she shows that different parties to the same relationship understand them in some similar – and some very different – ways. Theoretically rich and beautifully written, the book is accessible to the general public while breaking new ground for scholars in the field of family studies.
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Like Grass before the Scythe
The Life and Death of Sgt. William Remmel 121st New York Infantry
William Remmel
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Uncommonly articulate letters from a young German-American soldier with the Union forces
 
Sergeant William Remmel was a German immigrant who had settled with his parents and family in far upstate New York. His letters collected in Like Grass before the Scythe cover more than two full years of his service and provide details on military and social history in the eastern theater of operations and on the experience of the home front in upstate New York among a largely immigrant, working-class family and community.
 
Remmel wrote in English and apparently his parents responded in German. In addition to the important material on an immigrant family’s experience, Remmel also deals with the question of slavery, illness and hospital care (when he was wounded), the problem of hard war/total war, as well as the campaigns of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
 
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Like Light, Like Music
Lana K. W. Austin
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Emme McLean never imagined that in 1999 she would be living out the lyrics of the ancient murder ballads she grew up singing. But now Emme is back in Red River, Kentucky, using her skills as a journalist to prove her cousin did not kill her husband and to find out what is terrifying the town after many of its women went half-mad on the same night.

But to help her hometown’s haunted women, Emme must also face the things that haunt her, things she thought she had lost when she chose to move away: the majestic music of her family’s beloved hills and hollows, the mysterious old ways of her Appalachian kin, and the memory of her remarkable first love, Evan. Through it all, she must reckon with her magical “mountain gift”—is it real, or merely a unique synesthesia? And can she trust it to help heal her family and her town, a place still plagued by the social injustice that first drove her away? Can she trust it to help heal herself?
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Like Love
Michele Morano
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Crushes. Infatuations. Attractions. Unexpected, inexplicable allure. Entanglements steeped in taboo and disruption. In Like Love, nothing is off limits.
 
In these remarkable essays, Michele Morano explores the pleasures, possibilities, strangeness, and lessons of unconsummated romance. With insight and imagination, Like Love interweaves poignant, humorous episodes from adulthood with the backstory of a young family’s turbulent breakup. When Morano was an adolescent in blue-collar Poughkeepsie, New York, her mother left her father for a woman in an era when LGBTQ parents were widely viewed as “unfit.” Through the turmoil, adolescent Morano paid attention, tucking away the stories that were shaping her and guiding her understanding of love.
 
Turning romantic clichés inside out and challenging us to rethink our notions about what it means to love, Like Love tells hard and necessary truths about the importance of desire in growing, traveling, mourning, parenting, and figuring out who you are in the world. With precision and depth, Morano explores what it means to find ourselves in relationships that are not quite—but almost—like love.
 
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Like the Hajis of Meccah and Jerusalem
Orientalism and the Mormon Experience
Richard Francaviglia
Utah State University Press, 2012

 The series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. The first lecturer was Arrington himself. He was followed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. The University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives houses the Arrington collection. The state's land grant university began collecting records very early, and in the 1960s became a major depository for Utah and Mormon records. Leonard and his wife Grace joined the USU faculty and family in 1946, and the Arringtons and their colleagues worked to collect original diaries, journals, letters, and photographs.

Although trained as an economist at the University of North Carolina, Arrington became a Mormon historian of international repute. Working with numerous colleagues, the Twin Falls, Idaho, native produced the classic Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints in 1958. Utilizing available collections at USU, Arrington embarked on a prolific publishing and editing career. He and his close ally, Dr. S. George Ellsworth helped organize the Western History Association, and they created the Western Historical Quarterly as the scholarly voice of the WHA. While serving with Ellsworth as editor of the new journal, Arr ington also helped both the Mormon History Association and the independent journal Dialogue get established.

 

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Like the Sound of a Drum
Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut
Peter Kulchyski
University of Manitoba Press, 2005

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Like Thunder
Poets Respond to Violence in America
Virgil & Ryan G. Suarez & Van Cleave
University of Iowa Press, 2002

 More than 140 poems by 120 of America's best poets that focus on the effects of violence in contemporary America.

From Waco to Columbine, from Oklahoma City to New York City, from domestic abuse and drive-by shootings to religious fanaticism and acts of terrorism, the poems in Like Thunder are for those who have perished and those who have survived. More than 140 poems by 120 poets focus, in the editors' words, on “the violence in the news, the violence in our schools, the violence in our homes, as well as the violence in our own minds.”

The poets gathered here articulate terror and suffering but also present images of hope and redemption; they write of individual menaces and individual victims and the melding of the two that potentially exists in everyone. By transforming horrifying details into larger truths, they create a poetry of witness, of survival, and of remembrance.

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Like We Still Speak
Danielle Badra
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
Winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

Conversation and memory are at the heart of Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak, winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. In her elegiac and formally inventive debut, Badra carries on talking with the sister and father she has lost, often setting her words alongside theirs and others’ in polyphonic poems that can be read in multiple directions. Badra invites the reader to engage in this communal space where she investigates inheritance, witnessing, intimacy, and survival.
 
“This is a deeply spiritual book, all the more so because of its clarity and humility. Yet, we cannot walk away from the addictive command that so many of these poems ask us to follow: to read them along plural paths whose order changes while their immeasurable spirit remains unbound. Each poem is a singular vessel—of narratives, embodiments that correspond with memories, memories that recollect passion. . . . Like We Still Speak is a sanctum. Inside it, we are enthralled by beauty, consoled by light, sustained by making.”
—Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara, from the Preface
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Like What We Imagine
Writing and the University
David Bartholomae
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

David Bartholomae has been a prominent figure in the field of composition and rhetoric for almost five decades. This is an end-of-career book, a collection of late essays that reflect on the teaching of reading and writing, on the challenges and value of students’ work, and on the place of English in the university curriculum. The chapters are unified by a thread that connects some of the books and ideas, people and places, students and courses that shaped and sustained his work as a scholar and teacher over time. Several chapters present and discuss extended examples of student writing. The essays trace his formation from the early days of “Basic Writing” to his final engagements with study abroad and travel writing, where he had the chance to think again, and in radically different settings, about the fundamental problems of communication across linguistic and cultural divides.

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Likeness and Presence
A History of the Image before the Era of Art
Hans Belting
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration which possessed the tangible presence of the Holy. In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the long history of the sacral image and its changing role in European culture.
Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes, and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacred
images, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of the image in Western history.

"A rarity within its genre—an art-historical analysis of iconography which is itself iconoclastic. . . . One of the most intellectually exciting and historically grounded interpretations of Christian iconography." —Graham Howes, Times Literary Supplement

"Likeness and Presence offers the best source to survey the facts of what European Christians put in their churches. . . . An impressively detailed contextual analysis of medieval objects." —Robin Cormack, New York Times Book Review

"I cannot begin to describe the richness or the imaginative grandeur of Hans Belting's book. . . . It is a work that anyone interested in art, or in the history of thought about art, should regard as urgent reading. It is a tremendous achievement."—Arthur C. Danto, New Republic
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The Likeness of the King
A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France
Stephen Perkinson
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson’s The Likeness of the King challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as “the first modern portraits.”

Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.

“A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual context. The Likeness of the King provides a strong account of late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources; close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to counter received ideas.”—Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago 
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The Likeness of Things Unlike
A Poetics of Incommensurability
Sharon Cameron
University of Chicago Press
A study of the incommensurable, often discordant elements that define major works of American literature.

In Sharon Cameron’s essays, a magnetic constellation gathers works of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Cather, and Stevens—each manifesting in its own terms “the likeness of things unlike”—to form a loose commonality in a strain of American writing in which incommensurable elements can’t be integrated and can’t be separated. The Likeness of Things Unlike is concerned with discordant elements of an aesthetic work and argues that these elements refigure the aesthetic wholes whose integrity they apparently violate. These intertwined, subversive elements are challenges to literary systems and are essentially philosophical in their rethinking of categories, and thus go beyond the aesthetic particulars that exemplify them.
 
Cameron is known for rigorously and brilliantly connecting artistic achievement to radical ways of thinking. Georg Lukcás describes the essayist as one who “adapts himself to the essay’s ‘smallness’ of form—the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in [the] face of life.” With The Likeness of Things Unlike Cameron powerfully demonstrates Lukács’s remarkable insight.
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Lilavai
Kouhala
Harvard University Press, 2021

Women’s voices and their desires are in the spotlight in this celebrated ninth-century Prakrit romance, set in modern-day coastal Andhra Pradesh.

The Prakrit romance Lilavai, an early ninth-century poem attributed to Kouhala and set in modern-day coastal Andhra Pradesh, is the most celebrated work in the genre. Complexly narrated in the alternating voices of its heroines and heroes and featuring a cast of semi-divine and magical beings, it centers on three young women: Lilavai, princess of Sinhala (today’s Sri Lanka); her cousin Mahanumai, princess of the mythical city Alaka; and Kuvalaavali, Mahanumai’s adopted sister. Following a prophecy that Lilavai’s husband will rule the earth, the princess happens upon a portrait of King Hala of Pratishthana and immediately falls in love. While journeying to meet him, she hears her cousins’ tales of their lost loves, and then vows not to marry until they are reunited. To win Lilavai’s hand, King Hala journeys to the underworld, faces monsters, and overcomes armies.

Lilavai explores themes of karma and female desire, notably privileging women as storytellers. A new edition of the Prakrit text, presented in the Devanagari script, accompanies a new English prose translation.

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Lillie Devereux Blake
Retracing a Life Erased
Grace Farrell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Fiction writer, journalist, and essayist, Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913) published seven novels, two collections of stories and essays, and hundreds of other pieces during her lifetime. She also played a major role in the struggle for women's rights, eventually becoming Elizabeth Cady Stanton's candidate to succeed Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Yet for all her remarkable accomplishments, Lillie Blake's story has been all but forgotten. As Grace Farrell reveals in this richly textured biography, Blake's creative writings did not survive the canonical purges of women authors at the turn of the twentieth century, and her contributions to the suffrage movement were simply ignored in the official histories sanctioned by Susan B. Anthony. From the traces that remain, Farrell reconstructs an extraordinary life of passion and purpose. She chronicles Blake's literary career from Civil War correspondent to novelist and provides an inside view of suffrage politics, correcting some long held misconceptions perpetuated by Anthony and her supporters.

At the same time, Farrell expands the generic boundaries of biography by recounting not only a life and the causes of its erasure but also her own process of recovering that life. She brings the reader along with her as she follows Blake's path in the world, touches her diary, reads her letters, and campaigns to prevent Yale University from demolishing Blake's childhood home in New Haven.
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Lilliputin
Tales from a War
Jan Nemec
Seagull Books, 2023
Written in the first four months of the war in Ukraine, fuelled by anger towards mindless violence, Nemec’s stories tackle the present moment and confront what really matters at times of abundant destruction.

A Czech man in Ukraine in search of his alter ego. A gang of homeless kids driven from a cellar by tenants using it as a shelter from the war. A German couple who ‘rented a womb’ in Ukraine, whose child is now stuck in Kyiv. A teenager partnered with a Valkyrie for the distribution of lavash in besieged Mariupol delays his flight until it is too late. A Russian academic mounting a protest in the center of Moscow dressed in a costume from Swan Lake. They may not be soldiers at the front, but for the characters in these stories, life will never again be as it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this collection of short stories—two set in Ukraine, two in the West, and one in Russia—Czech author Jan Nemec has produced a work of remarkable immediacy.
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Lily
Marcia Reiss
Reaktion Books, 2013
The lily is a flower of contradictions. It represents both life and death, appearing at weddings and funerals. In their pure white form, lilies are a symbol of innocence, chastity, and purity of heart, but in contrast, the highly fragrant and intensely colored orange lilies symbolize passion. In Lily, Marcia Reiss explores these paradoxes, tracing the flower’s cultural significance in art, literature, religion, and popular entertainment throughout history.
 
Reiss journeys from the tomb carvings of ancient Egypt to the paintings of Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Salvador Dalí, exploring the lily as a subject of fascination and obsession. Unearthing many absorbing facts and fables about the blossom, she examines its use in cuisine and reveals them to have been a source of food and medicine in China for centuries. While Reiss focuses her attention on true lilies and the ornamental hybrids breeders have derived from them, she also provides extensive information about a wide variety of popular lilies, including daylilies, lilies of the valley, water lilies, and calla lilies. Filled with striking illustrations of these gorgeous plants, Lily is a book for gardeners and lily admirers alike.
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