If baseball is the sport of nostalgic prose, basketball’s movement, myths, and culture are truly at home in verse. In this extraordinary collection of essays, poets meditate on what basketball means to them: how it has changed their perspective on the craft of poetry; how it informs their sense of language, the body, and human connectedness; how their love of the sport made a difference in the creation of their poems and in the lives they live beyond the margins. Walt Whitman saw the origins of poetry as communal, oral myth making. The same could be said of basketball, which is the beating heart of so many neighborhoods and communities in this country and around the world. On the court and on the page, this “poetry in motion” can be a force of change and inspiration, leaving devoted fans wonderstruck.
Stories of government management failures often make the headlines, but quietly much gets done as well. What makes the difference? Ira Goldstein offers wisdom about how to lead and succeed in the federal realm, even during periods when the political climate is intensely negative, based on his decades of experience as a senior executive at two major government consulting firms and as a member of the US federal government's Senior Executive Service.
The Federal Management Playbook coaches the importance of always keeping four key concepts in mind when planning for success: goals, stakeholders, resources, and time frames. Its chapters address how to effectively motivate government employees, pick the right technologies, communicate and negotiate with powerful stakeholders, manage risks, get value from contractors, foster innovation, and more. Goldstein makes lessons easy to apply by breaking each chapter’s plans into three strategic phases: create an offensive strategy, execute your plan effectively, and play a smart defense. Additional tips describe how career civil servants and political appointees can get the most from one another, advise consultants on providing value to government, and help everyone better manage ever-present oversight.
The Federal Management Playbook is a must-read for anyone working in the government realm and for students who aspire to public service.
A classic work of history, ethnography, and botany, and an examination of the life and environs of the 18th-century south
William Bartram was a naturalist, artist, and author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the ExtensiveTerritories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws. The book, based on his journey across the South, reflects a remarkable coming of age. In 1773, Bartram departed his family home near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a British colonist; in 1777, he returned as a citizen of an emerging nation of the United States. The account of his journey, published in 1791, established a national benchmark for nature writing and remains a classic of American literature, scientific writing, and history. Brought up as a Quaker, Bartram portrayed nature through a poetic lens of experience as well as scientific observation, and his work provides a window on 18th-century southern landscapes. Particularly enlightening and appealing are Bartram’s detailed accounts of Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee peoples.A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn’t released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The Flatlanders—Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock—are icons in American music, with songs blending country, folk, and rock that have influenced a long list of performers, including Robert Earl Keen, the Cowboy Junkies, Ryan Bingham, Terry Allen, John Hiatt, Hayes Carll, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Lyle Lovett.
In The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again, Austin author and music journalist John T. Davis traces the band’s musical journey from the house on 14th Street in Lubbock to their 2013 sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. He explores why music was, and is, so important in Lubbock and how earlier West Texas musicians such as Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, as well as a touring Elvis Presley, inspired the young Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock. Davis vividly recreates the Lubbock countercultural scene that brought the Flatlanders together and recounts their first year (1972–1973) as a band, during which they recorded the songs that, decades later, were released as the albums More a Legend Than a Band and The Odessa Tapes. He follows the three musicians through their solo careers and into their first decade as a (re)united band, in which they cowrote songs for the first time on the albums Now Again and Hills and Valleys and recovered their extraordinary original demo tape, lost for forty years. Many roads later, the Flatlanders are finally both a legend and a band.
As I was coming up, it was painful to me not to have been given my own nickname. It made me feel different, or rather that I was being treated differently from other family members. I wondered why everybody else was spoken to in terms of their identity, their character, their behavior, and I was simply identified by the 'tag,' my given name. But then, when I read in a book that France meant free, I began to think of it as imbuing me with a sense of flight, of movement. Ultimately, I came to believe my name spoke for itself and that I did not need any other.'—from the book
Imbued with rich detail of family life in a rural community, as well as a system of values at a time of transition in American history, this is the life story of France Davis, the dynamic pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City. It is an engaging story of courage and vision that describes coming of age in the segregation-era South, of dreaming, enduring with honor, and living at the forefront of major issues within the United States.
Recorded and skillfully written by Nayra Atiya, France Davis: An American Story Told, is an oral history, ethnography, memoir, perhaps even a life-enhancing sermon delivered with the strong voice of a preacher. The gathered strands of a life lived with conviction and grace will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers from the curious to those seeking inspiration.
Winner of the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Surin begins by examining the current regime of accumulation—the global domination of financial markets over traditional industrial economies—which is used as an instrument for the subordination and dependency of poorer nations. He then moves to the constitution of subjectivity, or the way humans are produced as social beings, which he casts as the key arena in which struggles against dispossession occur. Surin critically engages with the major philosophical positions that have been posed as models of liberation, including Derrida’s notion of reciprocity between a subject and its other, a reinvigorated militancy in political reorientation based on the thinking of Badiou and Zizek, the nomad politics of Deleuze and Guattari, and the politics of the multitude suggested by Hardt and Negri. Finally, Surin specifies the material conditions needed for liberation from the economic, political, and social failures of our current system. Seeking to illuminate a route to a better life for the world’s poorer populations, Surin investigates the philosophical possibilities for a marxist or neo-marxist concept of liberation from capitalist exploitation and the regimes of power that support it.
Complex and paradoxical, Nehemiah Matson (1816–1873) celebrated the occupation of the Middle West by European pioneers even as he labored to preserve the memory of the natives these pioneers replaced. He perpetuated the memory of the Indians who were driven out of the territory, but he nevertheless accumulated wealth selling their land to the pioneers. Rodney O. Davis notes in his new foreword to this book that Matson combined the attributes of a scholar with those of a salesman and promoter.
Matson settled in Princeton, Illinois, in 1836. He left behind a library partially endowed by him, named for him, and finally completed in 1913. According to Davis, however, Matson’s other legacy, “of equal significance in his own eyes, consisted of the five books he authored on northern Illinois and Illinois River history and cartography, volumes based not only on conscientious scholarship but also on both Indian and white reminiscence and on local folklore.”
Matson’s historical writings are valuable even when he deals with well-known events because his personal perspective makes his observations unique. Without the stories and reminiscences he collected, much valuable information would have been lost, especially since many of his informants, both Indian and European, were illiterate. Because his informants often told conflicting stories, Matson admitted that “harmonizing all conflicting accounts . . . has not been a success.”
Although Matson’s sources may not always have agreed, and sometimes his heart may have overruled his head and colored his accounts, he was a conscientious and committed author. “Obviously,” Davis explains, “this book must be evaluated as what it is, a piece of colorful local history, romantically anchored in legend yet rooted also in invaluable research and produced by a dedicated amateur whose standards were high. . . . French and Indians of Illinois River is a model of its type, indeed a minor classic.”
Winner, 2022 Susannah DeBlack Award, Arkansas Historical Association
The delightful story of Friday, a dog who discovers that the world of art is filled with many wonderful friends.
A dog in an art museum? Maybe not most dogs, but Friday goes to the museum every Tuesday to visit his friends. One day Friday must say goodbye for the winter. Join the fun as Friday trots through the galleries, taking photos and saying goodbye to Maman the spider, Rosie the Riveter, George Washington, and many others.
Looking back on his day, Friday realizes that the works of art in a museum are more than just bronze and steel, paint and canvas, ink and paper. Instead, the art connects him—and us—to a diversity of cultures, stories, and dreams.
Through the art collection at Crystal Bridges, all of us—even a dog—become part of the American experience.
Lexile Level: 570L
Why would a successful physician who has undergone seven years of rigorous medical training take the trouble to seek out and learn to practice alternative methods of healing such as homeopathy and Chinese medicine? From Doctor to Healer answers this question as it traces the transformational journeys of physicians who move across the philosophical spectrum of American medicine from doctor to healer. Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John conducted extensive interviews to discover how and why physicians make the move to alternative medicine, what sparks this shift, and what beliefs they abandon or embrace in the process.
After outlining the basic models of American health care-the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic-the authors follow the thoughts and experiences of forty physicians as they expand their horizons in order to offer effective patient care. The book focuses on the radical shift from one end of the spectrum to the other-from the technocratic approach to holism-made by most of the interviewees. Because many American physicians find such a drastic change too threatening, the authors also address the less radical transition to humanism-a movement toward compassionate care arising from within the medical system.In Future Drive, Daniel Sperling addresses the adverse energy and environmental consequences of increased travel, and analyzes current initiatives to suggest strategies for creating a more environmentally benign system of transportation. Groundbreaking proposals are constructed around the idea of electric propulsion as the key to a sustainable transportation and energy system. Other essential elements include the ideas that:
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