front cover of Five Tales for the Theatre
Five Tales for the Theatre
Carlo Gozzi
University of Chicago Press, 1989
For Count Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), theater was a fabulous world apart, in which human beings, statues, and animals change places by magical transformations. Gozzi's stage becomes a multiscenic home for adventures, loves, enmities, and dazzling visual effects. This collection brings together for the first time modern English translations of five of Gozzi's most famous plays: The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman, and The Green Bird, each annotated by the translators and preceded by the author's preface. Ted Emery's Introduction places Gozzi in his social and historical context, tracing his world view in both the content and the form of his tales.

In the ten works he called fiable or fairy tales, Gozzi intermingled characters from the traditional and improvised commedia dell'arte with exotic figures of his own invention. During Gozzi's lifetime, Goethe and Schiller translated and produced some of his dramas at the Weimar Theatre. In our century, the dramas have reasserted themselves under the direction of Max Reinhardt, Vsevolod Meyerhold, George Devine, and Benno Besson, as well as in operatic adaptations by Puccini and Prokofiev.

The powerful conflicts, the idyllic and fearsome settings, and the startling transformations in these plays offer exceptional opportunities to actors, directors, and designers. The lively translations are faithful to Gozzi's Italian, while being eminently playable for English-speaking audiences today. Two of the translations have already had highly successful stagings by Andrei Serban at the American Repertory Theatre and on tour.
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Processing Politics
Learning from Television in the Internet Age
Doris A. Graber
University of Chicago Press, 2001
How often do we hear that Americans are so ignorant about politics that their civic competence is impaired, and that the media are to blame because they do a dismal job of informing the public? Processing Politics shows that average Americans are far smarter than the critics believe. Integrating a broad range of current research on how people learn (from political science, social psychology, communication, physiology, and artificial intelligence), Doris Graber shows that televised presentations—at their best—actually excel at transmitting information and facilitating learning. She critiques current political offerings in terms of their compatibility with our learning capacities and interests, and she considers the obstacles, both economic and political, that affect the content we receive on the air, on cable, or on the Internet.

More and more people rely on information from television and the Internet to make important decisions. Processing Politics offers a sound, well-researched defense of these remarkably versatile media, and challenges us to make them work for us in our democracy.
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Curriculum or Craftsmanship
Elementary School Teachers in a Bureaucratic System
Harry L. Gracey
University of Chicago Press, 1972
Sociologist Harry L. Gracey spent two years studying an East-Coast school system, which he calls "Brookview," and determined that the bureaucratic social structure of schools can have a profound and irreversibly negative effect on the creativity of teachers. This volume tells the story of the "Wilbur Wright" elementary school in Brookview. It examines the relationship between the educational institution as a bureaucracy and the goals of the two main types of teaching orientation found in elementary schools such as Wright.

The majority of teachers are "production" oriented. They believe that their job is to see that the children in their charge complete as much of the standardized grade level curriculum as possible during the school year. They do achieve some success in preparing children for life in a society where bureaucracy is the dominant form of social organization.

The other significant type of teaching orientation is that of the "craftsmen." These instructors see their goal as the development of each individual's learning potential, with the curriculum built upon the specific needs and interests of each child. Bureaucratic school structures do nothing to promote this kind of teaching.

Any ideas that are at variance with the school's organizational structure will fail. The craftsman teachers do not have the time to communicate the standardized programs desired by the school board and also to make use of their own individualistic techniques. Further, the continued use of the former cancels the effects of the craftsman approach.

In delineating his conclusions, Professor Gracey includes his observations on the community and educational setting of the study, the two types of teachers, the administration, the parents, and the children's response to educational organization.

This study is unique in approaching its educational subject matter from a sociological point of view; Professor Gracey intended it as a study of behavior in organizations. It should also serve educational goals, however, and will therefore interest educators and concerned citizens as well as sociologists.
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Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination
Kenyon Gradert
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. “Puritan” is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked to hear this. They fervently embraced the idea that Puritans were in fact pioneers of revolutionary dissent and invoked their name and ideas as part of their antislavery crusade.

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination reveals how the leaders of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement—from landmark figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson to scores of lesser-known writers and orators—drew upon the Puritan tradition to shape their politics and personae. In a striking instance of selective memory, reimagined aspects of Puritan history proved to be potent catalysts for abolitionist minds. Black writers lauded slave rebels as new Puritan soldiers, female antislavery militias in Kansas were cast as modern Pilgrims, and a direct lineage of radical democracy was traced from these early New Englanders through the American and French Revolutions to the abolitionist movement, deemed a “Second Reformation” by some. Kenyon Gradert recovers a striking influence on abolitionism and recasts our understanding of puritanism, often seen as a strictly conservative ideology, averse to the worldly rebellion demanded by abolitionists.
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The Last Consolation Vanished
The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
Zalmen Gradowski
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz.

On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III.
 
Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them.
 
The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.
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Patty's Got a Gun
Patricia Hearst in 1970s America
William Graebner
University of Chicago Press, 2008
It was a story so bizarre it defied belief: in April 1974, twenty-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst robbed a San Francisco bank in the company of members of the Symbionese Liberation Army—who had kidnapped her a mere nine weeks earlier. But the robbery—and the spectacular 1976 trial that ended with Hearst’s criminal conviction—seemed oddly appropriate to the troubled mood of the nation, an instant exemplar of a turbulent era.
 
With Patty’s Got a Gun, the first substantial reconsideration of Patty Hearst’s story in more than twenty-five years, William Graebner vividly re-creates the atmosphere of uncertainty and frustration of mid-1970s America. Drawing on copious media accounts of the robbery and trial—as well as cultural artifacts from glam rock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Graebner paints a compelling portrait of a nation confused and frightened by the upheavals of 1960s liberalism and beginning to tip over into what would become Reagan-era conservatism, with its invocations of individual responsibility and the heroic. Trapped in the middle of that shift, the affectless, zombielike, “brainwashed” Patty Hearst was a ready-made symbol of all that seemed to have gone wrong with the sixties—the inevitable result, some said, of rampant permissiveness, feckless elitism, the loss of moral clarity, and feminism run amok.
 
By offering a fresh look at Patty Hearst and her trial—for the first time free from the agendas of the day, yet set fully in their cultural context—Patty’s Got a Gun delivers a nuanced portrait of both an unforgettable moment and an entire era, one whose repercussions continue to be felt today.
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The Intended and Unintended Effects of U.S. Agricultural and Biotechnology Policies
Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Using economic models and empirical analysis, this volume examines a wide range of agricultural and biofuel policy issues and their effects on American agricultural and related agrarian insurance markets. Beginning with a look at the distribution of funds by insurance programs—created to support farmers but often benefiting crop processors instead—the book then examines the demand for biofuel and the effects of biofuel policies on agricultural price uncertainty. Also discussed are genetically engineered crops, which are assuming an increasingly important role in arbitrating tensions between energy production, environmental protection, and the global food supply. Other contributions discuss the major effects of genetic engineering on worldwide food markets. By addressing some of the most challenging topics at the intersection of agriculture and biotechnology, this volume informs crucial debates.

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Professing Literature
An Institutional History
Gerald Graff
University of Chicago Press, 1987

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Professing Literature
An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Gerald Graff
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago.

Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic.

“Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
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Land Bridges
Ancient Environments, Plant Migrations, and New World Connections
Alan Graham
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Land bridges are the causeways of biodiversity. When they form, organisms are introduced into a new patchwork of species and habitats, forever altering the ecosystems into which they flow; and when land bridges disappear or fracture, organisms are separated into reproductively isolated populations that can evolve independently. More than this, land bridges play a role in determining global climates through changes to moisture and heat transport and are also essential factors in the development of biogeographic patterns across geographically remote regions.

In this book, paleobotanist Alan Graham traces the formation and disruption of key New World land bridges and describes the biotic, climatic, and biogeographic ramifications of these land masses’ changing formations over time. Looking at five land bridges, he explores their present geographic setting and climate, modern vegetation, indigenous peoples (with special attention to their impact on past and present vegetation), and geologic history. From the great Panamanian isthmus to the boreal connections across the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans that allowed exchange of organisms between North America, Europe, and Asia, Graham’s sweeping, one-hundred-million-year history offers new insight into the forces that shaped the life and land of the New World.
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A Natural History of the New World
The Ecology and Evolution of Plants in the Americas
Alan Graham
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The paleoecological history of the Americas is as complex as the region is broad: stretching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, the New World features some of the most extraordinary vegetation on the planet. But until now it has lacked a complete natural history. Alan Graham remedies that with A Natural History of the New World. With plants as his scientific muse, Graham traces the evolution of ecosystems, beginning in the Late Cretaceous period (about 100 million years ago) and ending in the present, charting their responses to changes in geology and climate.

            By highlighting plant communities’ roles in the environmental history of the Americas, Graham offers an overdue balance to natural histories that focus exclusively on animals. Plants are important in evolution’s splendid drama. Not only are they conspicuous and conveniently stationary components of the Earth’s ecosystems, but their extensive fossil record allows for a thorough reconstruction of the planet’s paleoenvironments. What’s more, plants provide oxygen, function as food and fuel, and provide habitat and shelter; in short, theirs is a history that can speak to many other areas of evolution.

A Natural History of the New World is an ambitious and unprecedented synthesis written by one of the world’s leading scholars of botany and geology. 

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The Essential Naturalist
Timeless Readings in Natural History
Michael H. Graham
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Like nearly every area of scholarly inquiry today, the biological sciences are broken into increasingly narrow fields and subfields, its practitioners divided into ecologists, evolutionary biologists, taxonomists, paleontologists, and much more. But all these splintered pieces have their origins in the larger field of natural history—and in this era where climate change and relentless population growth are irrevocably altering the world around us, perhaps it’s time to step back and take a new, fresh look at the larger picture.

            
The Essential Naturalist offers exactly that: a wide-ranging, eclectic collection of writings from more than eight centuries of observations of the natural world, from Leeuwenhoek to E. O. Wilson, from von Humboldt to Rachel Carson. Featuring commentaries by practicing scientists that offer personal accounts of the importance of the long tradition of natural history writing to their current research, the volume serves simultaneously as an overview of the field’s long history and as an inspirational starting point for new explorations, for trained scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike.

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The Moon, Come to Earth
Dispatches from Lisbon
Philip Graham
University of Chicago Press, 2009

A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness.

In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney’s, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year’s sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he’s unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter’s challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school—but he also waxes loving about Portugal’s saudade-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can’t help but ache alongside them.

A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one’s secret selves, The Moon, Come to Earth is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.

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The Politics of Pain Medicine
A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry
S. Scott Graham
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Chronic pain is a medical mystery, debilitating to patients and a source of frustration for practitioners. It often eludes both cause and cure and serves as a reminder of how much further we have to go in unlocking the secrets of the body. A new field of pain medicine has evolved from this landscape, one that intersects with dozens of disciplines and subspecialties ranging from psychology and physiology to anesthesia and chiropractic medicine. Over the past three decades, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have struggled to define this complex and often contentious field as they work to establish standards while navigating some of the most challenging philosophical issues of Western science.

In The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry, S. Scott Graham offers a rich and detailed exploration of the medical rhetoric surrounding pain medicine. Graham chronicles the work of interdisciplinary pain management specialists to found a new science of pain and a new approach to pain medicine grounded in a more comprehensive biospychosocial model. His insightful analysis demonstrates how these materials ultimately shape the healthcare community’s understanding of what pain medicine is, how the medicine should be practiced and regulated, and how practitioner-patient relationships are best managed. It is a fascinating, novel examination of one of the most vexing issues in contemporary medicine.
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Producing Local Color
Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago
Diane Grams
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In big cities, major museums and elite galleries tend to dominate our idea of the art world. But beyond the cultural core ruled by these moneyed institutions and their patrons are vibrant, local communities of artists and art lovers operating beneath the high-culture radar. Producing Local Color is a guided tour of three such alternative worlds that thrive in the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Rogers Park.

These three neighborhoods are, respectively, historically African American, predominantly Mexican American, and proudly ethnically mixed. Drawing on her ethnographic research in each place, Diane Grams presents and analyzes the different kinds of networks of interest and support that sustain the making of art outside of the limelight. And she introduces us to the various individuals—from cutting-edge artists to collectors to municipal planners—who work together to develop their communities, honor their history, and enrich the experiences of their neighbors through art. Along with its novel insights into these little examined art worlds, Producing Local Color also provides a thought-provoking account of how urban neighborhoods change and grow.

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Curators
Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums
Lance Grande
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Over the centuries, natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public.
 
At the heart of it all from the very start have been curators. Yet after three decades as a natural history curator, Lance Grande found that he still had to explain to people what he does. This book is the answer—and, oh, what an answer it is: lively, exciting, up-to-date, it offers a portrait of curators and their research  like none we’ve seen, one that conveys the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. Grande uses the personal story of his own career—most of it spent at Chicago’s storied Field Museum—to structure his account as he explores the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology. Throughout, we are guided by Grande’s keen sense of mission, of a job where the why is always as important as the what.
 
This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a clear-eyed but loving account of natural history museums, their curators, and their ever-expanding roles in the twenty-first century.
 
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The Lost World of Fossil Lake
Snapshots from Deep Time
Lance Grande
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake, surrounded by volcanoes and forests and teeming with life.  Buried within the sun-baked limestone is spectacular evidence of the lush vegetation and plentiful fauna of the ancient past, a transitional ecosystem giving us clues to how North America recovered from a great extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs and the majority of all species on the planet.
 
 
Paleontologists have been conducting excavations at Fossil Butte for more than 150 years, and with The Lost World of Fossil Lake, one of the world’s leading experts on the fossils from this spectacular locality takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the discovery and exploration of the site. Deftly mixing incredible color photographs of the remarkable fossils uncovered at the site with an explanation of their evolutionary significance, Grande presents an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of the site, its treasures, and what we’ve learned from them. Grande presents a broad range of fossilized organisms from Fossil Lake—from single-celled algae to palm trees to crocodiles—and together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor. A field guide and atlas round out the book, enabling readers to identify and classify the majority of the known fossils from the site.
 
 
Lavishly produced in full color, The Lost World of Fossil Lake is a stunning reminder of the intellectual and physical beauty of scientific investigation—and a breathtaking window onto our planet’s long-lost past.
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Gems and Gemstones
Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World
Lance Grande
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Gems are objects of wealth, icons of beauty, and emblems of the very best of everything. They are kept as signs of prestige or power. Given as tokens of love and affection, they also come in a kaleidoscopic array of hues and can be either mineral or organic. Gems can command a person’s gaze in the way they play with light and express rich color. And they can evoke feelings of passion, greed, mystery, and warmth.

For millennia, gems have played an important role in human culture: they have significant value, both financially and within folklore and mythology. But just what are gems, exactly? This lavishly illustrated volume—the most ambitious publication of its kind—provides a general introduction to gems and natural gemstones, conveying their timeless beauty and exploring similarities among different species and varieties. Gems and Gemstones features nearly 300 color images of the cut gems, precious and semiprecious stones, gem-quality mineral specimens, and fine jewelry to be unveiled in a new Grainger Hall of Gems at The Field Museum in Chicago this October. The book and exhibition’s overarching theme will be the relationship between finished gems and their natural origin: while beautiful as faceted and polished pieces of jewelry, gems are often just as lovely—or even more so—as gemstones in their natural state. For example, an aquamarine or emerald as originally found in a mine with its natural crystal faces can be as stunning as any cut and polished gem prepared for a ring, bracelet, or charm.

Thoughtful of both ancient and modern times, Gems and Gemstones also includes fun-filled facts and anecdotes that broaden the historical portrait of each specimen. When Harry Winston, for instance, donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958, he sent it through the U.S. mail wrapped in plain brown paper. And for anyone who has ever marveled at the innovations of top jewelry designers, Gems and Gemstones features a dazzling array of polished stones, gold objects, and creations from around the world. Diamonds, sapphires, rubies, amethysts, pearls, topaz, amber—every major gem gets its due in what will be an invaluable source on the subject for years to come.

Gems and Gemstones is the basis for the iPad app, available in the Apple iTunes App Store, Gems and Jewels.

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The Last Colonial Massacre
Latin America in the Cold War
Greg Grandin
University of Chicago Press, 2004
After decades of bloody revolutions and political terror, many scholars and politicians lament the rise and brief influence of the left in Latin America; since the triumph of Castro they have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing Communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. The Last Colonial Massacre challenges these views.

Using Guatemala as a case study, Greg Grandin argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle not between American liberalism and Soviet Communism but between two visions of democracy. The main effect of United States intervention in Latin America, Grandin shows, was not the containment of Communism but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy.

Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Grandin uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries intent on holding on to their own power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists, blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of freedom and equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the continent. Drawing from declassified U.S. documents, Grandin exposes Washington's involvement in the 1966 secret execution of more than thirty Guatemalan leftists, which, he argues, prefigured the later wave of disappearances in Chile and Argentina.

Impassioned but judicious, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the triumphal role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.
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The Last Colonial Massacre
Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition
Greg Grandin
University of Chicago Press, 2011

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region.

With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy—one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal—and that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

“This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review

 

“A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History

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Time for Frankie Coolin
A Novel
Bill Granger
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Known as much for his journalistic reporting as for the fiction he wrote under a variety of pen names, Bill Granger combined his divergent talents in his powerful novel Time for Frankie Coolin. With distinctive voices, compelling characters, on-the-ground observation, and suspense, it offers a serious, illuminating take on the changing tides of race, class, and politics in late twentieth-century Chicago.

Time for Frankie Coolin tells the story of a plasterer turned landlord in Chicago who, in the late 1970s, buys abandoned buildings and makes them just habitable enough that he can charge minimal rent to his mostly black tenants. Frankie—both a tough guy in the trades and a family man—has done well by his wife and kids, moving them to a house in the suburbs. But a casual favor for his wife’s cousin—allowing the man to store some crates in an empty building—and a random act of arson set in motion a cascade of crises, including a menacing pair of G-men and the looming threat of prison if Frankie doesn’t talk. But since talking has never been one of Frankie’s strengths, he copes as he always has: by trying to tough it out on his own.

Calling to mind such gritty poets of the urban scene as George V. Higgins and Nelson Algren, Time for Frankie Coolin is both a psychological thriller and a ’70s Chicago period piece that shines a surprisingly sympathetic light on the often ignored stories of the people who lived, worked, and died at the city’s margins.
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Chinese State Enterprises
A Regional Property Rights Analysis
David Granick
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"We are indebted to David Granick for his thoughtful, careful, empirically documented study of the Chinese state industrial enterprise that not only provides a rarely attained comparative analysis but also possesses an explanatory power in suggesting how this system might evolve in the future."—Jeanne L. Wilson, Business Horizons
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Getting a Job
A Study of Contacts and Careers
Mark Granovetter
University of Chicago Press, 1995
This classic study of how 282 men in the United States found their jobs not only proves "it's not what you know but who you know," but also demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. Examining the link between job contacts and social structure, Granovetter recognizes networking as the crucial link between economists studies of labor mobility and more focused studies of an individual's motivation to find work.

This second edition is updated with a new Afterword and includes Granovetter's influential article "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problems of Embeddedness."

"Who would imagine that a book with such a prosaic title as 'getting a job' could pose such provocative questions about social structure and even social policy? In a remarkably ingenious and deceptively simple analysis of data gathered from a carefully designed sample of professional, technical, and managerial employees . . . Granovetter manages to raise a number of critical issues for the economic theory of labor markets as well as for theories of social structure by exploiting the emerging 'social network' perspective."—Edward O. Laumann, American Journal of Sociology

"This short volume has much to offer readers of many disciplines. . . . Granovetter demonstrates ingenuity in his design and collection of data."—Jacob Siegel, Monthly Labor Review

"A fascinating exploration, for Granovetter's principal interest lies in utilizing sociological theory and method to ascertain the nature of the linkages through which labor market information is transmitted by 'friends and relatives.'"—Herbert Parnes, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

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Evolutionary Dynamics of a Natural Population
The Large Cactus Finch of the Galapagos
B. Rosemary Grant
University of Chicago Press, 1989

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Hypocrisy and Integrity
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics
Ruth W. Grant
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Questioning the usual judgements of political ethics, Ruth W. Grant argues that hypocrisy can actually be constructive while strictly principled behavior can be destructive. Hypocrisy and Integrity offers a new conceptual framework that clarifies the differences between idealism and fanaticism while it uncovers the moral limits of compromise.
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In Search of Goodness
Ruth W. Grant
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The recent spate of books and articles reflecting on the question of evil might make one forget that the question of just what constitutes goodness is no less urgent or perplexing. Everyone wants to think of him- or herself as good. But what does a good life look like? And how do people become good? Are there multiple, competing possibilities for what counts as a good life, all equally worthy? Or, is there a unified and transcendent conception of the good that should guide our judgment of the possibilities? What does a good life look like when it is guided by God? How is a good life involved with the lives of others? And, finally, how good is good enough?


These questions are the focus of In Search of Goodness, the product of a year-long conversation about goodness. The eight essays in this volume challenge the dichotomies that usually govern how goodness has been discussed in the past: altruism versus egoism; reason versus emotion; or moral choice versus moral character. Instead, the contributors seek to expand the terms of the discussion by coming at goodness from a variety of perspectives:  psychological, philosophic, literary, religious, and political. In each case, they emphasize the lived realities and particulars of moral phenomena, taking up examples and illustrations from life, literature, and film. From Achilles and Billy Budd, to Oskar Schindler and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, to Iris Murdoch and the citizens of Flagstaff, Arizona, readers will find a wealth of thought-provoking insights to help them better understand this most basic, but complex, element of human life and happiness.

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John Locke's Liberalism
Ruth W. Grant
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this work, Ruth W. Grant presents a new approach to John Locke's familiar works. Taking the unusual step of relating Locke's Two Treatises to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Grant establishes the unity and coherence of Locke's political arguments. She analyzes the Two Treatises as a systematic demonstration of liberal principles of right and power and grounds it in the epistemology set forth in the Essay.
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Naming Evil, Judging Evil
Ruth W. Grant
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Is it more dangerous to call something evil or not to?  This fundamental question deeply divides those who fear that the term oversimplifies grave problems and those who worry that, to effectively address such issues as terrorism and genocide, we must first acknowledge them as evil. Recognizing that the way we approach this dilemma can significantly affect both the harm we suffer and the suffering we inflict, a distinguished group of contributors engages in the debate with this series of timely and original essays.

Drawing on Western conceptions of evil from the Middle Ages to the present,  these pieces demonstrate that, while it may not be possible to definitively settle moral questions, we are still able—and in fact are obligated—to make moral arguments and judgments. Using a wide variety of approaches, the authors raise tough questions: Why is so much evil perpetrated in the name of good?  Could evil ever be eradicated? How can liberal democratic politics help us strike a balance between the need to pass judgment and the need to remain tolerant? Their insightful answers exemplify how the sometimes rarefied worlds of political theory, philosophy, theology, and history can illuminate pressing contemporary concerns.

[more]

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Dual Justice
America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime
Anthony Grasso
University of Chicago Press, 2024

A far-reaching examination of how America came to treat street and corporate crime so differently.

While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.

By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system.

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Stoicism and Emotion
Margaret Graver
University of Chicago Press, 2007
On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. Stoicism and Emotion shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today’s English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses the deepest respect for human potential.

In this elegant and clearly written work, Margaret Graver gives a compelling new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, she argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, Graver also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one’s emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, Stoicism and Emotion uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its surprising relevance to our own.
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A Guide to Chicago's Murals
Mary Lackritz Gray
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Chicago is a city known for its fabulous architecture and public sculpture by artists such as Picasso and Calder, but anyone who has seen the gorgeous lunettes in the Auditorium Theater or the South Side's Wall of Respect, which inaugurated the city's contemporary mural movement, knows that Chicago has an equally rich tradition of mural painting. Through these murals, the history of Chicago and the nation is writ in churches and lobbies, on viaducts and school walls. Mary Gray's A Guide to Chicago's Murals is the first definitive handbook to the treasures that can be found all over the city.

With full-color illustrations of nearly two hundred Chicago murals and accompanying entries that describe their history—who commissioned them and why, how artists collaborated with architects, the subjects of the murals and their contexts—A Guide to Chicago's Murals serves both a general and a specific audience. Divided into easy-to-read geographical sections with useful maps for walking tours, it is the perfect companion for tourists or Chicagoans interested in coming to know better this aspect of the city's history. Gray also provides crucial information on lesser-known artists and on murals that have been destroyed over the years, filling a gap in the visual record of the city's development.

Gray also includes biographies of more than 150 artists and a glossary of key terms, making A Guide to Chicago's Murals essential reading for mural viewing. From post offices to libraries, fieldhouses to banks, and private clubs to street corners, Mary Gray chronicles the amazing works of artists who have sought to make public declarations in this most social of art forms.

"A major lacuna in the history of art in Chicago has been filled, with the thoroughness of the research proportionate to the richness of the material revealed."—From the Foreword by Franz Schulze

"Gray's book . . . can function as a guidebook, as the murals are conveniently arranged according to the quadrants of the city. But the book is also beautiful to look at and indespensable as art history and Chicago history as well. . . . This book is a wonderful guide to Chicago's rich and unique mural tradition."—Elizabeth Alexander, Chicago Tribune Books

"If you love art and history, this is a book you'll truly enjoy."—Al Paulson, Utne Reader
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Blue Chicago
The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs
David Grazian
University of Chicago Press, 2003
The club is run-down and dimly lit. Onstage, a black singer croons and weeps of heartbreak, fighting back the tears. Wisps of smoke curl through the beam of a single spotlight illuminating the performer.

For any music lover, that image captures the essence of an authentic experience of the blues. In Blue Chicago, David Grazian takes us inside the world of contemporary urban blues clubs to uncover how such images are manufactured and sold to music fans and audiences. Drawing on countless nights in dozens of blues clubs throughout Chicago, Grazian shows how this quest for authenticity has transformed the very shape of the blues experience. He explores the ways in which professional and amateur musicians, club owners, and city boosters define authenticity and dish it out to tourists and bar regulars. He also tracks the changing relations between race and the blues over the past several decades, including the increased frustrations of black musicians forced to slog through the same set of overplayed blues standards for mainly white audiences night after night. In the end, Grazian finds that authenticity lies in the eye of the beholder: a nocturnal fantasy to some, an essential way of life to others, and a frustrating burden to the rest.

From B.L.U.E.S. and the Checkerboard Lounge to the Chicago Blues Festival itself, Grazian's gritty and often sobering tour in Blue Chicago shows us not what the blues is all about, but why we care so much about that question.
[more]

front cover of On the Make
On the Make
The Hustle of Urban Nightlife
David Grazian
University of Chicago Press, 2007

David Grazian’s riveting tour of downtown Philadelphia and its newly bustling nightlife scene reveals the city as an urban playground where everyone dabbles in games of chance and perpetrates elaborate cons. Entertainment in the city has evolved into a professional industry replete with set designers, stage directors, and method actors whose dazzling illusions tempt even the shrewdest of customers. As entertaining and illuminating as the confessional stories it recounts, On the Make is a fascinating exposé of the smoke and mirrors employed in the city at night.

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front cover of Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors
Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors
Religion and the History of the CIA
Michael Graziano
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Reveals the previous underexplored influence of religious thought in building the foundations of the CIA.

Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.
[more]

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Priests
A Calling in Crisis
Andrew M. Greeley
University of Chicago Press, 2004
For several years now, the Roman Catholic Church and the institution of the priesthood itself have been at the center of a firestorm of controversy. While many of the criticisms lodged against the recent actions of the Church—and a small number of its priests—are justified, the majority of these criticisms are not. Hyperbolic and misleading coverage of recent scandals has created a public image of American priests that bears little relation to reality, and Andrew Greeley's Priests skewers this image with a systematic inside look at American priests today.

No stranger to controversy himself, Greeley here challenges those analysts and the media who parrot them in placing the blame for recent Church scandals on the mandate of celibacy or a clerical culture that supports homosexuality. Drawing upon reliable national survey samples of priests, Greeley demolishes current stereotypes about the percentage of homosexual priests, the level of personal and professional happiness among priests, the role of celibacy in their lives, and many other issues. His findings are more than surprising: they reveal, among other things, that priests report higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than doctors, lawyers, or faculty members; that they would overwhelmingly choose to become priests again; and that younger priests are far more conservative than their older brethren.

While the picture Greeley paints should radically reorient the public perception of priests, he does not hesitate to criticize the Church's significant shortcomings. Most priests, for example, do not think the sexual abuse problems are serious, and they do not think that poor preaching or liturgy is a problem, though the laity give them very low marks on their ministerial skills. Priests do not listen to the laity, bishops do not listen to priests, and the Vatican does not listen to any of them. With Greeley's statistical evidence and provocative recommendations for change—including a national "Priest Corps" that would offer young men a limited term of service in the Church—Priests offers a new vision for American Catholics, one based on real problems and solutions rather than on images of a depraved, immature, and frustrated priesthood.
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The Truth about Conservative Christians
What They Think and What They Believe
Andrew M. Greeley
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Ever since the reelection of President Bush, conservative Christians have been stereotyped in the popular media: Bible-thumping militants and anti-intellectual zealots determined to impose their convictions on such matters as evolution, school prayer, pornography, abortion, and homosexuality on the rest of us. But conservative Christians are not as fanatical or intractable as many people think, nor are they necessarily the monolithic voting block or political base that kept Bush in power. 

Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout's eye-opening book expertly conveys the complexity, variety, and sensibilities of conservative Christians, dispelling the myths that have long shrouded them in prejudice and political bias. For starters, Greeley and Hout reveal that class and income have trumped moral issues for these Americans more often than we realize: a dramatic majority of working-class and lower-class conservative Christians backed liberals such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton during their runs for president. And when it comes to abortion, most conservative Christians are not consistently pro-life in the absolute fashion usually assumed: they are still more likely to oppose the practice than other Americans, but 86 percent of them are willing to tolerate it to protect the health of the mother or when the woman has been raped, and 22 percent of them are even pro-choice.

What do conservative Christians really think about evolution, homosexuality, or even the meaning of the word of God? Answering these questions and more, The Truth about Conservative Christians will interest—and surprise—a broad range of readers, especially in this heated election year. 

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Agenda Setting, Policies, and Political Systems
A Comparative Approach
Christoffer Green-Pedersen
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Before making significant policy decisions, political actors and parties must first craft an agenda designed to place certain issues at the center of political attention. The agenda-setting approach in political science holds that the amount of attention devoted by the various actors within a political system to issues like immigration, health care, and the economy can inform our understanding of its basic patterns and processes. While there has been considerable attention to how political systems process issues in the United States, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Stefaan Walgrave demonstrate the broader applicability of this approach by extending it to other countries and their political systems.

Agenda Setting and Political Attention brings together essays on eleven countries and two broad themes. Contributors to the first section analyze the extent to which party and electoral changes and shifts in the partisan composition of government have led—or not led—to policy changes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and France. The second section turns the focus on changing institutional structures in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, including the German reunification and the collapse of the Italian party system. Together, the essays make clear the efficacy of the agenda-setting approach for understanding not only how policies evolve, but also how political systems function.
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Selling the Race
Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955
Adam Green
University of Chicago Press, 2006

In Selling the Race, Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately reenvisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.

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Sexual Fields
Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual Life
Adam Isaiah Green
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the late modern period, an unprecedented expansion of specialized erotic worlds has transformed the domain of intimate life. Organized by appetites and dispositions related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age, these erotic worlds are arenas of sexual exploration but, also, sites of stratification and dominion wherein actors vie for partners, social significance, and esteem. These are what Adam Isaiah Green calls sexual fields, which represent a semblance of social life for which he offers a groundbreaking new framework.

To build on the sexual fields framework, Green has gathered a distinguished group of scholars who together make a strong case for sexual field theory as the first systematic theoretical innovation since queer theory in the sociology of sexuality. Expanding on the work of Bourdieu, Green and contributors develop this distinctively sociological approach for analyzing collective sexual life, where much of the sexual life of our society resides today. Coupling field theory with the ethnographic and theoretical expertise of some of the most important scholars of sexual life at work today, Sexual Fields offers a game-changing approach that will revolutionize how sociologists analyze and make sense of contemporary sexual life for years to come.
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Concluding
Henry Green
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Concluding is probably the most lyrical novel by a writer whom Rebecca West has called "the most original" of his time. "Within the compass of a summer's day for all time yet intensely and closely centered upon a particular time and place, we are made aware of man's predicament in a world of transcendent sadness and beauty."—Horizon

"[A] novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall. . . . The sinister world of Concluding is . . . beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom."—from the Foreword by Eudora Welty
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Beyond Carnival
Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil
James N. Green
University of Chicago Press, 1999
For many foreign observers, Brazil still conjures up a collage of exotic images, ranging from the camp antics of Carmen Miranda to the bronzed girl (or boy) from Ipanema moving sensually over the white sands of Rio's beaches. Among these tropical fantasies is that of the uninhibited and licentious Brazilian homosexual, who expresses uncontrolled sexuality during wild Carnival festivities and is welcomed by a society that accepts fluid sexual identity. However, in Beyond Carnival, the first sweeping cultural history of male homosexuality in Brazil, James Green shatters these exotic myths and replaces them with a complex picture of the social obstacles that confront Brazilian homosexuals.

Ranging from the late nineteenth century to the rise of a politicized gay and lesbian rights movement in the 1970s, Green's study focuses on male homosexual subcultures in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. He uncovers the stories of men coping with arrests and street violence, dealing with family restrictions, and resisting both a hostile medical profession and moralizing influences of the Church. Green also describes how these men have created vibrant subcultures with alternative support networks for maintaining romantic and sexual relationships and for surviving in an intolerant social environment. He then goes on to trace how urban parks, plazas, cinemas, and beaches are appropriated for same-sex erotic encounters, bringing us into the world of street cruising, male hustlers, and cross-dressing prostitutes.

Through his creative use of police and medical records, newspapers, literature, newsletters, and extensive interviews, Green has woven a fascinating history, the first of its kind for Latin America, that will set the standard for future works.

"Green brushes aside outworn cultural assumptions about Brazil's queer life to display its full glory, as well as the troubles which homophobia has sent its way. . . . This latest gem in Chicago's 'World of Desire' series offers a shimmering view of queer Brazilian life throughout the 20th century."—Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the 2000 Lambda Literary Awards' Emerging Scholar Award of the Monette/Horwitz Trust

Winner of the 1999 Hubert Herring Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies
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Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides
Kenneth Hart Green
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green explores the critical role played by Maimonides in shaping Leo Strauss’s thought. In uncovering the esoteric tradition employed in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, Strauss made the radical realization that other ancient and medieval philosophers might be concealing their true thoughts through literary artifice. Maimonides and al-Farabi, he saw, allowed their message to be altered by dogmatic considerations only to the extent required by moral and political imperatives and were in fact avid advocates for enlightenment. Strauss also revealed Maimonides’s potential relevance to contemporary concerns, especially his paradoxical conviction that one must confront the conflict between reason and revelation rather than resolve it.
           
An invaluable companion to Green’s comprehensive collection of Strauss’s writings on Maimonides, this volume shows how Strauss confronted the commonly accepted approaches to the medieval philosopher, resulting in both a new understanding of Maimonides and a new depth and direction for his own thought. It will be welcomed by anyone engaged with the work of either philosopher.
 

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The Limits of Transnationalism
Nancy L. Green
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Transnationalism means many things to many people, from crossing physical borders to crossing intellectual ones. The Limits of Transnationalism reassesses the overly optimistic narratives often associated with this malleable term, revealing both the metaphorical and very real obstacles for transnational mobility. Nancy L. Green begins her wide-ranging examination with the story of Frank Gueydan, an early twentieth-century American convicted of manufacturing fake wine in France who complained bitterly that he was neither able to get a fair trial there nor to enlist the help of US officials. Gueydan’s predicament opens the door for a series of inquiries into the past twenty-five years of transnational scholarship, raising questions about the weaknesses of global networks and the slippery nature of citizenship ties for those who try to live transnational lives. The Limits of Transnationalism serves as a cogent reminder of this topic’s complexity, calling for greater attention to be paid to the many bumps in the road.
 
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The Other Americans in Paris
Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941
Nancy L. Green
University of Chicago Press, 2014
While Gertrude Stein hosted the literati of the Left Bank, Mrs. Bates-Batcheller, an American socialite and concert singer in Paris, held sumptuous receptions for the Daughters of the American Revolution in her suburban villa. History may remember the American artists, writers, and musicians of the Left Bank best, but the reality is that there were many more American businessmen, socialites, manufacturers’ representatives, and lawyers living on the other side of the River Seine.  Be they newly minted American countesses married to foreigners with impressive titles or American soldiers who had settled in France after World War I with their French wives, they provide a new view of the notion of expatriates.

Nancy L. Green thus introduces us for the first time to a long-forgotten part of the American overseas population—predecessors to today’s expats—while exploring the politics of citizenship and the business relationships, love lives, and wealth (and poverty for some) of Americans who staked their claim to the City of Light. The Other Americans in Paris shows that elite migration is a part of migration tout court and that debates over “Americanization” have deep roots in the twentieth century.
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Verdict According to Conscience
Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800
Thomas Andrew Green
University of Chicago Press, 1985

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A Fistful of Shells
West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
Toby Green
University of Chicago Press, 2019
By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. 

With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold.

Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.
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Flying Out of this World
Peter Greenaway
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls, and beckoning skies: these are the images British filmmaker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in Flying out of This World, the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts.

As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings ninety-one masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion, and interpretation, illuminate the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin, and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight.

A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology, and meteorology, Flying out of This World is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.
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The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1
Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944
Clement Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism—of Pollock, Miró, and Matisse—has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States.

Greenberg first established his reputation writing for the Partisan Review, which he joined as an editor in 1940. He became art critic for the Nation in 1942, and was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957. His seminal essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" set the terms for the ongoing debate about the relationship of modern high art to popular culture. Though many of his ideas have been challenged, Greenberg has influenced generations of critics, historians, and artists, and he remains influential to this day.
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front cover of The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2
Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949
Clement Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), champion of abstract expressionism and modernism—of Pollock, Miró, and Matisse—has been esteemed by many as the greatest art critic of the second half of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest art critic of all time. On radio and in print, Greenberg was the voice of "the new American painting," and a central figure in the postwar cultural history of the United States.

Greenberg first established his reputation writing for the Partisan Review, which he joined as an editor in 1940. He became art critic for the Nation in 1942, and was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957. His seminal essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" set the terms for the ongoing debate about the relationship of modern high art to popular culture. Though many of his ideas have been challenged, Greenberg has influenced generations of critics, historians, and artists, and he remains influential to this day.
[more]

front cover of The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3
Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956
Clement Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting.

With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art. For each volume, John O'Brian has furnished an introduction, a selected bibliography, and a brief summary of events that places the criticism in its artistic and historical context.
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front cover of The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4
Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969
Clement Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting.

With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art. For each volume, John O'Brian has furnished an introduction, a selected bibliography, and a brief summary of events that places the criticism in its artistic and historical context.
[more]

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The Politics of Pure Science
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1999
The Politics of Pure Science, a pioneering and controversial work, set a new standard for the realistic examination of the place of science in American politics and society. Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents in revealing detail the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the 1970s.

While the book's hard-hitting approach earned praise from a broad audience, it drew harsh fire from many scientists, who did not relish their turn under the microscope. The fact that this dispute is so reminiscent of today's acrimonious "Science Wars" demonstrates that although science has changed a great deal since The Politics of Pure Science first appeared, the politics of science has not—which is why this book retains its importance.

For this new edition, John Maddox (Nature editor emeritus) and Steven Shapin have provided introductory essays that situate the book in broad social and historical context, and Greenberg has written a new afterword taking account of recent developments in the politics of science.

"[A] book of consequence about science as one of the more consequential social institutions in the modern world. It is one that could be understood and should be read by the President, legislators, scientists and the rest of us ordinary folk. . . . Informative and perceptive."—Robert K. Merton, New York Times Book Review
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Science for Sale
The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In recent years the news media have been awash in stories about increasingly close ties between college campuses and multimillion-dollar corporations. Our nation’s universities, the story goes, reap enormous windfalls patenting products of scientific research that have been primarily funded by taxpayers. Meanwhile, hoping for new streams of revenue from their innovations, the same universities are allowing their research—and their very principles—to become compromised by quests for profit. But is that really the case? Is money really hopelessly corrupting science?

With Science for Sale, acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. While universities seek out corporate funding, news stories rarely note that those industry dollars are dwarfed by government support and other funds. Also, while many universities have set up technology transfer offices to pursue profits through patents, many of those offices have been financial busts. Meanwhile, science is showing signs of providing its own solutions, as highly publicized misdeeds in pursuit of profits have provoked promising countermeasures within the field.

But just because the threat is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn’t mean that there’s no danger. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, the temptations of money will always be a threat, and they can only be countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. 

Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale will be indispensable to anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.
[more]

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Science, Money, and Politics
Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars for scientific research. In this book, veteran science reporter Daniel S. Greenberg takes us behind closed doors to show us who gets it, and why. What he reveals is startling: an overlooked world of false claims, pork, and cronyism, where science, money, and politics all manipulate one another.
[more]

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The Construction of Homosexuality
David F. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1990
"At various times, homosexuality has been considered the noblest of loves, a horrible sin, a psychological condition or grounds for torture and execution. David F. Greenberg's careful, encyclopedic and important new book argues that homosexuality is only deviant because society has constructed, or defined, it as deviant. The book takes us over vast terrains of example and detail in the history of homosexuality."—Nicholas B. Dirks, New York Times Book Review
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A Natural History of the Chicago Region
Joel Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2002
In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Joel Greenberg takes readers on a journey that begins in 1673 with Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet—the first Europeans known to have visited the Chicago region—and that we're still on today. This is a fascinating story, told with humor and passion, of forests battling prairies for dominance; of grasslands plowed, wetlands drained, and species driven to extinction in the settlement of the Midwest; and of caring conservationists fighting to preserve and restore the native plants and animals. Intermingling historical anecdotes and episodes straight from the words of early settlers and naturalists with current scientific information, Greenberg places the natural history of the region in a human context, showing how it affects our everyday existence in even the most urbanized landscape of Chicago.
[more]

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Of Prairie, Woods, and Water
Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing
Joel Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In the literary imagination, Chicago evokes images of industry and unbridled urban growth. But the tallgrass prairie and deep forests that once made up Chicago’s landscape also inspired musings from residents and visitors alike. In Of Prairie, Woods, and Water, naturalist Joel Greenberg gathers these unique voices from the land to present an unexpected portrait of Chicago in this often charming, sometimes heart-wrenching anthology of nature writing.

These writings tell the tale of a land in transition—one with abundant, unique, and incredibly lush flora and fauna, a natural history quite elusive today. Drawing on archives he uncovered while writing his acclaimed A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg hand-selected these first-person narratives, all written between 1721 and 1959. Not every author is familiar, but every contribution is distinctive. From a pioneer’s hilarious notes on life in the Kankakee marsh to Theodore Drieser’s poignant plea for conservation of the Tippecanoe River to infamous murderer Nathan Leopold’s charming description of a pet robin he kept in prison, the sources included are as diverse as the nature they describe.
 
The excerpts conclude with insightful biographical essays and traverse a wide area of greater Chicagoland, from the Illinois River to southwest Michigan, from southern Wisconsin to the Limberlost swamp of northeastern Indiana. A fascinating record of Chicago’s changing environmental history, Of Prairie, Woods, and Water captures the natural world in a way that will inspire its continued conservation.
 
 
[more]

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Attachment in the Preschool Years
Theory, Research, and Intervention
Mark T. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 1993
This collection of original articles by leading specialists in child development brings together work from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to establish, for the first time, the importance of the preschool period (eighteen months to four years)for parent-child attachment relationships. Balancing theoretical, research-oriented, and clinical papers, Attachment in the Preschool Years provides valuable data and approaches for those working in a wide range of fields, including developmental psychology and psychopathology, child psychiatry, family therapy, pediatrics, nursing, and early childhood education.

"There is a wealth of information and thought in this book; it does not have a weak or uninteresting chapter, starting with the Preface by Emde, and as a whole, it forms a sort of seminar."—John E. Bates, Contemporary Psychology
[more]

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Architecture under Construction
Stanley Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Mies van der Rohe once commented, “Only skyscrapers under construction reveal their bold constructive thoughts, and then the impression made by their soaring skeletal frames is overwhelming.” Never has this statement resonated more than in recent years, when architectural design has undergone a radical transformation, and when powerful computers allow architects and engineers to design and construct buildings that were impossible just a few years ago.  At the same time, what lies underneath these surfaces is more mysterious than ever before. 

In Architecture under Construction, photographer Stanley Greenberg explores the anatomy and engineering of some of our most unusual new buildings, helping us to understand our own fascination with what makes buildings stand up, and what makes them fall down. As designs for new constructions are revealed and the public watches closely as architects and engineers challenge each other with provocative new forms and equally audacious ideas, Greenberg captures penetrating images that reveal the complex mystery—and beauty—found in the transitory moments before the skin of a building covers up the structures that hold it together.  

Framed by a historical and critical essay by Joseph Rosa and including an afterword by the author, the eighty captivating and thought-provoking images collected here—which focus on some of the most high-profile design projects of the past decade, including buildings designed by Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and Renzo Piano, among others —are not to be missed by anyone with an eye for the almost invisible mechanisms that continue to define our relationship with the built world.

[more]

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Alive with Alzheimer's
Cathy Stein Greenblat
University of Chicago Press, 2004
The confusion, losses, and devastation of Alzheimer's disease are familiar to the millions of Americans suffering from the disease and to their family members. Understandably, declining abilities and changing personal characteristics shape our picture of the disease, leading some to refer to the "double death" of Alzheimer's in which the sufferer drifts away long before his or her eventual physical end.

This small, tender volume of 85 photographs and accompanying discussion powerfully shows the limitations of this view. Cathy Stein Greenblat, an internationally respected sociologist and photographer, demonstrates in Alive with Alzheimer's that, while the ravages of the disease are real, Alzheimer's sufferers can do more than survive, they can thrive. Her images, interviews, and observations attest to the possibility of their being "alive" with Alzheimer's far beyond the expectations of the general public and even of many physicians with long experience with the disease.

Greenblat offers a new vision, taking us into a world of life-enhancing institutional care. Nursing homes and similar facilities don't have to be a last resort; as Greenblat shows, with a dedicated and experienced staff and an enriched environment (that includes respect, choices, pets, and music), extraordinary changes can be effected in Alzheimer's patients. Alive with Alzheimer's, the first photographic book on the disease, offers hope and inspiration. Moreover, its vivid, impressive evidence that ongoing stimulation in a good institutional setting can sustain Alzheimer's patients at a far higher level than is generally believed has significant implications for personal and policy decisions.

The new standard of care chronicled in Alive with Alzheimer's will provide hope and inspiration to those touched by the disease. As Dr. Enid Rockwell writes in her Afterword to Greenblat's moving book, "These photographs are extraordinary for practitioners, for family members, for everyone to see what's going on with these people. The stimulation pictured in this book is more powerful than any medication that we will have in our lifetime. . . . They so vividly show us that there are people inside these bodies, people with personalities, who experience emotion, and they show that there is life after Alzheimer's."
[more]

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Cat Musculature
A Photographic Atlas
Gordon Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 1981
This series of brilliant photographs shows the dissection of the cat musculature. It is designed for use in conjunction with the third edition of Hyman's Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, edited by Marvalee Wake, although it can be used with other textbooks. Every possible step has been taken to make the photographs easy to interpret and to follow. Reference indications to the Wake texts are included, and also concise data on the origin, insertion, and action of each muscle. The scale is such that in most cases no more than five muscles are shown per photograph, thus simplifying the task of visualizing the individual muscles. An invaluable aid for every student of cat anatomy.
[more]

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Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 2017
A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of Greenblatt’s thinking on a subject that has permeated his career and a thrilling tale of wandering, kidnapping, and go-betweens—of daring improvisation, betrayal, and violence. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks, forward to the present, and, in his new preface, even to fantastical meetings between humans and aliens in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greenblatt would have us ask: How is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder—for tolerant recognition of cultural difference—from being poisoned?
[more]

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Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Marvelous Possessions is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World.

In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to the breaking point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Léry, and Montaigne—and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages—wonder is a sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.

Marvelous Possession is not only a collection of the odd and exotic through which Stephen Greenblatt powerfully conveys a sense of the marvelous, but also a highly original extension of his thinking on a subject that has occupied him throughout his career. The book reaches back to the ancient Greeks and forward to the present to ask how it is possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder from being poisoned?

"A marvellous book. It is also a compelling and a powerful one. Nothing so original has ever been written on European responses to 'The wonder of the New World.'"—Anthony Pagden, Times Literary Supplement

"By far the most intellectually gripping and penetrating discussion of the relationship between intruders and natives is provided by Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions."—Simon Schama, The New Republic

"For the most engaging and illuminating perspective of all, read Marvelous Possessions."—Laura Shapiro, Newsweek
[more]

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Renaissance Self-Fashioning
From More to Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz
[more]

front cover of Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Renaissance Self-Fashioning
From More to Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

"No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz
[more]

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Shakespeare's Freedom
Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.

Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.

A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

[more]

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Writing Science in Plain English
Anne E. Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Scientific writing is often dry, wordy, and difficult to understand. But, as Anne E. Greene shows in Writing Science in Plain English,writers from all scientific disciplines can learn to produce clear, concise prose by mastering just a few simple principles.
 
This short, focused guide presents a dozen such principles based on what readers need in order to understand complex information, including concrete subjects, strong verbs, consistent terms, and organized paragraphs. The author, a biologist and an experienced teacher of scientific writing, illustrates each principle with real-life examples of both good and bad writing and shows how to revise bad writing to make it clearer and more concise. She ends each chapter with practice exercises so that readers can come away with new writing skills after just one sitting.
 
Writing Science in Plain English can help writers at all levels of their academic and professional careers—undergraduate students working on research reports, established scientists writing articles and grant proposals, or agency employees working to follow the Plain Writing Act. This essential resource is the perfect companion for all who seek to write science effectively.
[more]

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The Doctor Who Wasn't There
Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth
Jeremy A. Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This gripping history shows how the electronic devices we use to access care influence the kind of care we receive.

The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the politics and economies of American healthcare, physician and historian Jeremy A. Greene explores the role that electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of our health.

Today’s telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones of the 1920s, the radios that broadcasted health data in the 1940s, the closed-circuit televisions that enabled telemedicine in the 1950s, or the online systems that created electronic medical records in the 1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in the past, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms also produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer forms of communication that took their place. 

Illuminating the social and technical contexts in which electronic medicine has been conceived and put into practice, Greene’s history shows the urgent stakes, then and now, for those who would seek in new media the means to build a more equitable future for American healthcare. 
[more]

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Therapeutic Revolutions
Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century
Jeremy A. Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2016
When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: Back then we had few effective remedies, but now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease, from antibiotics to psychotropics to steroids to anticancer agents.

This collection challenges the historical accuracy of this revolutionary narrative and offers instead a more nuanced account of the process of therapeutic innovation and the relationships between the development of medicines and social change. These assembled histories and ethnographies span three continents and use the lived experiences of physicians and patients, consumers and providers, and marketers and regulators to reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the actual ways these claims have been used and understood in specific sites, from postwar West Germany pharmacies to twenty-first century Nigerian street markets. By asking us to rethink a story we thought we knew, Therapeutic Revolutions offers invaluable insights to historians, anthropologists, and social scientists of medicine.
 
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Five Words
Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes
Roland Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines.

Rather than analyzing works, careers, or histories, Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these five words. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also proposes new methods that take advantage of digital resources like full-text databases, but still depend on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.
[more]

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Unrequited Conquests
Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas
Roland Greene
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Love poetry dominated European literature during the Renaissance. Its attitudes, conventions, and values appeared not only in courtly settings but also in the transatlantic world, where cultures were being built, power exercised, and policies made. In this major contribution to our understanding of both the Age of Exploration and early modern lyric, Roland Greene argues that love poetry was not simply a reflection of the times but a means of cultural transformation.

European encounters with the Americas awakened many forms of desire, which pervaded the writings of explorers like Columbus and his contemporaries. These experiences in turn shaped colonial society in Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere. The New World, while it could be explored, conquered, and exploited, could never really be "known"—leaving Europe's desire continually unrequited and the project of empire unfulfilled.

Using numerous poetic examples and extensive historical documentation, Unrequited Conquests rewrites the relations between the Renaissance and colonial Latin America and between poetry and history.
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Center
Ideas and Institutions
Liah Greenfeld
University of Chicago Press, 1988
There are several concepts within the social sciences that refer to the fundamental realities on which the various disciplines focus their attention. The concept of the "center," as defined by Edward Shils, has such a status in sociology, for it deals with and attempts to provide an answer to the central question of the discipline—the question of the constitution of society.

"Center" is a commonly used term with a variety of meanings. According to editors Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin, "center" carries a twofold meaning when used as a concept. In its first sense, it is a synonym for "central value system," referring to irreducible values and beliefs that establish the identity of individuals and bind them into a common universe. In its second sense, "center" refers to "central institutional system," the authoritative institutions and persons who often express or embody the central value system. Both meanings imply a corresponding idea of "periphery," referring both to the elements of society that need to be integrated and to institutions and persons who lack authority.

The original essays compiled in this volume examine and apply the concept of the center in different contexts. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines—classics, religion, philosophy, history, literary criticism, anthropology, political science, and sociology—which serves to underscore the far-reaching significance of the Shilsean theory of society. The interrelated subsets of the "center-periphery" theme addressed here include: symbolic systems, intellectuals, the expansion of the center into the periphery, parallel concepts in the work of other scholars besides Shils, and the paths of research inspired by these concepts. The volume features an introspective essay by Shils himself, in which he reexamines his central ideas in the light of new experiences and the ideas of others, some of them contained in this volume.

By drawing together such diverse scholars around a unified idea, this collection achieves a cohesion that makes it an exciting contribution to the comparative analysis of social and cultural systems. A collective effort in social theory, Center: Ideas and Institutions is a testimony to the breadth and complexity of one of man's ideas.
[more]

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The Failure of Corporate Law
Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities
Kent Greenfield
University of Chicago Press, 2007

When used in conjunction with corporations, the term “public” is misleading. Anyone can purchase shares of stock, but public corporations themselves are uninhibited by a sense of societal obligation or strict public oversight. In fact, managers of most large firms are prohibited by law from taking into account the interests of the public in decision making, if doing so hurts shareholders. But this has not always been the case, as until the beginning of the twentieth century, public corporations were deemed to have important civic responsibilities.

With The Failure of Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield hopes to return corporate law to a system in which the public has a greater say in how firms are governed. Greenfield maintains that the laws controlling firms should be much more protective of the public interest and of the corporation’s various stakeholders, such as employees. Only when the law of corporations is evaluated as a branch of public law—as with constitutional law or environmental law—will it be clear what types of changes can be made in corporate governance to improve the common good. Greenfield proposes changes in corporate governance that would enable corporations to meet the progressive goal of creating wealth for society as a whole rather than merely for shareholders and executives.

[more]

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Soda Science
Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola
Susan Greenhalgh
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs.
 
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
 
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
 
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
 
Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.
[more]

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Mapping
David Greenhood
University of Chicago Press, 1964
"A praiseworthy introduction to the lore of maps and a mine of information for the amateur map-maker."—O.M. Miller, American Geographical Society

"This book should be welcomed by all students of mapping, for it will take them in uncomplicated stages through the complexities of compiling a map. . . . Mr. Greenwood is to be congratulated on an excellent book."—C.J. Angus, Canadian Geographical Journal

"For the baggy and middle-aged who cannot afford skiing in Austria or sailing off Bimini, Greenhood invites his readers to a sort of intellectual excitement which neither skiing nor sailing could equal. . . . Unless you work professionally with maps to the degree that a navigator does, for instance, this book will fascinate and enthrall you."—Monroe Bush, American Forests

"A teacher who wishes to go into the classroom with a storehouse of knowledge and ideas will find this a remarkable book. It is easy to read, and each page contains information which can be fed into the work in progress no matter which area of the world is being studied."—Instructor
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Ruling Culture
Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy
Fiona Greenland
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers. 
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Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative
Jack M. Greenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In this extraordinary explication of one of the most enigmatic and influential works of the Renaissance, the Uffizi Circumcision of Christ, Jack M. Greenstein reassesses the nature and goals of high humanist narrative painting.

"Greenstein has raised the level of sophistication of the historical criticism of Renaissance painting by at least one whole notch; at the same time, he has written a book for everyone interested in problems of interpretation."—David Summers, University of Virginia
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Race and Authority in Urban Politics
Community Relations and the War on Poverty
David Greenstone
University of Chicago Press, 1976
In this penetrating book, the authors provide a systematic empirical analysis of an important public policy issue—citizen participation in the Community Action Program of the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty." This Phoenix edition includes a new introduction in which the authors explicate the most important themes in their analysis.

In a series of lively chapters, Greenstone and Peterson show how the coalitions that formed around the community action question developed not out of electoral or organizational interests alone but were strongly influenced by prevailing conceptions of the nature of authority in America. The book stresses the way in which both machine and reform structures affected the ability of minority groups to organize effectively and to form alliances in urban politics. It considers the wide-ranging critiques made of the Community Action Program by conservative, liberal, and radical analysts and finds that all of them fail to appreciate the significance and intensity of the racial cleavage in American politics.
[more]

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Changing Lives
Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy
Peter W. Greenwood
University of Chicago Press, 2005
One of the most astonishing aspects of juvenile crime is how little is known about the impact of the policies and programs put in place to fight it. The most commonly used strategies and programs for combating juvenile delinquency problems primarily rely on intuition and fads. Fortunately, as a result of the promising new research documented in Changing Lives, these deficiencies in our juvenile justice system might quickly be remedied.

Peter W. Greenwood here demonstrates here that as crimes rates have fallen, researchers have identified more connections between specific risk factors and criminal behavior, while program developers have discovered a wide array of innovative interventions. The result of all this activity, he reveals, has been the revelation of a few prevention models that reduce crime much more cost-effectively than popular approaches such as tougher sentencing, D.A.R.E., boot camps, and "scared straight" programs. Changing Lives expertly presents the most promising of these prevention programs, their histories, the quality of evidence to support their effectiveness, the public policy programs involved in bringing them into wider use, and the potential for investments and developmental research to increase the range and quality of programs.
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Rereading the Black Legend
The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires
Margaret R. Greer
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The phrase “The Black Legend” was coined in 1912 by a Spanish journalist in protest of the characterization of Spain by other Europeans as a backward country defined by ignorance, superstition, and religious fanaticism, whose history could never recover from the black mark of its violent conquest of the Americas. Challenging this stereotype, Rereading the Black Legend contextualizes Spain’s uniquely tarnished reputation by exposing the colonial efforts of other nations whose interests were served by propagating the “Black Legend.”

A distinguished group of contributors here examine early modern imperialisms including the Ottomans in Eastern Europe, the Portuguese in East India, and the cases of Mughal India and China, to historicize the charge of unique Spanish brutality in encounters with indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration. The geographic reach and linguistic breadth of this ambitious collection will make it a valuable resource for any discussion of race, national identity, and religious belief in the European Renaissance.
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Foragers and Farmers
Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe
Susan Alling Gregg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Susan Alling Gregg presents a sophisticated model for the transition from hunter-gatherer societies tosettled agricultural communities in prehistoric Europe. She proposes that farmers and foragers must have encountered each other and interacted in a variety of ways for over a millennium as farming systems spread throughout the continent. Several variations of subsistence developed, such as foraging and hunting for part of the year and farming for the rest, or cooperative exchange arrangements between hunter-gatherers and farmers throughout the year.

Gregg examines anthropological, ecological, and archaeological dimensions of prehistoric population interaction. She then examines the ecological requirements of both crops and livestock and, in order to identify an optimal farming strategy for Early Neolithic populations, develops a computer simulation to examine various resource mixes. Turning to the foragers, she models the effects that interaction with the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement system.

Supporting her model with archaeological, ecological, and ethnobotanical evidence from southwest Germany, Gregg shows that when foragers and farmers occur contemporaneously, both need to be considered before either can be understood. Theoretically and methodologically, her work builds upon earlier studies of optimal diet and foraging strategy, extending the model to food-producing populations. The applicability of Gregg's generalized model for both wild and domestic resources reaches far beyond her case study of Early Neolithic Germany; it will interest both Old and New World archaeologists.
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Anxious Pleasures
The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People
Thomas Gregor
University of Chicago Press, 1985
"Good fish get dull but sex is always fun." So say the Mehinaku people of Brazil. But Thomas Gregor shows that sex brings a supreme ambiguity to the villagers' lives. In their elaborate rituals—especially those practiced by the men in their secret societies—the Mehinaku give expression to a system of symbols reminiscent of psychosexual neuroses identified by Freud: castration anxiety, Oedipal conflict, fantasies of loss of strength through sex, and a host of others. "If we look carefully," writes Gregor, "we will see reflections of our own sexual nature in the life ways of an Amazonian people." The book is illustrated with Mehinaku drawings of ritual texts and myths, as well as with photographs of the villagers taking part in both everyday and ceremonial activities.
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Mehinaku
The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village
Thomas Gregor
University of Chicago Press, 1977
Thomas Gregor sees the Mehinaku Indians of central Brazil as performers of roles, engaged in an ongoing improvisational drama of community life. The layout of the village and the architecture of the houses make the community a natural theater in the round, rendering the villagers' actions highly visible and audible. Lacking privacy, the Mehinaku have become masters of stagecraft and impression management, enthusiastically publicizing their good citizenship while ingeniously covering up such embarrassments as extramarital affairs and theft.
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Politics and the Order of Love
An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship
Eric Gregory
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Augustine—for all of his influence on Western culture and politics—was hardly a liberal. Drawing from theology, feminist theory, and political philosophy, Eric Gregory offers here a liberal ethics of citizenship, one less susceptible to anti-liberal critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition. The result is a book that expands Augustinian imaginations for liberalism and liberal imaginations for Augustinianism. 
Gregory examines a broad range of Augustine’s texts and their reception in different disciplines and identifies two classical themes which have analogues in secular political theory: love—and related notions of care, solidarity, and sympathy—and sin—as well as related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest. From an Augustinian point of view, Gregory argues, love and sin constrain each other in ways that yield a distinctive vision of the limits and possibilities of politics.
In providing a constructive argument for Christian participation in liberal democratic societies, Gregory advances efforts to revive a political theology in which love’s relation to justice is prominent.  Politics and the Order of Love will provoke new conversations for those interested in Christian ethics, moral psychology, and the role of religion in a liberal society.
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From Many Gods to One
Divine Action in Renaissance Epic
Tobias Gregory
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Epic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief.

From Many Gods to One offers the first comparative study of poetic approaches to the problem of epic divine action. Through readings of Petrarch, Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton, Tobias Gregorydescribes the narrative and ideological consequences of the epic’s turn from pagan to Christian. Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines—religious studies, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature—From Many Gods to One sheds new light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.

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Architecture, Means and Ends
Vittorio Gregotti
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Vittorio Gregotti—the architect of Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium, Milan’s Arcimboldi Opera Theater, and Lisbon’s Centro Cultural de Belém, among many other noted constructions—is not only a designer of international repute but an acclaimed theorist and critic. Architecture, Means and Ends is his practical and imaginative reflection on the role of the technical aspects of architectural design, both as part of the larger process of innovation and in relation to the mythic opposition between vision and construction.

Interweaving the seemingly irreconcilable concerns of aesthetics, meaning, and construction,  Architecture, Means and Ends reflects Gregotti’s overarching claim that buildings always have a symbolic, cultural content. In this book, he argues that by making symbolic expression a primary objective in the design of a project, the designer will produce a practical aesthetic as well as an ethical solution. Architecture, Means and Ends embraces that philosophy and will appeal to those, like Gregotti, working at the intersections of the history of design, art criticism, and architectural theory.

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Greek Tragedies, Volume 1
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.
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Greek Tragedies, Volume 2
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 1960
In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.
[more]

front cover of Greek Tragedies, Volume 3
Greek Tragedies, Volume 3
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In three paperback volumes, the Grene and Lattimore editions offer a selection of the most important and characteristic plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the nine-volume anthology of The Complete Greek Tragedies. Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.
[more]

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Of Farming and Classics
A Memoir
David Grene
University of Chicago Press, 2006

A fiercely independent thinker, colorful storyteller, and spirited teacher, David Grene devoted his life to two things: farming, which he began as a boy in Ireland and continued into old age; and classics, which he taught for several decades that culminated in his translating and editing, with Richmond Lattimore, of The Complete Greek Tragedies.

In this charming memoir, which he wrote during the years leading up to his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine, Grene weaves together these interests to tell a quirky and absorbing story of the sometimes turbulent and always interesting life he split between the University of Chicago—where he helped found the Committee on Social Thought—and the farm he kept back in Ireland.

Charting the path that took him from Europe to Chicago in 1937, and encompassing his sixty-five-year career at the university, Grene’s book draws readers into the heady and invigorating climate of his time there. And it is elegantly balanced with reflections stemming from his work on the farm where he hunted, plowed and regularly traveled on horseback to bring his cows home for milking. Grene’s form and humor are quite his own, and his brilliant storytelling will enthrall anyone interested in the classics, rural Ireland, or twentieth-century intellectual history, especially as it pertains to the University of Chicago.

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A Box of Photographs
Roger Grenier
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Most attempts to generalize about photography as a medium run up against our experience of the photographs themselves. We live with photos and cameras every day, and philosophies of the photographic image do little to shake our intimate sense of how we produce photographs and what they mean to us. In this book that is equal parts memoir and intellectual and cultural history, French writer Roger Grenier contemplates the ways that photography can change the course of a life, reflecting along the way on the history of photography and its practitioners.
 
Unfolding in brief, charming vignettes, A Box of Photographs evokes Grenier’s childhood in Pau, his war years, and his working life at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris. Throughout these personal stories, Grenier subtly weaves the story of a lifetime of practicing and thinking about photography and its heroes—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Brassaï, Inge Morath, and others. Adding their own insights about photography to the narrative are a striking range of writers, thinkers, and artists, from Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, and Arthur Schopenhauer to Susan Sontag, Edgar Degas, and Eugène Delacroix. Even cameras themselves come to life and take on personalities: an Agfa accompanies Grenier on grueling military duty in Algeria, a Voigtlander almost gets him killed by German soldiers during the liberation of Paris, and an ill-fated Olympus drowns in a boating accident. Throughout, Grenier draws us into the private life of photographs, seeking the secrets they hold for him and for us.
 
A valedictory salute to a lost world of darkrooms, proofs, and the gummed paper corners of old photo albums, A Box of Photographs is a warm look at the most honest of life’s mirrors.
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The Difficulty of Being a Dog
Roger Grenier
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The forty-three lovingly crafted vignettes within The Difficulty of Being a Dog dig elegantly to the center of a long, mysterious, and often intense relationship: that between human beings and dogs. In doing so, Roger Grenier introduces us to dogs real and literary, famous and reviled—from Ulysses's Argos to Freud's Lün to the hundreds of dogs exiled from Constantinople in 1910 and deposited on a desert island—and gives us a sense of what makes our relationships with them so meaningful.
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Palace of Books
Roger Grenier
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For decades, French writer, editor, and publisher Roger Grenier has been enticing readers with compact, erudite books that draw elegant connections between the art of living and the work of art. Under Grenier’s wry gaze, clichés crumble, and offbeat anecdotes build to powerful insights.

With Palace of Books, he invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people feel the need to write, or what is involved in putting one’s self on the page, or how a writer knows she’s written her last sentence, Grenier marshals apposite passages from his favorite writers:  Chekhov, Baudelaire, Proust, James, Kafka, Mansfield and many others. Those writers mingle companionably with tales from Grenier’s half-century as an editor and friend to countless legendary figures, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, and Brassai,.

Grenier offers here a series of observations and quotations that feel as spontaneous as good conversation, yet carry the lasting insights of a lifetime of reading and thinking. Palace of Books is rich with pleasures and surprises, the perfect accompaniment to old literary favorites, and the perfect introduction to new ones.
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The Protestant Temperament
Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America
Philip Greven
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence—from letters, diaries, and other intimate family records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Philip Greven explores the strikingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children were reared in America. In tracing the hidden continuities of religious experience, of attitudes toward God, children, the self, sexuality, pleasure, virtue, and achievement, Greven identifies three distinct Protestant temperaments prevailing among Americans at the time: the Evangelical, the Moderate, and the General. The Protestant Temperament is a powerful reassessment of the role of child-rearing and religion in early American life.
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The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville
Fulke Greville
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Along with his childhood friend Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Thom Gunn’s selection of Greville’s short poems includes the whole of Greville’s lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville’s verse dramas. Gunn’s introduction places Greville’s thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Greville’s own poetic achievement. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

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Getting In
The Essential Guide to Finding a STEMM Undergrad Research Experience
Paris H. Grey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An empowering guide for students in STEMM that demystifies the process of securing undergraduate research experiences.
 
Conducting research is an important foundation for many undergraduates on STEMM career paths. But landing an extremely competitive research spot that is also an enriching experience involves knowing how to present yourself effectively and an awareness of your goals and expectations. In this book, an expert lab manager and a longtime principal investigator share their secrets for obtaining these coveted positions.
 
Offering advice to students in a wide variety of STEMM fields at both research-intensive universities and primarily undergraduate institutions, Getting In helps students navigate the hidden curriculum of academia, unofficial rules that disproportionately affect first-generation college students and those from low-income backgrounds and communities historically underrepresented in science. The authors provide not only an overview of STEMM research and lab opportunities but also specific strategies for the entire application process—including how to write emails that get noticed by busy professors, how to ask for a research position during office hours, and interview questions to prepare for—so students can claim their place in research settings.
 
With its emphasis on the many interpersonal and professional benefits of research experiences, Getting In equips all STEMM undergrads with the tools they need both to secure these valued positions and to develop habits that will build productive relationships with their future research mentors.

As an undergrad, Getting In will help you:
 
  • determine how much time you can spend on research by evaluating your current activity level and goals.
  • find the time to do research without giving up your social life or risking your GPA.
  • avoid common mistakes in the search, application, or interview that make it harder to find a research experience.
  • write emails that get you noticed by busy professors by customizing the included templates.
  • prepare for tough interview questions so you’ll impress the interviewer with your answers, and be able to determine if the position is right for you.

As a research mentor, Getting In will help your students:
 
  • navigate the hidden curriculum of finding a research experience in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM).
  • set realistic expectations for their research experience.
  • understand why conducting research requires effort and will include some failure and other challenges.
  • be active participants in their success in the lab.
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Life and Research
A Survival Guide for Early-Career Biomedical Scientists
Paris H. Grey
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Life in a research lab can be daunting, especially for early-career scientists. Personal and professional hurdles abound in bench research, and this book by two seasoned lab professionals is here to help graduate students, postdocs, and staff scientists recognize stumbling blocks and avoid common pitfalls.
 
Building and maintaining a mentoring network, practicing self-care and having a life outside of the lab, understanding that what works perfectly for a labmate might not work for you—these are just a few of the strategies that lab manager and molecular biologist Paris H. Grey and PI and geneticist David G. Oppenheimer wished they had implemented far sooner in their careers. They also offer practical advice on managing research projects, sharing your work on social media, and attending conferences. Above all, they coach early-career scientists to avoid burnout and make the most of every lab experience to grow and learn.  
 
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Tuning the World
The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859–1955
Fanny Gribenski
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Tuning the World tells the unknown story of how the musical pitch A 440 became the global norm.

Now commonly accepted as the point of reference for musicians in the Western world, A 440 hertz only became the standard pitch during an international conference held in 1939. The adoption of this norm was the result of decades of negotiations between countries, involving a diverse group of performers, composers, diplomats, physicists, and sound engineers. Although there is widespread awareness of the variability of musical pitches over time, as attested by the use of lower frequencies to perform early music repertoires, no study has fully explained the invention of our current concert pitch. In this book, Fanny Gribenski draws on a rich variety of previously unexplored archival sources and a unique combination of musicological perspectives, transnational history, and science studies to tell the unknown story of how A 440 became the global norm. Tuning the World demonstrates the aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and political contingencies underlying the construction of one of the most “natural” objects of contemporary musical performance and shows how this century-old effort was ultimately determined by the influence of a few powerful nations.
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Botanical Icons
Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean
Andrew Griebeler
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.
 
This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean.
 
Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity.
 
Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science.
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Animal Minds
Donald R. Griffin
University of Chicago Press, 1992


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