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Yali's Question
Sugar, Culture, and History
Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Yali's Question is the story of a remarkable physical and social creation—Ramu Sugar Limited (RSL), a sugar plantation created in a remote part of Papua New Guinea. As an embodiment of imported industrial production, RSL's smoke-belching, steam-shrieking factory and vast fields of carefully tended sugar cane contrast sharply with the surrounding grassland. RSL not only dominates the landscape, but also shapes those culturally diverse thousands who left their homes to work there.

To understand the creation of such a startling place, Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz explore the perspectives of the diverse participants that had a hand in its creation. In examining these views, they also consider those of Yali, a local Papua New Guinean political leader. Significantly, Yali features not only in the story of RSL, but also in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning world history Guns, Germs, and Steel—a history probed through its contrast with RSL's. The authors' disagreement with Diamond stems, not from the generality of his focus and the specificity of theirs, but from a difference in view about how history is made—and from an insistence that those with power be held accountable for affecting history.
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Yaya's Story
The Quest for Well-Being in the World
Paul Stoller
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Yaya’s Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller—its author—an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and culture, these two men’s lives couldn’t be more different. But when they were both threatened by a grave illness—cancer—those differences evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential convergence, a deep camaraderie in the face of the most harrowing of circumstances. Yaya’s Story is that story.
           
Harouna and Stoller would meet in Harlem, at a bustling African market where Harouna built a life as an African art trader and Stoller was conducting research. Moving from Belayara in Niger to Silver Spring, Maryland, and from the Peace Corps to fieldwork to New York, Stoller recounts their separate lives and how the threat posed by cancer brought them a new, profound, and shared sense of meaning. Combining memoir, ethnography, and philosophy through a series of interconnected narratives, he tells a story of remarkable friendship and the quest for well-being. It’s a story of difference and unity, of illness and health, a lyrical reflection on human resiliency and the shoulders we lean on.    
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The Year of the Gorilla
George B. Schaller
University of Chicago Press, 2010

This seminal work chronicles George B. Schaller’s two years of travel and observation of gorillas in East and Central Africa in the late 1950s, high in the Virunga volcanoes on the Zaire-Rwanda-Uganda border. There, he learned that these majestic animals, far from being the aggressive apes of film and fiction, form close-knit societies of caring mothers and protective fathers watching over playful young. Alongside his observations of gorilla society, Schaller celebrates the enforced yet splendid solitude of the naturalist, recounts the adventures he experienced along the way, and offers a warning against poaching and other human threats against these endangered creatures. This edition features a postscript detailing Schaller’s more recent visits with gorillas, current to 2009. 

“Whether the author is tracking gorillas, slipping past elephant herds on narrow jungle paths, avoiding poachers’ deadfalls, or routing Watusi invaders, this is an exciting book. Although Schaller feels that this is ‘not an adventure book,’ few readers will be able to agree.”—Irven DeVore, Science

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The Year of the Gorilla
George B. Schaller
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"A sensitive and articulate observer, [Schaller] is at his best when he is describing the forest itself . . . . This is an exciting book. Although Schaller feels that this is 'not an adventure book,' few readers will be able to agree."—Irven DeVore, Science
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A Year with Nature
An Almanac
Marty Crump
University of Chicago Press, 2018
A Year with Nature is an almanac like none you’ve ever seen: combining science and aesthetics, it is a daily affirmation of the extraordinary richness of biodiversity and our enduring beguilement by its beauty. With a text by herpetologist and natural history writer Marty Crump and a cornucopia of original illustrations by Bronwyn McIvor, this quirky quotidian reverie gazes across the globe, media, and time as it celebrates date-appropriate natural topics ranging from the founding of the National Park Service to annual strawberry, garlic, shrimp, hummingbird, and black bear festivals.

With Crump, we mark the publication of classics like Carson’s Silent Spring and White’s Charlotte’s Web, and even the musical premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. We note the discovery of the structure of DNA and the mountain gorilla, the rise of citizen science projects, and the work of people who’ve shaped how we view and protect nature—from Aristotle to E. O. Wilson. Some days feature US celebrations, like National Poinsettia Day and National Cat Day; others highlight country-specific celebrations, like Australia’s Wombat Day and Thailand’s Monkey Buffet Festival, during which thousands of macaques feast on an ornately arranged spread of fruits and vegetables. Crump also highlights celebrations that span borders, from World Wildlife Conservation Day to International Mountain Day and global festivities for snakes, sea turtles, and chocolate. Interweaving fascinating facts on everything from jellyfish bodies to monthly birth flowers with folkloric entries featuring the Loch Ness Monster, unicorns, and ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology, the almanac is as exhaustive as it is enchanting.

A Year with Nature celebrates the wonder and beauty of our natural world as we have expressed it in visual arts, music, literature, science, natural history, and everyday experience. But more than this, the almanac’s vignettes encourage us to contemplate how we can help ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy the landscapes and rich biodiversity we so deeply cherish.
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Yearnings of the Soul
Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah
Jonathan Garb
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In Yearnings of the Soul, Jonathan Garb uncovers a crucial thread in the story of modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism more generally: psychology. Returning psychology to its roots as an attempt to understand the soul, he traces the manifold interactions between psychology and spirituality that have arisen over five centuries of Kabbalistic writing, from sixteenth-century Galilee to twenty-first-century New York. In doing so, he shows just how rich Kabbalah’s psychological tradition is and how much it can offer to the corpus of modern psychological knowledge.
           
Garb follows the gradual disappearance of the soul from modern philosophy while drawing attention to its continued persistence as a topic in literature and popular culture. He pays close attention to James Hillman’s “archetypal psychology,” using it to engage critically with the psychoanalytic tradition and reflect anew on the cultural and political implications of the return of the soul to contemporary psychology. Comparing Kabbalistic thought to adjacent developments in Catholic, Protestant, and other popular expressions of mysticism, Garb ultimately offers a thought-provoking argument for the continued relevance of religion to the study of psychology. 
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Yellowstone Wolves
Science and Discovery in the World's First National Park
Edited by Douglas W. Smith, Daniel R. Stahler, and Daniel R. MacNulty
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 2020, it will have been twenty-five years since one of the greatest wildlife conservation and restoration achievements of the twentieth century took place: the reintroduction of wolves to the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. Eradicated after the park was established, then absent for seventy years, these iconic carnivores returned to Yellowstone in 1995 when the US government reversed its century-old policy of extermination and—despite some political and cultural opposition—began the reintroduction of forty-one wild wolves from Canada and northwest Montana. In the intervening decades, scientists have studied their myriad behaviors, from predation to mating to wolf pup play, building a one-of-a-kind field study that has both allowed us to witness how the arrival of top predators can change an entire ecosystem and provided a critical window into impacts on prey, pack composition, and much else.
 
Here, for the first time in a single book, is the incredible story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone National Park as told by the very people responsible for their reintroduction, study, and management. Anchored in what we have learned from Yellowstone, highlighting the unique blend of research techniques that have given us this knowledge, and addressing the major issues that wolves still face today, this book is as wide-ranging and awe-inspiring as the Yellowstone restoration effort itself. We learn about individual wolves, population dynamics, wolf-prey relationships, genetics, disease, management and policy, newly studied behaviors and interactions with other species, and the rippling ecosystem effects wolves have had on Yellowstone’s wild and rare landscape. Perhaps most importantly of all, the book also offers solutions to ongoing controversies and debates.
 
Featuring a foreword by Jane Goodall, beautiful images, a companion online documentary by celebrated filmmaker Bob Landis, and contributions from more than seventy wolf and wildlife conservation luminaries from Yellowstone and around the world, Yellowstone Wolves is a gripping, accessible celebration of the extraordinary Yellowstone Wolf Project—and of the park through which these majestic and important creatures once again roam.
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Yerkes Observatory, 1892-1950
The Birth, Near Death, and Resurrection of a Scientific Research Institution
Donald E. Osterbrock
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Drawing on his experience as historian of astronomy, practicing astrophysicist, and director of Lick Observatory, Donald Osterbrock uncovers a chapter in the history of astronomy by providing the story of the Yerkes Observatory.

"An excellent description of the ups and downs of a major observatory."—Jack Meadows, Nature

"Historians are much indebted to Osterbrock for this new contribution to the fascinating story of twentieth-century American astronomy."—Adriaan Blaauw, Journal for the History of Astronomy

"An important reference about one of the key American observatories of this century."—Woodruff T. Sullivan III, Physics Today
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Yes
Thomas Bernhard
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The narrator, a scientist working on antibodies and suffering from emotional and mental illness, meets a Persian woman, the companion of a Swiss engineer, at an office in rural Austria. For the scientist, his endless talks with the strange Asian woman mean release from his condition, but for the Persian woman, as her own circumstances deteriorate, there is only one answer.

"Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent

"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."—Spectator

Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and Brüchner prizes, and Le Prix Séguier.
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Yet Another Costume Party Debacle
Why Racial Ignorance Persists on Elite College Campuses
Ingrid A. Nelson
University of Chicago Press
How the policies of elite colleges allow racially themed parties to continue by perpetuating the status quo.
 
On a cold February evening, a group of students at Bowdoin College, an elite and historically white liberal arts college in Maine, gathered to drink tequila at a party referred to as “not not a fiesta.” By noon the next day, Instagram videos of students sporting miniature sombreros had spread like wildfire through campus. Over the next few weeks, national media outlets would broadcast the embarrassing fallout. But the frequency with which similar parties recur on campuses across the United States begs the question: what, if anything, do undergraduates learn about race and racism from these encounters?

Drawing on interviews and archival research, Yet Another Costume Party Debacle shows us how colleges both contest and reproduce racialized systems of power. Sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson juxtaposes how students and administrators discuss race with how they behave in the aftermath of racially charged campus controversies. Nelson spoke in-depth with students and other key players in several controversial parties—“Cracksgiving,” a “gangster party,” and the “not not a fiesta” tequila party—at Bowdoin. The college’s administrative response failed to encourage productive dialogue or address larger questions about race on campus. Nelson shows how the underlying campus structures at elite liberal arts colleges foster an environment that is ripe for racially charged incidents; we shouldn’t be surprised when we read about yet another costume party debacle. Nelson advises how we can take charge of diversity on our campuses by changing the systems that bring students together and drive them apart.
 
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Yoga and the Hindu Tradition
Jean Varenne
University of Chicago Press, 1977
A popular and critical success when it first appeared in France, Yoga and the Hindu Tradition has freed Yoga from the common misconceptions of the recent Yoga vogue. Jean Varenne, the distinguished French Orientalist, presents the theory of classical Yoga, in all its richness, as a method—a concrete way to reach the Absolute through spiritual exercises—which makes possible the transition from existence to essence.

This excellent translation, including line drawings and charts, a glossary of technical terms, and a complete translation of the Yoga Darshana Upanishad, begins with a brief description of the metaphysical and religious history on which Yoga is based. Varenne discusses the theoretical conception of Yoga as the search for liberating knowledge, concluding with a brief indication of the physical practices and extra Yogic themes such as Kundalini and Tantrism. It is the author's hope that "those who read [this book] will come to realize that it is in fact dishonest to reduce Yoga to some sort of physical training, or to just an occult doctrine; it is a 'world view' a Weltanschauung that comprehends reality in its totality."

"The straightforward, well-organized presentation makes the book itself a microcosm of what Varenne singles out as a dominant feature of classical Hindu thought—a bringing of the complex and multitudinous into a unity."—Judith Guttman, Yoga Journal
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Yorùbá Bàtá Goes Global
Artists, Culture Brokers, and Fans
Debra L. Klein
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Responding to growing international interest in the Yorùbá culture of southwestern Nigeria, practitioners of bàtá—a centuries-old drumming, dancing, and singing tradition—have recast themselves as traditional performers in a global market. As the Nigerian market for ritual bàtá has been declining, international opportunities for performance have grown. Debra L. Klein’s lively ethnography explores this disjunction, revealing the world of bàtá artists and the global culture market that helps to sustain their art.

Yorùbá Bàtá Goes Global describes the dramatic changes and reinventions of traditional bàtá performance in recent years, showing how they are continually recreated, performed, and sold. Klein delves into the lives of Yorùbá musicians, focusing on their strategic collaborations with artists, culture brokers, researchers, and entrepreneurs worldwide. And she explores how reinvigorated performing ensembles are beginning to parlay success on the world stage into increased power and status within Nigeria. Klein’s study of the interwoven roles of innovation and tradition will interest scholars of African, global, and cultural studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology alike.
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You Feel So Mortal
Essays on the Body
Peggy Shinner
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Feet, bras, autopsies, hair—Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in You Feel So Mortal, a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came from; and the collective body, with all its historical, social, and political implications. What, she asks, does this whole mess of bones, muscles, organs, and soul mean? Searching for answers, she turns her keen narrative sense to body image, gender, ethnic history, and familial legacy, exploring what it means to live in our bodies and to leave them behind.
 
Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, breasts, and the storied skills of the bra fitter; asks, from the perspective of a confused and grieving daughter, what it means to cut the body open; and takes a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history to look at women’s hair in ancient Rome, Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, India, and her own past. Some pieces investigate the body under emotional or physical duress, while others use the body to consider personal heritage and legacy. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric.
 
Turning the category of body books on, well, its ear, You Feel So Mortal offers a probing view of our preoccupation with the body that is both idiosyncratic and universal, leaving us with the deep satisfaction of our shared humanity.
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You Were Never in Chicago
Neil Steinberg
University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residents was one that Liebling described as the apotheosis of such criticism: a postcard that read, simply, "You were never in Chicago."

Neil Steinberg has lived in and around Chicago for more than three decades—ever since he left his hometown of Berea, Ohio, to attend Northwestern—yet he remains fascinated by the dynamics captured in Liebling's anecdote. In You Were Never in Chicago Steinberg weaves the story of his own coming-of-age as a young outsider who made his way into the inner circles and upper levels of Chicago journalism with a nuanced portrait of the city that would surprise even lifelong residents.

Steinberg takes readers through Chicago's vanishing industrial past and explores the city from the quaint skybridge between the towers of the Wrigley Building, to the depths of the vast Deep Tunnel system below the streets. He deftly explains the city's complex web of political favoritism and carefully profiles the characters he meets along the way, from greats of jazz and journalism to small-business owners just getting by. Throughout, Steinberg never loses the curiosity and close observation of an outsider, while thoughtfully considering how this perspective has shaped the city, and what it really means to belong. Intimate and layered, You Were Never in Chicago will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all Chicagoans, be they born in the city or forever transplanted.

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You'll Know When You Get There
Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band
Bob Gluck
University of Chicago Press, 2012

As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and electronic sounds into groundbreaking experiments that helped shape the American popular music that followed. In You’ll Know When You Get There, Bob Gluck offers the first comprehensive study of this influential group, mapping the musical, technological, political, and cultural changes that they not only lived in but also effected.  

 
Beginning with Hancock’s formative years as a sideman in bebop and hard bop ensembles, his work with Miles Davis, and the early recordings under his own name, Gluck uncovers the many ingredients that would come to form the Mwandishi sound. He offers an extensive series of interviews with Hancock and other band members, the producer and engineer who worked with them, and a catalog of well-known musicians who were profoundly influenced by the group. Paying close attention to the Mwandishi band’s repertoire, he analyzes a wide array of recordings—many little known—and examines the group’s instrumentation, their pioneering use of electronics, and their transformation of the studio into a compositional tool.
 
From protofunk rhythms to synthesizers to the reclamation of African identities, Gluck tells the story of a highly peculiar and thrillingly unpredictable band that became a hallmark of American genius.

 


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The Young Descartes
Nobility, Rumor, and War
Harold J. Cook
University of Chicago Press, 2018
René Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am.”  But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of his time. Far from it. As a young nobleman, Descartes was a soldier and courtier who took part in some of the greatest events of his generation—a man who would not seem out of place in the pages of The Three Musketeers.

In The Young Descartes, Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty. Rather, for years he traveled throughout Europe in diplomacy and at war. He was present at the opening events of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe and Northern Italy, and was also later involved in struggles within France. Enduring exile, scandals, and courtly intrigue, on his journeys Descartes associated with many of the most innovative free thinkers and poets of his day, as well as great noblemen, noblewomen, and charismatic religious reformers. In his personal life, he expressed love for men as well as women and was accused of libertinism by his adversaries.

These early years on the move, in touch with powerful people and great events, and his experiences with military engineering and philosophical materialism all shaped the thinker and philosopher Descartes became in exile, where he would begin to write and publish, with purpose. But though it is these writings that made ultimately made him famous, The Young Descartes shows that this story of his early life and the tumultuous times that molded him is sure to spark a reappraisal of his philosophy and legacy.
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The Young Fed
The Banking Crises of the 1920s and the Making of a Lender of Last Resort
Mark Carlson
University of Chicago Press

A new history of crisis responses in the central bank’s formative years.

The long-standing description of the Federal Reserve as a “lender of last resort” refers to the central bank’s emergency liquidity provision for financial entities in periods of crisis. As Mark Carlson shows, this function was foundational to how the Fed was designed but has, at times, proven challenging to implement. The Young Fed examines the origins of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity provision which, along with the setting of monetary policy, has become a critical responsibility.

Focusing on the Fed’s response to the financial crises of the 1920s, Carlson documents the formative deliberations of central bank policymakers regarding how to assist banks experiencing distress; the lessons that were learned; and how those lessons shaped subsequent policies. Carlson depicts an early Fed that experimented with a variety of approaches to crises, ranging from bold spectacles featuring cash-filled armored cars to behind-the-scenes interventions to prevent inducing panics or bank runs. The Young Fed weaves previously unpublished material from the Fed archives into a watershed work in American economic history: a deeply sourced account of how the world’s most important central bank became a lender of last resort.

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The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.
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Young Men and Fire
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 1992
On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

"A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."—Timothy Foote, USA Today

"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."—Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books

"Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge."—Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction."—John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal

"Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor. . . . A great book."—James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review
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Young Men and Fire
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press, 2017
A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would writeincludes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul.
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Young, White, and Miserable
Growing Up Female in the Fifties
Wini Breines
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Young, White, and Miserable is a critically acclaimed study that compellingly shows how the feminist movement of the 1960s found momentum in the seemingly peaceable time of the 1950s. Wini Breines explores white middle class America and argues that mixed messages given to girls during this decade lent fuel to the fire that would later become known as feminism. Concluding with a look at the life and suicide of social scientist Anne Parsons, this book is a poignant and important look into conditions that led to the women's movement.
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Youth Employment and Joblessness in Advanced Countries
Edited by David G. Blanchflower and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
The economic status of young people has declined significantly over the past two decades, despite a variety of programs designed to aid new workers in the transition from the classroom to the job market. This ongoing problem has proved difficult to explain. Drawing on comparative data from Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, these papers go beyond examining only employment and wages and explore the effects of family background, education and training, social expectations, and crime on youth employment.

This volume brings together key studies, providing detailed analyses of the difficult economic situation plaguing young workers. Why have demographic changes and additional schooling failed to resolve youth unemployment? How effective have those economic policies been which aimed to improve the labor skills and marketability of young people? And how have youths themselves responded to the deteriorating job market confronting them? These questions form the empirical and organizational bases upon which these studies are founded.
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The Youth Labor Market Problem
Its Nature, Causes, and Consequences
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and David A. Wise
University of Chicago Press, 1982
This volume brings together a massive body of much-needed research information on a problem of crucial importance to labor economists, policy makers, and society in general: unemployment among the young. The thirteen studies detail the ambiguity and inadequacy of our present standard statistics as applied to youth employment, point out the error in many commonly accepted views, and show that many critically important aspects of this problem are not adequately understood. These studies also supply a significant amount of raw data, furnish a platform for further research and theoretical work in labor economics, and direct attention to promising avenues for future programs.
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Youth on Trial
A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice
Edited by Thomas Grisso and Robert G. Schwartz
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In Youth on Trial, a wide range of leaders in developmental psychology and law combine their expertise to investigate the limitations of our youth policy—including the problematic trend of trying alleged juvenile criminals as adults.
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Youth Without Youth
Mircea Eliade
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard.  Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.

At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella.  Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.  Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural.  In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.

Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery.  It was adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years.

 “A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade’s novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
 
Youth Without Youth reads like a surreal collaboration by Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a genius.”—William Allen, author of Starkweather and The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances
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