El Salvador is widely considered one of the most successful United Nations peacebuilding efforts, but record homicide rates, political polarization, socioeconomic exclusion, and corruption have diminished the quality of peace for many of its citizens. In Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador, Christine J. Wade adapts the concept of elite capture to expand on the idea of “captured peace,” explaining how local elites commandeered political, social, and economic affairs before war’s end and then used the peace accords to deepen their control in these spheres.
While much scholarship has focused on the role of gangs in Salvadoran unrest, Wade draws on an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how day-to-day violence is inextricable from the economic and political dimensions. In this in-depth analysis of postwar politics in El Salvador, she highlights the local actors’ primary role in peacebuilding and demonstrates the political advantage an incumbent party—in this case, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA—has throughout the peace process and the consequences of this to the quality of peace that results.
Both film noir and the Weimar street film hold a continuing fascination for film spectators and film theorists alike. The female characters, especially the alluring femmes fatales, remain a focus for critical and popular attention. In the tradition of such attention, Dangerous Dames focuses on the femme fatale and her antithesis, the femme attrapée.
Unlike most theorists, Jans Wager examines these archetypes from the perspective of the female spectator and rejects the persistence of vision that allows a reading of these female characters only as representations of unstable postwar masculinity. Professor Wager suggests that the woman in the audience has always seen and understood these characters as representations of a complex aspect of her existence.
Dangerous Dames looks at the Weimar street films The Street, Variety, Asphalt, and M and the film noir movies The Maltese Falcon, Gun Crazy, and The Big Heat. This book opens the doors to spectators and theorists alike, suggesting cinematic pleasures outside the bounds of accepted readings and beyond the narrow categorization of film noir and the Weimar street film as masculine forms.
“Whoever distrusts the barking of watchdogs, however, does not immediately have to begin howling with the wolves.”—Bernhard Waldenfels
In this seminal work, acclaimed philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels deals with the problem of the nature of order after the “shattering of the world,” and the loss of the idea of a universal or fundamental order.
Order in the Twilight unites phenomenological methodology with recent work on the theory of order, normativity, and dialogue, as well as structuralism and Gestalt theory. Philosophically stringent, it expresses a more optimistic attitude than much modern philosophy, especially deconstruction.
Waldenfels passes the question of order through numerous defining aspects, and concludes that there is not one global order, but rather various conflicting domains of order. Whenever the boundary of a vital or experiential domain is crossed, a discourse speaks at the boundary, not about it, and across a threshold without abolishing it. The rest is rationalization, i.e., an attempt to find a place in the respective order for what is to-be-ordered. But why, the author concludes, should a theory be more unambiguous than reality?
Order in the Twilight is an important book at this time, because it may help lift the humanities out of the skeptical, relativistic disarray in which they have been embroiled in recent decades. Waldenfels does not attempt to dictate what reality should be; rather, he is open to any valid evidences. His book offers a solid footing to the human and social sciences as they seek to escape from deconstructive irrationalism.
During the 1950s, when less than 20 percent of American high school graduates attended college, a group of ambitious young African Americans enrolled at Ohio University, a predominantly white school in Athens, Ohio. Because they were a tiny, barely tolerated minority, they banded together, supported each other, and formed lasting bonds. Years later, at a series of “Soulful Reunions,” they recalled the joys and challenges of living on a white campus before the civil rights era, and eighteen of them decided to share their stories.
The authors of the eighteen autobiographical sketches in Soulful Bobcats were a diverse group. They were athletes, rhetoricians, musicians, and actresses; they aspired to professions in the military, business, education, government, architecture, and the arts. Some grew up in poor families, while others enjoyed the comforts of the middle class. But they had several things in common. They all came from families that believed education was important. They had been taught to avoid trouble, to persist despite setbacks, and to expect to encounter prejudice and even discrimination.
The authors vividly describe instances in which they were humiliated—by other students, by professors, or by townspeople—as well as the few occasions when violence seemed inevitable. In addition, they describe their “first,” including becoming the first African American students at Ohio University to be awarded scholarships for their prowess in football, basketball, track, and tennis; the first to compete for titles such as “Mr. Fraternity” or “Queen of the Military Ball”; the first to appear in theatrical performances alongside their white schoolmates. They also tell of their success in providing a social life for themselves by organizing two Greek letter fraternities and one sorority, holding their own off-campus dances, and joining the few campus organizations that were open to them. Above all, their stories speak to a resilience that allowed these “Soulful Bobcats” to learn from their experiences at Ohio University, to engage in meaningful careers, and to lead rich, fulfilling lives.
The year 2008 is the deadline set by President Mbeki for the finalization of all land claims by people who were dispossessed under the apartheid and previous white governments. Although most experts agree this is an impossible deadline, it does provide a significant political moment for reflection on the ANC government’s program of land restitution since the end of apartheid.
Land reform (and land restitution within that) remains a highly charged issue in South Africa, one that deserves more in–depth analysis. Drawing on her experience as Rural Land Claims Commissioner in KwaZulu–Natal from 1995 to 2000, Professor Cherryl Walker provides a multilayered account of land reform in South Africa, one that covers general critical commentary, detailed case material, and personal narrative. She explores the master narrative of loss and restoration, which has been fundamental in shaping the restitution program; offers a critical overview of the achievements of the program as a whole; and discusses what she calls the “non–programmatic limits to land reform,” including urbanization, environmental constraints and the impact of HIV/AIDS.
Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters.
Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice brings together a wealth of topical material and case studies by leading experts in the field who present a rich mix of perspectives from politics, sociology, geography, social anthropology, law, history, and agricultural economics. The collection addresses both the material and the symbolic dimensions of land claims, in rural and urban contexts, and explores the complex intersection of issues confronting the restitution program, from the promotion of livelihoods to questions of rights, identity, and transitional justice.
A valuable contribution to the field of land and agrarian studies, both in South Africa and internationally, it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive treatment to date of South Africa’s postapartheid land claims process and will be essential reading for scholars and students of land reform for years to come.
What do ordinary women in an African city do in the face of “serious enough” infections in themselves and signs of acute illness in their young children? How do they manage? What does it take to get by? How do they maintain the wellbeing of the household in a setting without what would be considered as basic health provision in an American or European city?
Professor Wallman focuses on women in a densely-populated part of Kampala called Kamwokya. With the help of a team of Ugandans and non-Ugandans, a vivid picture emerges, enhanced by color photographs, sketches and maps.
Women are largely responsible for the management of illness in all members of the family. Young children are at particular risk and the women have to take the first crucial decisions about treatment. Formal health resources are scarce and so they most often resort to an extraordinary range of treatments provided in the informal economy. A holistic picture of all the options that local people recognize is drawn, and an enriched understanding of problems and opportunities for health care in tropical cities emerges.
Multidisciplinary work on sexually transmitted disease is rare, even in this time of AIDS, and the book effectively maps the social contexts of its perception and management. Moreover, it focuses on women as ordinary citizens, selected by residence and not by reference to known medical conditions or high risk behavior. It is important too that the field strategies have encouraged local informants to become active participants in the definition of local problems and their solutions.
When World War I brought an end to German colonial rule in Namibia, much of the German population stayed on. The German community, which had managed to deal with colonial administration, faced new challenges when the region became a South African mandate under the League of Nations in 1919. One of these was the issue of Germanness, which ultimately resulted in public conversations and expressions of identity.
In Creating Germans Abroad, Daniel Walther examines this discourse and provides striking new insights into the character of the German populace in both Germany and its former colony, Southwest Africa, known today as Namibia. In addition to German colonialism, Walther considers issues of race, class, and gender and the activities of minority groups. He offers new perspectives on German cultural and national identity during the Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich.
In a larger context, Creating Germans Abroad acts as a model for investigating the strategies and motivations of groups and individuals engaged in national or ethnic engineering and demonstrates how unforeseen circumstances can affect the nature and outcome of these endeavors.
Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is the first book-length examination of the relation between these two major thinkers of the twentieth century. Questioning the dominant view that the two have little of substance in common, Judith Wambacq brings them into a compelling dialogue to reveal a shared, historically grounded concern with the transcendental conditions of thought. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze propose an immanent ontology, differing more in style than in substance. Wambacq’s synthetic treatment is nevertheless critical; she identifies the limitations of each thinker’s approach to immanent transcendental philosophy and traces its implications—through their respective relationships with Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure—for ontology, language, artistic expression, and the thinking of difference. Drawing on primary texts alongside current scholarship in both French and English, Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is comprehensive and rigorous while remaining clear, accessible, and lively. It is certain to become the standard text for future scholarly discussion of these two major influences on contemporary thought.
In Beep, David Wanczyk illuminates the sport of blind baseball to show us a remarkable version of America’s pastime. With balls tricked out to squeal three times per second, and with bases that buzz, this game of baseball for the blind is both innovative and intense. And when the best beep baseball team in America, the Austin Blackhawks, takes on its international rival, Taiwan Homerun, no one’s thinking about disability. What we find are athletes playing their hearts out for a championship.
Wanczyk follows teams around the world and even joins them on the field to produce a riveting inside narrative about the game and its players. Can Ethan Johnston, kidnapped and intentionally blinded as a child in Ethiopia, find a new home in beep baseball, and a spot on the all-star team? Will Taiwan’s rookie MVP Ching-kai Chen—whose superhuman feats on the field have left some veterans suspicious—keep up his incredible play? And can Austin’s Lupe Perez harness his competitive fire and lead his team to a long-awaited victory in the beep baseball world series?
Beep is the first book about blind baseball.
Frank Waters, whose work has spanned half a century, has continually attempted to depict the reconciliation of opposites, to heal the national wounds of polarization.
Flight From Fiesta, Waters’ first novel in nearly two decades, is testimony to that aspiration, emerging as a moving and masterfully–told story of two characters who must discover the potential for common ground between their personalities.
Set in Santa Fe in the mid–fifties, the story itself is deceptively simple. Elsie, a spoiled, self–centered ten–year–old Anglo tourist girl, has come to the annual Fiesta with her divorced mother and her mother’s lover. When Elsie runs away from her hotel, she encounters Inocencio, an old alcoholic Pueblo Indian now reduced to selling pottery beneath the portal of the Palace of the Governors. With childish cunning she maneuvers Inocencio into taking her away with him. In the wake of the child’s disappearance, as the local posse–mentality intensifies and Inocencio is suspected of kidnapping and perhaps molesting her, the frightened Indian flees to the hills, taking Elsie with him on a week–long odyssey through the mountains, towns, and pueblos of New Mexico.
Waters’ eye is precise, providing sharp visual detail on very page. His ear is flawless, especially in his rendering of the laconic and stolid Indian speech patterns. All through his book there is an immediacy and a feel for place and culture that cannot be fabricated but must be gained, as Waters himself has gained it, through a lifetime among these people, these towns, and these mountains. The reconciliation of the two fugitives of Flight From Fiesta serves to point, not didactically or allegorically, but emotionally and spiritually, but emotionally and spiritually, to the possibility of the grander reconciliation that Waters envisions.
“The novel was begun in 1926, when I was twenty-four years old and working as a telephone engineer in Imperial Valley, on the California-Baja California border. During my stay there I made a horseback trip down into the little-known desert interior of Lower California. After having lived all of my early years in the high Rockies of California, I was unprepared for the vast sweep of sunstruck desert with its flat wastes, clumps of cacti, and barren parched-rock ranges. Its emotional impact was so profound, I was impelled to give voice to it with pencil and paper.”
— Frank Waters
First published in 1930 under the title Fever Pitch, The Lizard Woman is Frank Waters’ first novel. It foreshadows a theme central to Waters’ later work: that we must attune our spirits to the land to fully understand our places in the natural order.
The story of Martiniano, The Man Who Killed the Deer, is a timeless story of Pueblo Indian sin and redemption, and of the conflict between Indian and white laws; written with a poetically charged beauty of style, a purity of conception, and a thorough understanding of Native American values.
Masked Gods is a vast book, a challenging and profoundly original account of the history, legends, and ceremonialism of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Following a brief but vivid history of the two tribes through the centuries of conquest, the book turns inward to the meaning of Native American legends and ritual—Navajo songs, Pueblo dances, Zuni kachina ceremonies. Enduring still, these rituals and ceremonies express a view of life, of man’s place in the creation, which is compared with Taoism and Buddhism—and with the aggressive individualism of the Western world.
One of Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.
Frank Waters lived for three years among the Hopi people of Arizona and was quickly drawn into their culture. Pumpkin Seed Point is a beautifully written personal account of Waters’s inner and outer experiences among the Hopi.
Ambitious and only twenty-four years old, Arthur Manby arrived from England to the Territory of New Mexico in 1883 and saw in its wilderness an empire that he believed himself destined to rule. For his kingdom, he chose a vast Spanish land grant near Taos, a wild 100,000 acres whose title was beyond question. Obsessed, he poured more than twenty years into his dream of glory, and schemed, stole, lied, cajoled, begged, and bribed to take the vast grant from its rightful owners. With great mastery, Waters draws us into this obsession, and the intense drama of these years is at once psychological and historical. In May 1913, Manby came at last to possess the grant, but within three years it had slipped again from his grasp.
The story does not end there, and perhaps only Frank Waters could have portrayed the strange disintegration of Manby’s personality as he aged, his frantic but ingenious efforts to regain “his” land. Among these was the creation of a secret society which terrorized whole towns and villages, becoming so powerful that even Manby no longer knew all its members and workings. At the same time he turned deeper inward, locked and bolted his gates against the outside world which hated and feared him more than ever. On July 3, 1929, a swollen, headless body was discovered in Manby’s Taos home. Some said it was murder; others swore the body was not Manby’s; still others reported seeing him alive afterward. The story blazed into national headlines and an official inquiry followed. Step by step, Waters takes us into the web of strange clues, evidence, more murders and complications—an investigation which the New Mexican government inexplicably called to a halt. The case remains one of the West’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Based on the real life of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom at Otowi Crossing, just below Los Alamos, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.
In keeping with its tradition of allowing the best of its list to thrive, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press is particularly proud to reissue The Woman at Otowi Crossing by best-selling author Frank Waters. This new edition features an introduction by Professor Thomas J. Lyon and a foreword by the author’s widow, Barbara Waters.
The story is quintessential Waters: a parable for the potentially destructive materialism of the mid-twentieth century. The antidote is Helen Chalmer’s ability to understand a deeper truth of her being; beyond the Western notion of selfhood, beyond the sense of a personality distinct from the rest, she experiences a new and wider awareness.
The basis for an opera of the same name, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the powerful story of the crossing of cultures and lives: a fable for our times.
In this novel of the mestizo, or mixed-blood, Frank Waters completes the Southwestern canvas begun in The Man Who Killed the Deer and People of the Valley. Set in a violent Mexican border town, the story centers on Barby, a tormented mestizo, Guadalupe, the mestiza “percentage-girl,” and Tai-Ling, the serene yogi. Their fates mingle though each remains alone—Barby bound to the brute rages of the night; Guadalupe unconscious of all save the sun of her sexuality; Tai-Ling believing it is possible to transcend completely the flow of life.
Pontiac, Sequoyah, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle. These legendary names are familiar even to the uninitiated in Native American history, yet the life stories of these great spiritual leaders have been largely unknown.
In this, his last book, internationally celebrated author Frank Waters makes vivid the poignant, humorous, and tragic stories of these neglected and heroic Native Americans. From the brilliant tactical abilities of famed warriors to the eloquent oratory of indigenous philosophers, poets, and statesmen, the profiles in Brave Are My People help correct this error of omission.
Now in paperback, Brave Are My People represents a major contribution to Water’s remarkable literary work.
The vast Colorado River collects water from the highest Rocky Mountain peaks and traverses the widest plateaus, the deepest canyons, and the lowest deserts before emptying into the delta of northern Mexico. This austere land and mighty river resist exploration, settlement, and description. But in the hands of one of the West’s great writers, Frank Waters, the history and lore of its past make irresistible reading and a resounding case for mankind’s respect for the environment.
In Below Grass Roots, the second book in Frank Waters’s Pikes Peak saga, turn-of-the-century Colorado Springs is prospering with the mining boom and a growing tourist industry. Patriarch Joseph Rogier becomes ever more obsessed with the treasures of the towering mountain and tries to enlist his son-in-law Jonathan Cable in his mining schemes. Cable instead leaves for Navajo country with his young son. Rogier, convinced that new wealth lies deep within the mountain, below grass roots, sinks his mines and what remains of his fortune ever deeper into the mountain’s granite.
As in the other two novels in this semiautobiographical saga, Waters’s masterful narrative draws on his own keen perception of the human condition to bring us this compelling tale of struggle and hope in the American West.
Pike’s Peak is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock.
Based on one of the most significant periods in Frank Waters’s own life, Pike’s Peak is perhaps the most complete expression of all the archetypal themes he explored in both fiction and nonfiction.
In The Dust within the Rock, the third book in the Pike’s Peak saga, an aging Joseph Rogier clings to his vision of finding gold in the great mountain and his grandson Marsh comes of age in the Rogier household. It is the early part of the twentieth century, in Colorado Springs, and the schoolhouse, the newsstand, the railroad, the mines, all become part of the younger man’s emergence into adulthood and self-discovery.
Waters’s powerful and intuitive style transforms the tale into a mythic journey, a search for meaning played out in the drama of everyday living on the vast American frontier.
Pike’s Peak (1971) is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock. Some years after its publication, an interviewer asked Frank Waters whether it was autobiographical. “Yes,” he replied, “and no.”
The Wild Earth’s Nobility is the first of Frank Waters’s semiautobiographical novels in the Pikes Peak saga. Here, in a frontier town in the shadow of the commanding mountain, the Rogier family settles near an age-old route of migrating Native Americans. In an era of prospecting, silver strikes, and frenzied mining, Joseph Rogier becomes a successful building contractor, rears a large family, and is gradually overwhelmed by the power of the great peak.
In Waters’s visionary prose, the story becomes a mythic journey to reconcile instinct and reason, consciousness and intuition, and the powerful emotions of a family struggling with its own dreams and human limitations.
Frank Waters (1902-1995), one of the finest chroniclers of the American Southwest, wrote twenty-eight works of fiction and nonfiction. Of Pike’s Peak (1971), the Chicago Daily News wrote, “It is a product of maturity, written with a sustained strength and beauty of style rarely found in fiction today.”
Pike’s Peak is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock.
“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.
Writing in Western American Literature, Charles L. Adams said, “In Mountain Dialogues, we see Frank Waters acknowledging his sources—major influences on a great American thinker and writer. Waters weaves together threads of these influences, adds his own thought, and presents us with a truly cosmic overview. This overview is thoroughly that of an American ‘Westerner’; it also is one that merits international consideration.”
And as the Bloomsbury Review wrote: “Mountain Dialogues is more than just a collection of personal essays. It is an ‘evolutionist’s handbook’ for the sons and daughters of the new West, a guide for those who would transcend the limitations of Western civilization.”
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.
Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.
This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.
Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.
This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.
This reprint makes available again Frank Waters’ dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike’s Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth. More than regional history, Midas of the Rockies is a story so fabulously impossible and yet so painfully true that it commends itself to the whole of America, the only earth, the only people who could have created it.
The novels and nonfiction work of writer Frank Waters stand as a monument to his genius and to his lifetime quest to plumb the spiritual depths that he found for himself in the landscape and people of his beloved Southwest. In a career spanning more than half a century, he shared, through his many books, his insights and discoveries with countless readers across the globe.
Now, drawn from rare editorials, speeches, and essays that Frank Waters authored over the years as a reflection and a formation of his life-long themes, Pure Waters provides a treasure trove of exciting new material from this giant of the American Southwest.
In celebration of the centenary of his birth, Swallow Press is pleased to offer this new collection by one of its bestselling and most inspiring authors.
The Old Northwest—the region now known as the Midwest—has been largely overlooked in American cultural history, represented as a place smoothly assimilated into the expanding, manifestly-destined nation. An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture studies the primary texts and principal conflicts of the settlement of the Old Northwest to reveal that its entry into the nation’s culture was not without problems. In fact, Edward Watts argues that it is best understood as a colony of the United States, just as the eastern states were colonies of the British Empire.
Reconsidered as a colony, the Old Northwest becomes a crucible revealing the complex entanglement of local, indigenous, and regional interests with the coercions of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. This conflicted setting, like those of all settlement colonies, was beset by competing views of local identity, especially as they came to contradict writers from the eastern seaboard.
Using postcolonial theories developed to describe other settlement colonies, An American Colony identifies the Old Northwest as a colony and its culture as less than fully participating in either the nation’s or its own writing and identity. This embedded sense of cultural inferiority, Watts argues, haunts Midwestern culture even today.
Winner of the Ohioana Library’s 2008 Ohio Legacy Citation
2014-2015 Choose to Read Ohio selection
“A good place to be from.” That’s how some people might characterize the Buckeye State. The writings in Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, are testimony to the truth of that statement. By prominent writers such as P. J. O’Rourke, Susan Orlean, and Alix Kates Shulman, these contributions are alternately nostalgic, irreverent, and sincere, and offer us a personal sense of place. Their childhoods are as varied as their work. Some were raised in urban Cleveland, Akron, and Cincinnati, others in the small Ohio towns that typify the Midwest, and still others in the countryside. Yet what they have to tell us about their roots resonates with a shared heritage, a sense of what is universal and enduring about growing up in the heartland.
Their collective résumé reads like a literary Who’s Who, including four Pulitzer Prizes, several National Book Awards, and many prestigious fellowships. Good Roots is also plain good reading from some of our country’s most accomplished contemporary writers.
Contributors include: Jill Bialosky, Dan Cryer, Michael Dirda, Elizabeth Dodd, Anthony Doerr, Rita Dove, Ian Frazier, Dale Keiger, Andrea Louie, Kathleen Dean Moore, Mary Oliver, Susan Orlean, P. J. O’Rourke, Julie Salamon, Scott Russell Sanders, Alix Kates Shulman, Jeffery Smith, James Toedtman, and Mark Winegardner.
In 1800, the highlands of Sri Lanka had some of the most biologically diverse primary tropical rainforest ecosystems in the world. By 1900, only a few craggy corners and mountain caps had been spared the fire stick. Highland villagers, through the extension of slash-and-burn agriculture, and British managers, through the creation of plantations—first of coffee, then cinchona, and finally tea—had removed virtually the entire primary forest cover.
Tropical Pioneers documents the conversion of a tropical rainforest biome and the collision between what previously had been more discrete ecological zones within South Asia. The ecological impacts were transformational. Author James L. A. Webb, Jr., demonstrates that profound ecological disruption occurred in the central highlands of Sri Lanka during the nineteenth century and suggests that the theme of ecological crisis brought about by the integration of tropical ecological zones during precolonial and colonial periods alike is an important one for historians to investigate elsewhere.
Tropical Pioneers is based on extensive research in the National Archives of Sri Lanka, the National Agricultural Library at Gannaruwa, the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society-Ceylon Branch, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Public Record Office of the United Kingdom, and the British Library.
A history of epidemic illness and political change, The Politics of Disease Control focuses on epidemics of sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis) around Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika in the early twentieth century as well as the colonial public health programs designed to control them. Mari K. Webel prioritizes local histories of populations in the Great Lakes region to put the successes and failures of a widely used colonial public health intervention—the sleeping sickness camp—into dialogue with African strategies to mitigate illness and death in the past.
Webel draws case studies from colonial Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda to frame her arguments within a zone of vigorous mobility and exchange in eastern Africa, where African states engaged with the Belgian, British, and German empires. Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, The Politics of Disease Control connects responses to sleeping sickness with experiences of historical epidemics such as plague, cholera, and smallpox, demonstrating important continuities before and after colonial incursion. African strategies to mitigate disease, Webel shows, fundamentally shaped colonial disease prevention programs in a crucial moment of political and social change.
Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber’s narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.
Hired Pens, a history of the writing profession in the United States, recognizes the place of independent writers who wrote for their livelihood from the 1830s and 1840s, with the first appearance of a broad-based print culture, to the 1960s.
Many realist authors began on this American Grub Street. Jack London turned out hackwork for any paying market he could find, while Scott Fitzgerald’s stories in slick magazines in the 1920s and early ’30s established his name as a writer.
From Edgar Allen Poe’s earliest forays into writing for pay to Sylvia Plath’s attempts to produce fiction for mass-circulation journals, Hired Pens documents without agenda the evolution of professional writing in all its permutations—travel accounts, sport, popular biography and history, genre and series fiction—and the culture it fed.
The death of her father begins Dorothy Weil’s search for what causes the family’s “spinning of in all directions like the pieces of Chaos.” She embarks on a river odyssey, traveling the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers by steamboat, towboat, and even an old-fashioned flatboat. The river brings her family back, as she records the stories of her fellow “river rats”: steamboat veterans, deckhands, captains, and cooks.
The River Home takes the reader into a world few ever glimpse, that of America’s riverboats. In the fast-paced narrative, with incisive characterizations and dialogue, the author introduces us to this vivid milieu and a gallery of fascinating people. We meet her father, a “wild river man from the Kentucky hills,” her mother, “a proper girl from a Cincinnati Dutch clan,” and her brother, a fourth-generation river man, as well as the artists and academics she meets in her adult life.
Weil’s voice is clear and wry, as well as poetic, bringing out both the sadness and joys of a family torn by mismatched backgrounds. Her themes speak to all: the confusion brought by family conflict, the strength of family love no matter how troubled the relationships, the mortality we all face, the importance of where we come from and where we go.
Though often associated with foreigners and refugees, many Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Despite their long residency, foreign and state officials and Kenyan citizens often perceive the Somali population to be a dangerous and alien presence in the country, and charges of civil and human rights abuses have mounted against them in recent years.
In We Do Not Have Borders, Keren Weitzberg examines the historical factors that led to this state of affairs. In the process, she challenges many of the most fundamental analytical categories, such as “tribe,” “race,” and “nation,” that have traditionally shaped African historiography. Her interest in the ways in which Somali representations of the past and the present inform one another places her research at the intersection of the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology.
Given tragic events in Kenya and the controversy surrounding al-Shabaab, We Do Not Have Borders has enormous historical and contemporary significance, and provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African.
Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through “the system.” The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out.
In depictions of foster care and adoption, stories tend to cluster at the dark or light ends of the spectrum, rather than telling the day-to-day successes and failures of families working to create themselves. Who raises other people’s children? Why? What’s money got to do with it when the love on offer feels so real? And how does the particular setting of Appalachia—itself so frequently oversimplified or stereotyped—influence the way these questions play out?
In Fall or Fly, Welch invites people bound by a code of silence to open up and to share their experiences. Less inspiration than a call to caring awareness, this pioneering work of storytelling journalism explores how love, compassion, money, and fear intermingle in what can only be described as a marketplace for our nation’s greatest asset.
To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.
By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect Will Wells’s constant attention to his environment and to his past—and to our environment and our past—and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.
Ping-Pong with the Nazis
Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set
their pipes aside, a Dutch interior.
The slapped ball clacks over the table
like a telegraphic code, then trickles
like faint hope across the marble floor.
How quickly he bends to retrieve it
and puts it back in play, the Jewish boy
living with false papers in a villa
owned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and now
commandeered by retreating Germans
as divisional headquarters. The young
blond soldiers, deferential to a social
better, muss his blond locks like the kid
brothers back in the fatherland, like big
brothers steeped in genial menace.
He begs another game, so they relent.
As the ball resumes its chatter across
the no-man’s-land strung with a net,
he calculates the risk that each shot brings.
And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.
The job seems simple enough: Reporter Lee Hershey needs protection for a couple of weeks as he pursues the biggest story of his career with all eyes on swing state Ohio in the midst of a presidential election. Columbus private eye Andy Hayes, broke as usual, doesn’t have much choice but to sign on, even with his girlfriend falling for the charming journalist.
Then murder strikes at the Statehouse and Andy finds himself partly responsible for the death. With an innocent man behind bars, a mysterious vehicle following Andy around the city, and more lives in danger, the detective has his hands full trying to solve a killing in a poisonous political environment where everyone has a motive for murder and anyone could be the next target.
Private investigator Andy Hayes takes the assignment against his better judgment.
In 1979, a high-profile burglar shot a cop, was apprehended, and then disappeared without ever being prosecuted. Forty years later, after the wounded cop’s suicide, his son, Preston Campbell, is convinced there’s been a cover-up that allowed his father’s attacker to go free. At first, Hayes dismisses Campbell’s outlandish conspiracy theories. But when a mysterious Cold War connection to the burglar emerges, the investigation heats up, and Hayes discovers a series of deaths that seem to be connected, one way or another, to the missing criminal. Nothing seems to add up, though, and Hayes finds himself hurtling headlong down a decades-old path of deadly secrets.
In the midst of cracking the cold case, Hayes has another mystery to solve closer to home: What’s been troubling his younger son, Joe, and why is his ex-wife so eager to have the boy out of her house? Further complicating matters, Hayes learns that another private eye, the captivating but inscrutable Hillary Quinne, is also on the trail of the vanished burglar and needs Hayes’s help. As their professional and personal lives blur, Hayes wonders what he’s gotten himself into, and whether he really wants out.
The job seems easy enough at first for private investigator Andy Hayes: save his client’s reputation by retrieving a laptop and erasing a troublesome video from its hard drive. But that’s before someone breaks into Andy’s apartment in Columbus; before someone else, armed with a shotgun, relieves him of the laptop; and before the FBI suddenly shows up on his doorstep asking questions.
Soon, there’s a growing list of people with a claim on the computer, all of them with secrets they don’t want uncovered. When one of those people ends up dead, Andy has his hands full convincing authorities he’s not responsible, while trying to figure out who is—and who’s got the laptop—before someone else dies. Soon the trail leads to the last place Andy wants to go: back to Ohio State University, where few have forgiven him for a mistake he made two decades earlier in his days as the Buckeyes’ star quarterback. That misjudgment sent him on a downward spiral that cost him a playing career, two marriages, several wrecked relationships, and above all his legacy in Ohio’s capital city, where the fortunes of the OSU team are never far from people’s minds.
As Andy tracks a laptop and a killer from the toniest of the city’s suburbs to its grittiest neighborhoods, he must confront a dark figure from his past and prove that this time he won’t drop the ball.
One day in 2002, three friends—a Somali immigrant, a Pakistan–born U.S. citizen, and a hometown African American—met in a Columbus, Ohio coffee shop and vented over civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan. Their conversation triggered an investigation that would become one of the most unusual and far–reaching government probes into terrorism since the 9/11 attacks.
Over several years, prosecutors charged each man with unrelated terrorist activities in cases that embodied the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism at home.
Government lawyers spoke of catastrophes averted; defense attorneys countered that none of the three had done anything but talk. The stories of these homegrown terrorists illustrate the paradox the government faces after September 11: how to fairly wage a war against alleged enemies living in our midst.
Hatred at Home is a true crime drama that will spark debate from all political corners about safety, civil liberties, free speech, and the government’s war at home.
As a serial killer stalks prostitutes in Columbus, Ohio, a distraught brother asks private investigator Andy Hayes to find his sister before it’s too late. In a deadly race against time, Andy soon learns he’s not the only person hunting Jessica Byrnes, but he may be the only one who wants her alive. Byrnes hasn’t been seen in weeks following a downward slide that started as a runaway teenager and may have ended permanently on the streets.
Assisting Andy is ex-prostitute Theresa Sullivan. She now works at St. Andrew’s, the mission church run by Andy’s pal the Reverend Roy Roberts, who is less than keen on Theresa reliving the memories that nearly killed her. A local congresswoman making headlines with her work against human trafficking puts pressure on Andy to solve the case, while the police don’t want him near their exhaustive search for the murderer. At the same time, Andy’s hunt for Jessica exposes the buying and selling of trafficked women across the region. Looming over Andy’s increasingly desperate search is the shadow of his most dangerous adversary yet.
As a serial killer stalks prostitutes in Columbus, Ohio, a distraught brother asks private investigator Andy Hayes to find his sister before it’s too late. In a deadly race against time, Andy soon learns he’s not the only person hunting Jessica Byrnes, but he may be the only one who wants her alive. Byrnes hasn’t been seen in weeks following a downward slide that started as a runaway teenager and may have ended permanently on the streets.
Assisting Andy is ex-prostitute Theresa Sullivan. She now works at St. Andrew’s, the mission church run by Andy’s pal the Reverend Roy Roberts, who is less than keen on Theresa reliving the memories that nearly killed her. A local congresswoman making headlines with her work against human trafficking puts pressure on Andy to solve the case, while the police don’t want him near their exhaustive search for the murderer. At the same time, Andy’s hunt for Jessica exposes the buying and selling of trafficked women across the region. Looming over Andy’s increasingly desperate search is the shadow of his most dangerous adversary yet.
Few subjects are as intensely debated in the United States as the death penalty. Some form of capital punishment has existed in America for hundreds of years, yet the justification for carrying out the ultimate sentence is a continuing source of controversy. No Winners Here Tonight explores the history of the death penalty and the question of its fairness through the experience of a single state, Ohio, which, despite its moderate midwestern values, has long had one of the country’s most active death chambers.
In 1958, just four states accounted for half of the forty-eight executions carried out nationwide, each with six: California, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas. By the first decade of the new century, Ohio was second only to Texas in the number of people put to death each year. No Winners Here Tonight looks at this trend and determines that capital punishment has been carried out in an uneven fashion from its earliest days, with outcomes based not on blind justice but on the color of a person’s skin, the whim of a local prosecutor, or the biases of the jury pool in the county in which a crime was committed.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s work is the only comprehensive study of the history of the death penalty in Ohio. His analysis concludes that the current law, crafted by lawmakers to punish the worst of the state’s killers, doesn’t come close to its intended purpose and instead varies widely in its implementation. Welsh-Huggins takes on this controversial topic evenhandedly and with respect for the humanity of the accused and the victim alike. This exploration of the law of capital punishment and its application will appeal to students of criminal justice as well as those with an interest in law and public policy.
Almost two years have passed since Aaron Custer supposedly set a fire at a house in Columbus that killed three college students, including the young woman with whom he had argued just hours before. Prosecutors had an ironclad case against Custer, a convicted firebug whose fingerprints were found on the lighter that started the blaze and who quickly pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.Private investigator and fallen Ohio State football star Andy Hayes is skeptical when Custer’s grandmother asks him to reopen the investigation by finding a mysterious witness who may have seen the real culprit that night. Andy’s doubts fade as he uncovers a tangle of motives for the victims’ deaths, implicating the state’s natural gas fracking boom, drug dealers, and more. But to delve deeper, Andy must once again make amends with his past. TV reporter Suzanne Gregory, a former fiancée, has more information on the Orton Avenue fire than any journalist in town, but asking for her help means reopening old wounds—just as Andy has embarked on a new relationship he’s determined not to screw up. As Andy follows Custer’s trail down ever-darker paths, he must revisit his past and decide whether he can afford to forfeit his future.
Author and reviewer Bill Osinski called Fourth Down and Out, the first of the Andy Hayes mysteries, “A tall, frosty stein of Middle-American noir, backed with a healthy shot of wry.” In this second installment, Andrew Welsh-Huggins draws on real events and current affairs to bring his city to life—warts and all.
It’s a violent encounter that private investigator Andy Hayes could have done without. One minute he’s finishing up some grocery shopping ahead of a custody visit with his sons. The next, he must come to the rescue of a Somali American mother and her young children as anti-immigrant bullies torment them.
Grateful for his intervention, the Somali community hires Andy to find a missing teenager who vanished without a trace and is now accused of plotting a terror attack in his adopted hometown of Columbus, Ohio. The government is certain that nineteen-year-old Abdi Mohamed followed in the footsteps of his brother, who died in Syria a few months earlier in a jihadi assault. But Mohamed’s family isn’t convinced, describing a soccer-loving American kid who renounced his brother’s actions and planned to attend college in the fall and become a diplomat someday.
Soon Andy is fending off fed-up FBI agents and dueling with a mysterious foe with links to the white supremacist movement. As he draws ever closer to the truth behind Mohamed’s disappearance, Hayes stumbles onto a conspiracy that could put hundreds of lives in danger, including his own two boys.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.
Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened “romantic irony.” Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it.
Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.
Rain is a young woman under the influence of a charismatic drifter named Wolf and his other “wife,” Winter. Through months of wandering homeless through the cities, small towns, and landscape of Appalachia, the trio have grown into a kind of desperate family, a family driven by exploitation and abuse. A family that Rain must escape.
When she meets Stratton Bryant, a widower living alone in an old east Tennessee farmhouse, Rain is given the chance to see a bigger world and find herself a place within it. But Wolf will not let her part easily. When he demands loyalty and obedience, the only way out is through an episode of violence that will leave everyone involved permanently damaged.
A harrowing story of choice and sacrifice, Charles Dodd White’s In the House of Wilderness is a novel about the modern South and how we fight through hardship and grief to find a way home.
A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana.
Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them.
The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by
Despite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.
Forests of Gold is a collection of essays on the peoples of Ghana with particular reference to the most powerful of all their kingdoms: Asante. Beginning with the global and local conditions under which Akan society assumed its historic form between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these essays go on to explore various aspects of Asante culture: conceptions of wealth, of time and motion, and the relationship between the unborn, the living, and the dead. The final section is focused upon individuals and includes studies of generals, of civil administrators, and of one remarkable woman who, in 1831, successfully negotiated peace treaties with the British and the Danes on the Gold Coast. The author argues that contemporary developments can only be fully understood against the background of long-term trajectories of change in Ghana.
Twice in this century popular revolts against colonial rule have occured in the Banten district of West Java. These revolts, conducted largely under an Islamic leadership, also proclaimed themselves Communist. Islamic Communism is seemingly a paradox. This is especially the case when one considers that probably no religion has proved more resistant to Communist ideology than Islam.
Michael Williams here details the complicated history of the Bantenese revolts in the twentieth century and probes the ideological riddle of Islamic Communism. Modern history is replete with examples of regions with a long history of organizing themselves politically to resist intrusion on their territory, resources, and people. This book establishes that in Indonesia, the Bantenese were among the most practiced exponents of resistance.
The poems in One Unblinking Eye cast a steady and serious gaze at life outside the beltways. Whether testifying at a prayer meeting in Indiana, tramping the backwoods of northern New England, or working on an oil derrick in the Gulf, the inhabitants of these poems live on the margins of society. “They are the left-behind, odd-manneredones/Who speak in starts,” Norman Williams writes of the last residents of a West Virginia mining town. Describing the woods of central Maine, he speaks of “lives … scraped from sides/Of deer and garden plots; where double-wides,/On concrete pads abut a hard-pan road.”
It is the art of these poems to convince the reader that these lives matter. There is desperation here, and madness, but there is an equal measure of determination and faith. In one poem, Mr. Williams writes of a fisherman haunted by his daughter’s death, who “casts his line/In hopes a flash and strike will draw him back.” These words describe the poet’s method as well. The work in this collection is built on a supple metrical foundation; it is filled with glancing rhymes and wordplay; and it is touched off by striking images. It is, in other words, composed with care, and it richly rewards a careful reading.
Norman Williams writes in Burlington, Vermont, where he works as an attorney. His first book, The Unlovely Child, was published by Alfred A. Knopf to enthusiastic reviews. Anthony Hecht wrote that “the voice of these poems is marvelously modulated, low-key in its acceptances, modest in its exultations, steady and unintoxicated in its long vision. It is my fixed conviction that with his first book he has fashioned a landmark in our literature, and sounded a uniquely American note with beautiful certainty.”
With his second book, more than fifteen years in the making, Norman Williams reafirms the truth of that assessment.
Meredith Sue Willis’s Out of the Mountains is a collection of thirteen short stories set in contemporary Appalachia. Firmly grounded in place, the stories voyage out into the conflicting cultural identities that native Appalachians experience as they balance mainstream and mountain identities.
Willis’s stories explore the complex negotiations between longtime natives of the region and its newcomers and the rifts that develop within families over current issues such as mountaintop removal and homophobia. Always, however, the situations depicted in these stories are explored in the service of a deeper understanding of the people involved, and of the place. This is not the mythic version of Appalachia, but the Appalachia of the twenty-first century.
From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.
Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.
By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.
Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime. He paid the highest price with his life. The brutal circumstances of his death shocked the world and helped isolate his oppressors.
This short biography of Biko shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century—and just how relevant he remains. Biko’s understanding of black consciousness as a weapon of change could not be more relevant today to “restore people to their full humanity.”
As an important historical study, this book’s main sources were unique interviews done in 1989—before the end of apartheid—by the author with Biko’s acquaintances, many of whom have since died.
Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1933, but unable to find work, Charles M. Wiltse joined his parents on the small farm they had recently purchased in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.
In wry and often affecting prose, Wiltse recorded a year in the life of this quintessentially American place during the Great Depression. He describes the family’s daily routine, occasional light moments, and their ongoing frustrations, small and large—from a neighbor’s hog that continually broke into the cornfields to the ongoing struggle with their finances. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had little to offer small farmers, and despite repeated requests, the family could not secure loans from local banks to help them through the hard economic times. Wiltse spoke the bitter truth when he told his diary, “We are not a lucky family.” In this he represented millions of others caught in the maw of a national disaster.
The diary is introduced and edited by Michael J. Birkner, Wiltse’s former colleague at the Papers of Daniel Webster Project at Dartmouth College, and coeditor, with Wiltse, of the final volume of Webster’s correspondence.
The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises brings together five essays by Yvor Winters: “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” “The Audible Reading of Poetry,” “The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” “Robert Frost, Or the Spiritual Drifter as Poet,” and “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.”
Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works—Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense—of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing.
The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer—as it is of very man—to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example—the technique of the “whole critic” who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators.
Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.
Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker’s philosophy.
In Professor Robert Wood’s study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey’s terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural , and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions.
Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, Placing Aesthetics aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions.
Even in the period following the electoral defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1990, the revolution of 1979 continues to have a profound effect on the political economy of Nicaragua. Wright’s study, which is based on interviews with people from all walks of life—from government and party officials to academics and campesinos—as well as on the large volume of literature in both English and Spanish, focuses on the FSLN understanding of the relationships between the state, the party, and mass actors, and the nature of social classes. Wright considers the topics of agrarian reform, the development of mass organizations, the role of labor, and other aspects of the Nicaraguan political economy in order to assess their significance in theoretical as well as practical terms.
In Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Erika Wright argues that the emphasis in Victorian Studies on disease as the primary source of narrative conflict that must be resolved has obscured the complex reading practices that emerge around the concept of health. By shifting attention to the ways that prevention of illness and the preservation of well-being operate in fiction, both thematically and structurally, Wright offers a new approach to reading character and voice, order and temporality, setting and metaphor. As Wright reveals, while canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Martineau, and Gaskell register the pervasiveness of a conventional “therapeutic” form of action and mode of reading, they demonstrate as well an equally powerful investment in the achievement and maintenance of “health”—what Wright refers to as a “hygienic” narrative—both in personal and domestic conduct and in social interaction of the individual within the community.
William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal. Instead, as Julia Wright argues in her award-winning study Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake’s concern lies with the kind of community that is being established. Moreover, writing at the moment of the emergence of modern nationalism, Blake reveals a concern with the national community in particular.
Beginning with a discussion of the priority of national narrative in late-eighteenth-century art theory and antiquarianism, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation traces its relevance in Blake’s printed works, from The Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth Prophecies to The Laocoön. Professor Wright then turns to Europe, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, focusing on Blake’s portrayals of particular characters’ alienation from the groups and ideologies represented in the texts. The book closes by arguing that Blake’s major printed works, Milton and Jerusalem, are explicit and extensive engagements with the question of nation—and empire.
Although nationalism existed in various forms during the Romantic period, Blake’s contemporaries generally assumed that nations should progress continuously, producing a clear narrative line from an auspicious origin to the perfect fulfillment of that promise. Wright argues that these mutually determining constructs of national character and national narrative inform Blake’s handling of the problem of the individual-within-a-community.
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