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Zenith City
Stories from Duluth
Michael Fedo
University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Duluth may be the city of “untold delights” as lampooned in a Kentucky congressman’s speech in 1871. Or it may be portrayed by a joke in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Or then again, it may be the “Zenith City of the unsalted seas” celebrated by Dr. Thomas Preston Foster, founder of the city’s first newspaper. But whatever else it may be, this city of granite hills, foghorns, and gritty history, the last stop on the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes, is undeniably a city with character—and characters. Duluth native Michael Fedo captures these characters through the happy-go-melancholy lens nurtured by the people and landscape of his youth. In Zenith City Fedo brings it back home. Framed by his reflections on Duluth’s colorful—and occasionally very dark—history and its famous visitors, such as Sinclair Lewis, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Dylan, his memories make the city as real as the boy next door but with a better story.

Here, among the graceful, poignant, and often hilarious remembered moments—pranks played on a severe teacher, the family’s unlikely mob connections, a rare childhood affliction—are the coordinates of Duluth’s larger landscape: the diners and supper clubs, the baseball teams, radio days, and the smelt-fishing rites of spring. Woven through these tales of Duluth are Fedo’s curious, instructive, and ultimately deeply moving stories about becoming a writer, from the guidance of an English teacher to the fourteen-year-old reporter’s interview with Louis Armstrong to his absorption in the events that would culminate in his provocative and influential book The Lynchings in Duluth. These are the sorts of essays—personal, cultural, and historical, at once regional and far-reaching—that together create a picture of people in a place as rich in history and anecdote as Duluth and of the forces that forever bind them together.

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Zoological Surrealism
The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé
James Leo Cahill
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An archive-based, in-depth analysis of the surreal nature and science movies of the pioneering French filmmaker Jean Painlevé

Before Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there was Jean Painlevé, a pioneering French scientific and nature filmmaker with a Surrealist’s eye. Creator of more than two hundred films, his studies of strange animal worlds doubled as critical reimaginations of humanity. With an unerring eye for the uncanny and unexpected, Painlevé and his assistant Geneviève Hamon captured oneiric octopuses, metamorphic crustaceans, erotic seahorses, mythic vampire bats, and insatiable predatory insects.

Zoological Surrealism draws from Painlevé’s early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlevé’s archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of “cinema’s Copernican vocation”—how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints.

From Painlevé’s engagements with Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Franju, and competing Surrealists to the historiographical dimensions of Jean Vigo’s concept of social cinema, Zoological Surrealism taps never-before-examined sources to offer a completely original perspective on a cutting-edge filmmaker. The first extensive English-language study of Painlevé’s early films and their contexts, it adds important new insight to our understanding of film while also contributing to contemporary investigations of the increasingly surreal landscapes of climate change and ecological emergency.

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The Zoology of Tapeworms
Robert A. Wardle and James A. McLeod
University of Minnesota Press, 1952

The Zoology of Tapeworms was first published in 1952. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Leaders in helminthology have long recognized the need for such a work as this—a comprehensive study of tapeworms. This definitive treatise describes the tapeworms of the world—their gross and microscopic anatomy, their physiology, life cycles, and relationships to hosts, the theories of origin and evolution, and the various systems of classification that have been applied to tapeworms.

Detailed, systematic descriptions and keys for the identification of all known genera of the world and species of North America are provided. Emphasis on the theoretical significance of various aspects of tapeworm zoology is balanced by a wealth of detailed description. A bibliography up to 1950 is appended.

A review of the literature on each topic is incorporated in the discussions. Starting with a few fragments of information a century or more ago, the literature on the subject of tapeworms has appeared in a wide range of journals and books published in at least five languages. Many of the older publications are, for practical purposes, unavailable, and a number of the more recent journals are difficult to obtain. Therefore, the consolidation of this large body of scattered literature in a single volume will be of value to scientists in many fields.

In addition to filling a basic need for helminthologists, this book should serve as a reference work for parasitologists, zoologists, ecologists, clinicians, medical research workers, and students and workers in various fields of biology.

There are 419 text illustrations from drawings of species by the authors.

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