front cover of Glimpses into My Own Black Box
Glimpses into My Own Black Box
An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction
George W. Stocking
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

George W. Stocking, Jr., has spent a professional lifetime exploring the history of anthropology, and his findings have shaped anthropologists’ understanding of their field for two generations. Through his meticulous research, Stocking has shown how such forces as politics, race, institutional affiliations, and personal relationships have influenced the discipline from its beginnings. In this autobiography, he turns his attention to a subject closer to home but no less challenging. Looking into his own “black box,” he dissects his upbringing, his politics, even his motivations in writing about himself. The result is a book systematically, at times brutally, self-questioning.
    An interesting question, Stocking says, is one that arouses just the right amount of anxiety. But that very anxiety may be the ultimate source of Stocking’s remarkable intellectual energy and output. In the first two sections of the book, he traces the intersecting vectors of his professional and personal lives. The book concludes with a coda, “Octogenarian Afterthoughts,” that offers glimpses of his life after retirement, when advancing age, cancer, and depression changed the tenor of his reflections about both his life and his work.
    This book is the twelfth and final volume of the influential History of Anthropology series.

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front cover of Still on Call
Still on Call
Richard Stern
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Richard Stern is a literary treasure."
---Scott Turow

"Stern's new miscellany reveals a literary mind of the first order, thinking in elegant prose about dozens of interesting subjects."
---Philip Roth

"Stern is a great virtuoso. . . . [I]n an ailing literary culture, we should be grateful for a work like this and a career, too, spanning the American half-century."
---New York Times Book Review

"Stern's skill gives vitality to everything he treats."
---Edmund White, Los Angeles Times

"Like a gifted dancer in a small space, Stern has tremendous grace and ease on the page, executing dynamic turns and dips with a fine economy of motion and without sacrificing nuance."
---Booklist

Still on Call is the sixth and final collection of critically acclaimed novelist and educator Richard Stern. "Orderly miscellany" is the author's term for this aggregation of reflections, essays, reviews, reportage, commentary, and observations on writing and fellow writers, life, and contemporary culture.

The collection's three sections, Coasting, Posting, and Hosting, contain pieces that range from reflections on becoming a writer in the 1940s to assessments of such major writers and close colleagues as Saul Bellow, and Donald Justice to topical offerings from Stern's popular blog for the New Republic.

This wide-ranging collection is intended as the culmination of sixty years of the writing life but, first and foremost, as provocative entertainment. Stern is a prolific writer, and this selection of some of his highest-quality writing both educates and enthralls.

Richard Stern is the Helen A. Regenstein Emeritus Professor of English and of the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the author of nineteen works of fiction and nonfiction. His books include the novels A Father's Words and Golk, and, most recently, the collection What Is What Was. Stern has been the subject of two books: The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman by David Garret Izzo and Richard Stern by James Schiffer.

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