BiblioVault - Books about 1966-

All Is Leaf

Essays and Transformations

John T Price

University of Iowa Press, 2022

Drawing inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—award-winning essayist John Price explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.”

He employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.

From his Iowa backyard to the edge of the Arctic Circle, from the forgotten recesses of the body to the far reaches of the solar system, this book demonstrates the ways imagination and informed compassion can, as Price describes it, expand thousandfold the boundaries of what we might “have naïvely considered an individual self.”

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All the Leavings

Laurie Easter

Oregon State University Press, 2021

In this nonlinear, loosely chronological memoir, Laurie Easter deftly navigates the rugged terrain of living off the grid in rural southern Oregon, along with the many hazards of the human heart. In quiet, searching, and sometimes experimental essays, she bravely explores the liminal spaces between guilt and forgiveness, life and death, grief and love, human society and the natural world.

Whether recounting the home birth of her second child, encounters with cougars, the fraught dynamics of mother-daughter relationships, the destructive power of wildfires, or the community bonds challenged by a tragic suicide, Easter’s writing is firmly grounded in place. She takes readers deep into the heart of a still-wild Oregon, perilous yet rich with natural beauty.

Written from one woman’s perspective as a mother, wife, and friend, All the Leavings is ultimately a book about love—for the child who faces a health crisis, for the friend dying of AIDS, for the one entangled by addiction who then disappears. Long after the final page is turned, it will resonate with readers interested in essays, memoir, alternative lifestyles, and the literature of the West.

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Anti-Politics Machine

Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

James Ferguson

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into "technical" problems awaiting solution by "development" agencies and experts. It is the political intelligibility of these effects, along with the process that produces them, that this book seeks to illuminate through a detailed case study of the workings of the "development" industry in one country, Lesotho, and in one "development" project.Using an anthropological approach grounded in the work of Foucault, James Ferguson analyzes the institutional framework within which such projects are crafted and the nature of "development discourse," revealing how it is that, despite all the "expertise" that goes into formulating development projects, they nonetheless often demonstrate a startling ignorance of the historical and political realities of the locale they are intended to help. In a close examination of the attempted implementation of the Thaba-Tseka project in Lesotho, Ferguson shows how such a misguided approach plays out, how, in fact, the "development" apparatus in Lesotho acts as an "anti-politics machine," everywhere whisking political realities out of sight and all the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently political operation of strengthening the state presence in the local region.James Ferguson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine.

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Divergent Trajectories

Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers

Flore Chevaillier

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Divergent Trajectories: Interviews with Innovative Fiction Writers by Flore Chevaillier examines the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction through a series of interviews with some of today’s most cutting-edge fiction writers. New relationships between literature, media culture, and hypertexts have added to modes of experimentation and reshaped the boundaries between literary and pop culture media; visual arts and literature; critical theory and fiction writing; and print and digital texts. This collection of interviews undertakes such experimentations through an intimate glance, allowing readers to learn about each writer’s journey, as well as their aesthetic, political, and personal choices.

Including interviews with R. M. Berry, Debra Di Blasi, Percival Everett, Thalia Field, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Lance Olsen, Michael Martone, Carole Maso, Joseph McElroy, Christina Milletti, Alan Singer, and Steve Tomasula, Divergent Trajectories provides a framework that allows innovative authors to discuss in some depth their works, backgrounds, formal research, thematic preferences, genre treatment, aesthetic philosophies, dominant linguistic expressions, cultural trends, and the literary canon. Through an examination of these concepts, writers ask what “traditional” and “innovative” writing is, and most of all, what fiction is today.

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Goodbye, My Tribe

An Evangelical Exodus

Vic Sizemore

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus is Vic Sizemore’s collection of personal essays chronicling two simultaneous transformations. One is the gathering of unconnected—and nonpolitical—evangelical congregations across the nation into the political juggernaut called the Religious Right; the other is the author’s own coming to terms with the emotional and spiritual trauma of his life deep inside fundamentalist Christianity, and his struggle to free himself from its grasp. Sizemore, whose father was a preacher and professor at a small West Virginia Bible college, attended Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, arguably the crucible of American evangelical Christianity.

Sizemore began writing these essays with the aim of exploring and understanding what happened when the mythology of his “tribe” crumbled from beneath his feet. He draws heavily on his upbringing and his family history as a framework for how his “tribe” of white evangelicals have found ways to reconcile Christianity with what the author finds to be troubling stances on many social issues, among them race, gender, sexuality, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy.

In a clear-eyed and eloquent voice, Sizemore grapples movingly with his own bewilderment and chagrin as he struggles to reconcile the essential philosophical and moral decay that he believes many evangelicals have come to embrace. His insights, arranged topically and thematically and told through graceful and accessible prose, toggle between memoir and literary journalism, along a spectrum that touches on history, philosophy, theology, and personal reflections.

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Home Ice

Confessions of a Blackhawks Fan

Kevin Cunningham

University of Iowa Press, 2017

Unable to skate and surrounded by sports fans who cared more about Evel Knievel than hockey, Kevin Cunningham became obsessed with the Chicago Blackhawks as a confused eight year old. He has no idea why. Yet from that moment on he embarked on a fan’s journey that absorbed his childhood, destroyed his GPA, and made him seriously weigh romance against an away game at Calgary. What explains this fascination?

Home Ice combines memoir and history to explore how the mysteries of Blackhawks fandom explain big questions like tribal belonging, masculinity, and why you would ever trade Chris Chelios. In recounting the team’s—and his own—wins and losses (and ties), Cunningham covers everything from Keith Magnuson’s bachelor pad to the grim early aughts to Patrick Kane’s Cup-winner. Throughout, he explores how we come to love the things we love. Funny and touching, Home Ice is one Blackhawk fan’s attempt to understand why sports fandom is utterly ridiculous and entirely necessary.

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Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas

A Brief Romance

By Yaron Peleg

University of Texas Press, 2008

Over the past two decades, profound changes in Israel opened its society to powerful outside forces and the dominance of global capitalism. As a result, the centrality of Zionism as an organizing ideology waned, prompting expressions of anxiety in Israel about the coming of a post-Zionist age. The fears about the end of Zionism were quelled, however, by the Palestinian uprising in 2000, which spurred at least a partial return to more traditional perceptions of homeland. Looking at Israeli literature of the late twentieth century, Yaron Peleg shows how a young, urban class of Israelis felt alienated from the Zionist values of their forebears, and how they adopted a form of escapist romanticism as a defiant response that replaced traditional nationalism.

One of the first books in English to identify the end of the post-Zionist era through inspired readings of Hebrew literature and popular media, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas examines Israel's ambivalent relationship with Jewish nationalism at the end of the twentieth century.

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Lucrecia Martel

Gerd Gemünden

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Films like Zama and The Headless Woman have made Lucrecia Martel a fixture on festival marquees and critic's best lists. Though often allied with mainstream figures and genre frameworks, Martel works within art cinema, and since her 2001 debut The Swamp she has become one of international film's most acclaimed auteurs.Gerd Gemünden offers a career-spanning analysis of a filmmaker dedicated to revealing the ephemeral, fortuitous, and endless variety of human experience. Martel's focus on sound, touch, taste, and smell challenge film's usual emphasis on what a viewer sees. By merging of these and other experimental techniques with heightened realism, she invites audiences into film narratives at once unresolved, truncated, and elliptical. Gemünden aligns Martel's filmmaking methods with the work of other international directors who criticize—and pointedly circumvent—the high-velocity speeds of today's cinematic storytelling. He also explores how Martel's radical political critique forces viewers to rethink entitlement, race, class, and exploitation of indigenous peoples within Argentinian society and beyond.

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Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships

John T. Price

University of Iowa Press, 2012

John Price’s Man Killed by Pheasant is a loving ode to the prairies of the Midwest, to west central Iowa, and to family connections that stretch from his Swedish ancestors to his parents to his wife and children. Throughout he embraces “the opportunity, as always, to settle, to remember, and be ready.” This quest sounds more portentous than it is once enriched with Price’s gentle humor and endearing empathy. Sharing stories of home, secrets of landscape, and binding ties to both, he weaves history and memory to create permanent kinships for himself and for his readers.

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My Mother’s Funeral

Adriana Páramo

CavanKerry Press, 2013

My Mother’s Funeral circles around the death of the author’s mother, but what also emerges is a landscape of personal loss and pain, of innocence, humor, violence and beauty. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and Colombian heritage, Páramo describes the volatile bond linking mothers and daughters in a culture largely unknown to Americans. The book moves between past (Colombia in the 1940s) and present lives, and maps scenes both geographical (Bogotá, Medellín, Anchorage) as well as psychological--ultimately revealing the indomitable spirit of the women in her family. Especially from Páramo’s mother the reader learns what it means to be a Colombian woman.

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Nowhere Near the Line

Pain and Possibility in Teaching and Writing

Elizabeth H. Boquet

Utah State University Press, 2016

“When I was starting College Presidents for Gun Safety, one of the concerns I heard was the idea that there were just too many issues on which to articulate an opinion. Where would it stop? Where would we draw the line? . . . In light of this latest tragedy, on a college campus that could have been any of ours, I would say: ‘We are nowhere near the line yet.’” (Lawrence Schall, quoted in “Tragedy at Umpqua,” by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2015)

In this short work, Elizabeth Boquet explores the line Lawrence Schall describes above, tracing the overlaps and intersections of a lifelong education around guns and violence, as a student, a teacher, a feminist, a daughter, a wife, a citizen and across the dislocations and relocations that are part of a life lived in and around school. Weaving narratives of family, the university classroom and administration, her husband’s work as a police officer, and her work with students and the Poetry for Peace effort that her writing center sponsors in the local schools, she recounts her efforts to respond to moments of violence with a pedagogy of peace. “Can we not acknowledge that our experiences with pain anywhere should render us more, not less, capable of responding to it everywhere?” she asks. “Compassion, it seems to me, is an infinitely renewable resource.”

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Our Lady of Controversy

Alma López's “Irreverent Apparition”

Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López

University of Texas Press, 2011

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition.

Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America).

Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

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Sherman Alexie

A Collection of Critical Essays

Jeff Berglund

University of Utah Press, 2010

Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America.

Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.

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To Know a Starry Night

Paul Bogard

University of Nevada Press, 2021

“Against a backdrop rich with purples, blues, and shades of black, a blaze of stars glittering across a vast empty sky spurs our curiosity about the past, driving us inevitably to ponder the future. For millennia, the night sky has been a collective canvas for our stories, maps, traditions, beliefs, and discoveries. Over the course of time, continents have formed and eroded, sea levels have risen and fallen, the chemistry of our atmosphere has changed, and yet the daily cycle of light to dark has remained pretty much the same . . . until the last 100 years.”
—Karen Trevino, from the foreword

No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.

Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Night explores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky\--how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.

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