In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.

A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.

 Ak'é Nýdzin, or Navajo Oshley, was born sometime between 1879 and 1893. His oral memoir is set on the northern frontier of Navajo land, principally the San Juan River basin in southeastern Utah, and tells the story of his early life near Dennehetso and his travels, before there were roads or many towns, from Monument Valley north along Comb Ridge to Blue Mountain. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglos and Navajos expanded their use and settlement of lands north of the San Juan. Grazing lands and the Anglo wage economy drew many Navajos across the river. Oshley, a sheepherder, was among the first to settle there. He cared for the herds of his extended family, while also taking supplemental jobs with the growing livestock industry in the area.

His narrative is woven with vivid and detailed portraits of Navajo culture: clan relationships, marriages and children, domestic life, the importance of livestock, complex relations with the natural world, ceremonies, trading, and hand trembling.

This volume, the original version of which was published in 1988, brings to a close the autobiographical writings of a modern Christian philosopher who lived through the two World Wars and the ecclesiastical upheaval in the Catholic Church in the context of the Second Vatican Council. What stamps this philosopher throughout the course of his life – with all its social and political uncertainties – is his constant dedication to truth and his manifest unswerving integrity.

Themes with which the reader of his previous works would be well acquainted recur in this volume. The dedicated Catholic philosopher, who preferred his independence as a trainer of teachers to the less independent role of a professor in a Catholic university, was quite prepared to criticize developments in the Church which resulted from Vatican II. In his defense of the sacred, which he deemed threatened by popularizing trends in the Church, he criticized what he saw as the watered down language in modern German translations of Church liturgical texts; the growing preference for secular garb; and the compromising developments which saw the sacramental signs – surrounding baptism, for instance – being reduced to such an extent that they no longer had the power to signify their sacred meaning even to a well-intentioned congregation.

A great lover of the philosophy of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas – among many others –, Pieper highlighted the need for living a life of truth. He did not consider truth to be merely something abstract but as something to be lived existentially. While he could explain his philosophy in clear rational terms, something which especially stood to him in his post-war lectures to eager students who were hungry for intellectual guidance and leadership, the great interest of his philosophy was, possibly, his preoccupation with mystery – that which impinges on our inner lives but frustrates all our attempts to account for it in purely rational terms.

As a philosopher – one might say a Christian philosopher – Pieper seems to have observed the traditional boundaries drawn between philosophy and theology. His generation was exposed to the modernist debates in the Church. It would have been deemed heretical to say that the Divine could be grasped by our purely human thought processes – access to the Divine being only possible through faith and grace. Pieper was no heretic. But he was also not altogether conservative. In fact, his philosophy, closely allied to existentialism – despite his care, for instance, to distance himself from the negative existentialism of Sartre – focused on the individual’s inner existential grasp of the most profound reality. Truth is to be found within us, even if it remains a mystery. What lies beyond death is, for the individual, the ultimate mystery.

How do memoirists make their work interesting, daring, exciting, and unorthodox enough so that they attract an audience, yet not so heinous and scandalous that their readers are unable to empathize or identify with them? In Justifiable Conduct, renowned sociologist Erich Goode explores the different strategies memoirists use to "neutralize" their alleged wrongdoing and fashion a more positive image of themselves for audiences. He examines how writers, including James Frey, Susan Cheever, Roman Polanski, Charles Van Doren and Elia Kazan, explain, justify, contextualize, excuse, or warrant their participation in activities such as criminal behavior, substance abuse, sexual transgressions, and political radicalism.

Using a theory of deviance neutralization, Goode assesses the types of behavior exhibited by these memoirists to draw out generic narratives that are most effective in attempting to absolve the actor-author. Despite the highly individualistic and variable lives of these writers, Goode demonstrates that memoirists use a conventional vocabulary for their unconventional behavior.