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Brahmanical Theories of the Gift
A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Dānakānda of the Krtyakalpataru
David Brick
Harvard University Press
This volume constitutes the first critical edition and translation into any modern language of a dānanibandha, a classical Hindu legal digest devoted to the culturally and religiously important topic of gifting. Specifically, it is a critical edition—based upon all identifiable manuscripts—and complete, annotated translation of the Dānakānda (“Book on Gifting”), the fifth section of the encyclopedic Krtyakalpataru (c. 1114–1154) of Laksmīdhara and the earliest extant dānanibandha. David Brick has included an extensive historical introduction to the text and its subject matter.
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Coming into Friendship as a Gift
Christina Van Regenmorter
QuakerPress, 2008

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The Enigma of the Gift
Maurice Godelier
University of Chicago Press, 1998
When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess.

Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate.

Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

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From Gift to Commodity
Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Hildegard Hoeller
University of New Hampshire Press, 2012
In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period's fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.
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The Gift
A Novel
Florence Noiville
Northwestern University Press, 2012
This moving fictional memoir begins as a woman heads home after a meeting regarding her inheritance. Rebeling against the legalese uttered by the attorney, her mind drifts back to her childhood and she sees her life with sudden clarity. On the train, she jots down a few notes, which prompt the poetic outpouring of memory and emotion that make up this delicate novel.

The narrator’s mother looms large in her psyche. Labeled “eccen­tric” or “Italian,” her mother in fact suffered from what was later found to be manic depression. Without understanding the disease, the fam­ily treated the unpredictable ups and downs of her condition as they struck. During periods of paralyzing depression she was hospitalized, and the family felt abandoned. During periods of manic productivity and overdrive, she was a dedicated pharmacist, an exemplary home­maker, and an unusually knowledgeable gardener. 

This sparse novel draws the portrait of a grand and unforgettable lady, loving and unable to love at once. Her bequest is as much a ma­terial one as it is an emotional one, and, the author surmises as she glances at her own daughters, a genetic one.
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Gift and Communion
Jaroslaw Kupczak
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
Gift and Communion offers a critical presentation of John Paul II's theology of the body, understood in the light of Christian theological tradition. The main thesis of the book is that John Paul II's theology of the body forms a new, inspiring approach to Christian ethics and the theology of marriage and family, as well as to theological anthropology. A central thrust of Gift and Communion is to treat theology of the body - as it deserves - in all its philosophical and theological seriousness and to present it as an important stage in the historical development of Catholic theology
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The Gift
Expanded Edition
Marcel Mauss
HAU, 2016
Scan down a list of essential works in any introduction to anthropology course and you are likely to see Marcel Mauss’ masterpiece, The Gift. With this new translation, Mauss’ classic essay is returned to its original context, published alongside the works that framed its first publication in the 1923–24 issue of L’Année Sociologique. With a critical foreword by Bill Maurer and a new introduction by translator Jane Guyer, this expanded edition is certain to become the standard English version of the essay—a gift that keeps on giving.

Included alongside the “Essay on the Gift” are Mauss’ memorial accounts of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues who were lost during World War I, as well as his scholarly reviews of influential contemporaries such as Franz Boas, J. G. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others. Read in the context of these additional pieces, the “Essay on the Gift” is revealed as a complementary whole, a gesture of both personal and political generosity: Mauss’ honor for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern society’s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his own careful, yet critical, reading of his intellectual milieu. The result sets the scene for a whole new generation of readers to study this essay alongside pieces that exhibit the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished the essay into life.
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The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France
Natalie Zemon Davis
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000


Must a gift be given freely? How can we tell a gift from a bribe? Are gifts always a part of human relations—or do they lose their power and importance once the market takes hold and puts a price on every exchange? These questions are central to our sense of social relations past and present, and they are at the heart of this book by one of our most interesting and renowned historians.
In a wide-ranging look at gift giving in early modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis reveals the ways that gift exchange is crucial to understanding alliance and conflict in family life, economic relations, politics, and religion. Moving from the king’s bounty to the beggar’s alms, her book explores the modes and meanings of gift giving in every corner of sixteenth-century French society. In doing so, it arrives at a new way of considering gifts—what Davis calls "the gift register"—as a permanent feature of social relations over time. Gift giving, with its own justifications and forms in different periods, can create amity or lead to quarrels and trouble. It mixes the voluntary and the obligatory, with interested bribery at one extreme and inspired gratuitousness at the other.
Examining gifts both ethnographically (through archives, letters, and other texts) and culturally (through literary, ethical, and religious sources), Davis shows how coercive features in family life and politics, rather than competition from the market, disrupted the gift system. This intriguing book suggests that examining the significance of gifts can not only help us to understand social relations in the past, but teach us to deal graciously with each other in the present.

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The Gift of Active Empathy
Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
Alina Wyman
Northwestern University Press, 2016
This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.
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A Gift of Angels
The Art of Mission San Xavier del Bac
Bernard L. Fontana; photographs by Edward McCain
University of Arizona Press, 2010
It rises suddenly out of the Sonoran Desert landscape, towering over the tallest tree or cactus, a commanding building with a sensuous dome, elliptical vaults, and sturdy bell towers. There is nothing else like it around, nor does it seem there should be. This incongruity of setting is what strikes first-time visitors to Mission San Xavier del Bac. This great church is of another place and another time, while its beauty is universal and timeless.

Mission San Xavier del Bac is a two-century-old Spanish church in southern Arizona located just a few miles from downtown Tucson, a metropolis of more than half a million people in the American Southwest. A National Historic Landmark since 1963, the mission’s graceful baroque art and architecture have drawn visitors from all over the world.

Now Bernard Fontana—the leading expert on San Xavier—and award-winning photographer Edward McCain team up to bring us a comprehensive view of the mission as we’ve never seen it before. With 200 stunning full-color photographs and incisive text illuminating the religious, historical, and motivational context of these images, A Gift of Angels is a must-have for tourists, scholars, and other visitors to San Xavier.

From its glorious architecture all the way down to the finest details of its art, Mission San Xavier del Bac is indeed a gift of angels.
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A Gift of Belief
Philanthropy and the Forging of Pittsburgh
Kathleen W. Buechel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Philanthropy has long been associated with images of industrial titans and wealthy families. In Pittsburgh, long a center for industry, the shadows of Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and others loom especially large, while the stories of working-class citizens who uplifted their neighbors remain untold. For the first time, these two portraits of Pittsburgh philanthropy converge in a rich historic tapestry. The Gift of Belief reveals how Pittsburghers from every strata, creed, and circumstance organized their private resources for the public good. The industrialists and their foundations are here but stand alongside lesser known philanthropists equally involved in institution building, civic reform, and community empowerment.

Beginning with sectarian philanthropy in the nineteenth century, moving to scientific philanthropy in the early twentieth century and Pittsburgh Renaissance-era institution-building, and concluding with modern entrepreneurship, twelve authors trace how Pittsburgh aligned with, led, or lagged behind the national philanthropic story and explore how ideals of charity and philanthropy entwined to produce distinctive forms of engagement that has defined Pittsburgh’s civic life.

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The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome
Friendship in Cicero's Ad Familiares and Seneca's Moral Epistles
Amanda Wilcox
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving.
    By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, Wilcox provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she shows that he both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Though Cicero and Seneca are often viewed as a study in contrasts, Wilcox extensively compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s significant influence on Seneca as a prose stylist, philosopher, and public figure.

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The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard.

A major work, The Gift of Death resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion.

"The Gift of Death is Derrida's long-awaited deconstruction of the foundations of the project of a philosophical ethics, and it will long be regarded as one of the most significant of his many writings."—Choice

"An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of relgion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida."—Booklist

"Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry. . . . Provocative."—Publishers Weekly
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The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation.
 
This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty.
 
“An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition
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front cover of The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation.
 
This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty.
 
“An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition
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The Gift of Freedom
War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
Mimi Thi Nguyen
Duke University Press, 2012
In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen develops a new understanding of contemporary United States empire and its self-interested claims to provide for others the advantage of human freedom. Bringing together critiques of liberalism with postcolonial approaches to the modern cartography of progress, Nguyen proposes "the gift of freedom" as the name for those forces that avow to reverence aliveness and beauty, and to govern an enlightened humanity, while producing new subjects and actions—such as a grateful refugee, or enduring war—in an age of liberal empire. From the Cold War to the global war on terror, the United States simultaneously promises the gift of freedom through war and violence and administers the debt that follows. Focusing here on the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as the twice-over target of the gift of freedom—first through war, second through refuge—Nguyen suggests that the imposition of debt precludes the subjects of freedom from escaping those colonial histories that deemed them "unfree." To receive the gift of freedom then is to be indebted to empire, perhaps without end.
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A Gift of Madrigals and Motets
Edited by H. Colin Slim
University of Chicago Press, 1972
Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a gift—or "musical embassy"—to the English court of Henry VIII. The manuscript set—minus the missing altus part—has been owned since 1935 by the Newberry Library in Chicago; but until H. Colin Slim's exhaustive efforts, no thorough study of the history or contents of the partbooks had been undertaken.

At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to England. In his search for this information, Professor Slim used the musicologists' customary tools, namely, biobibliography, concordances, and textual and musical analysis. But he also used bibliographers' tools not always employed by musicologists: watermarks, bindings, script, orthography, and illuminations.

As a result of his efforts, the author was able to identify nearly all the works' composers and the manuscripts' expert illuminator. He also presents a detailed description of the binding process and the probably background of the scribe, places the political and social references in the works, and determines the route the volumes may have taken after they left Henry's library.

By placing the date of the partbooks' arrival in England around 1528, Professor Slim suggests that the musical culture of the early Tudor court was less French than has hitherto been thought. Indeed, the presence of the partbooks in Henry's library makes them the earliest evidence of the Italian madrigal in England. The author also provides new and significant data on the artistic and historical position of Philippe Verdelot, the partbooks' most extensively represented composer.

Volume I of this set contains two parts. The first, dealing with the manuscript itself, contains the history of the partbooks, information on their origin, composers, texts, and their importance as a gift to Henry VIII. Part II, dealing with the music, discusses general musical traits, the motets, the madrigals, the results of collation, and the appearance of some of the Newberry motets and madrigals in other sources.
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A Gift of Madrigals and Motets, Volume 2
Transcription
Edited by H. Colin Slim
University of Chicago Press, 1972
Near the end of the third decade of the sixteenth century, a five-volume set of madrigal and motet partbooks was assembled in Florence and sent as a gift—or "musical embassy"—to the English court of Henry VIII. The manuscript set—minus the missing altus part—has been owned since 1935 by the Newberry Library in Chicago; but until H. Colin Slim's exhaustive efforts, no thorough study of the history or contents of the partbooks had been undertaken.

At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to England. In his search for this information, Professor Slim used the musicologists' customary tools, namely, biobibliography, concordances, and textual and musical analysis. But he also used bibliographers' tools not always employed by musicologists: watermarks, bindings, script, orthography, and illuminations.

As a result of his efforts, the author was able to identify nearly all the works' composers and the manuscripts' expert illuminator. He also presents a detailed description of the binding process and the probably background of the scribe, places the political and social references in the works, and determines the route the volumes may have taken after they left Henry's library.

By placing the date of the partbooks' arrival in England around 1528, Professor Slim suggests that the musical culture of the early Tudor court was less French than has hitherto been thought. Indeed, the presence of the partbooks in Henry's library makes them the earliest evidence of the Italian madrigal in England. The author also provides new and significant data on the artistic and historical position of Philippe Verdelot, the partbooks' most extensively represented composer.
In Volume II, Professor Slim has transcribed the music of the thirty motets and thirty madrigals for modern performance. The parts are cantus, tenor, bassus, and quintus et VI; the altus partbook is missing. Concordant sources provide the altus parts for all but four of the motets and six of the madrigals. These ten have been composed by Professor Slim. Notes at the end of each selection provide variant readings for both music and text. The Latin texts of the motets, the Italian of the madrigals, and an English translation of each appear at the end of the volume.
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A Gift of Meaning
Bill Tammeus
University of Missouri Press, 2001

Because of the peculiar momentary nature of journalism, not every column can stand the test of time. But many—even those about events nearly gone from the public consciousness--contain lasting truths. A Gift of Meaning is a collection of those lasting truths from Bill Tammeus, a columnist for the Kansas City Star.

Each piece reveals Tammeus's attempt to wrestle eternal meaning from the events and experiences that sweep us along day by day.

I stopped by a homeless shelter the other day to see someone I know. As I waited, I felt rather conspicuous in my suit and tie. In fact, the friendly man at the information desk asked me if I was a pastor. I chuckled.

But as I sat in the lobby waiting to see the man I came to check on, I was struck again by what may be the most difficult of all human tasks: empathy. That is, the challenge of really putting ourselves in the shoes of others.

In the end, A Gift of Meaning is not just a presentation of found meaning, but also a call to readers to stop and think for themselves. This book is an invitation to breathe deeply and seek out the meaning of what the world heaves at us each day. It is an offering of insights that will provide fresh ways of comprehending things readers thought they already understood.

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A Gift of Presence
The Theology and Poetry of the Eucharist in Thomas Aquinas
Jan Heiner Tück
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
Jan-Heiner Tück presents a work that explores the sacramental theology, lived spirituality, and Eucharistic poetry of the Church’s doctor communis, St. Thomas Aquinas. Although Aquinas’ Eucharistic poetry has long occupied an important place in the Church’s liturgical prayer and her repertoire of sacred music, the depth of these poems remains hidden until one grasps the rich sacramental theology underlying it. Consequently, Tück first offers a detailed but approachable primer of Aquinas’ theology of the sacraments, before diving deeply into the Angelic Doctor’s theology and poetry of the Eucharist. The Scriptural accounts stand at the heart of the systematic framework developed by Aquinas, and thus significant attention is devoted to showing the harmony between the accounts of Christ’s passion and the detailed exposition of the Summa theologiae. Moreover, the Eucharistic controversies of the ninth and eleventh centuries provide the contrapuntal context in which Aquinas did his thinking, praying, and writing. Not surprisingly, therefore, the response he crafts to these controversies draws upon both speculative powers and contemplative prayer, brought together in the unity of Aquinas’ theology and spirituality. The net result is a twofold treasure for the Church: a careful systematic presentation of Eucharistic theology and the lived devotional expression of the same in the carefully constructed—and now much beloved—stanzas of Pange lingua gloriosi, Lauda Sion, Adoro te devote, etc. By revealing the lively interplay of the saint’s powerful speculative intellect and a heart steeped in love for the Eucharistic Lord, Tück offers a sophisticated exposition of Aquinas’ Eucharistic poetry and the roots it sinks into a wider theological framework. Finally, the contemporary significance and power of Aquinas’ work is drawn out, not only in the rarefied realm of intellectual inquiry but also in the everyday expanse of ordinary life.
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The Gift of Science
Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition
Roger Berkowitz
Harvard University Press, 2005

The front pages of our newspapers and the lead stories on the evening news bear witness to the divorce of law from justice. The rich and famous get away with murder; Fortune 500 corporations operate sweatshops with impunity; blue-chip energy companies that spoil the environment and sicken communities face mere fines that don't dent profits. In The Gift of Science, a bold, revisionist account of 300 years of jurisprudence, Roger Berkowitz looks beyond these headlines to explore the historical and philosophical roots of our current legal and ethical crisis.

Moving from the scientific revolution to the nineteenth-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends. Drawing on major figures from the traditions of law, philosophy, and history, The Gift of Science is not only a mesmerizing and original intellectual history of law; it shows how modern law remains imprisoned by a failed scientific metaphysics.

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The Gift of the Unicorn
Essays on Writing
Percival Hunt
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965

The ability to write well is difficult to gain. To write beyond the ordinary—beyond the clear and effective paragraph or book—needs craft, patience, and practice. And it has always required something more: genius, magic, a supreme gift. Professor Hunt in The Gift of the Unicorn binds the two—the craft and the gift—under a unifying light, showing both writer and reader the how and why and perhaps of good writing and of the writing that has gained, in Hunt’s words, “the friendship of time” and is called literature.
Essays include: “Beginning,” “The Web of Writing,” “The Telling,” “Spontaneity,” “Disciplined Writing,” “The Story,” “The People in the Book,” “Of Rules, Again,” and “Ending.”

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God as Otherwise Than Being
Toward a Semantics of the Gift
Calvin O. Schrag
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Speaking as one of the founders of American Continental philosophy, Calvin O. Schrag offers an exceptionally clear, balanced, and informative discussion of a complex questions vexing postmodern currents of philosophical and theological reflection: Does the "death" of the god conceived as a "highest being" in Western, and especially modern, traditions open a new space within which to rethink God in terms of a "gift" or "giving" that would stand beyond the usual spate of metaphysical categories?

Schrag draws with grace, ease, and precision upon the history of Western metaphysics, from Plato and Aristotle through Nietzsche and Heidegger. Most important to his central question of God as "otherwise than Being," however, are such influential post-Heideggerian thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. Schrag's inquiry engages these thinkers at a serious level and also expands recent discussions by relating them to the work of figures hitherto overlooked or underplayed, most notably Paul Tillich.
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Indian Summer
Musings on the Gift of Life
Sam Pickering
University of Missouri Press, 2005

 Returning to Nova Scotia every summer contributes to the illusion of smooth continuance, each summer not the first thread in a new fabric but another button on a cardigan, perhaps looser than buttons below but still familiar and comfortable. Every summer the songs of white-throated sparrows bounce from scrub like novelty tunes from the fifties. Early in the morning ravens grind woodenly. . . . No matter how slowly I jog, on the headland butterflies spring from my feet in clumps, first azures and orange crescents, then wood nymphs, and finally over the lowlands near the Beaver River outlet cabbage whites spiraling, dizzy with mating.

Indian Summer is the newest collection of personal essays by Sam Pickering. In typical Pickering fashion, he seeks to capture the gift of living. He brings to the page again his family, students, and a wealth of country characters who live in places that exist only in his imagination and who wander through the stories he tells.

            He describes how his life has been altered by his children leaving home for college, and he ponders the changes aging brings and the things that never change. The consummate teacher, he celebrates academic life and the pleasures of the classroom. Readers will roam familiar ground with Pickering as he explores the fields and small hills of eastern Connecticut and the bogs and woods on his farm in Nova Scotia.
            Indian Summer celebrates hearing and seeing. Butterflies tumble across the pages, flowers bloom and wilt, and dragonflies glitter like stained glass in the sunlight. Pickering teaches us to value our words and to laugh at the world around us. His musings mirror his desire for his readers to appreciate life a little more after exploring this book.
 
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Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz
Laleen Jayamanne
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers, expressed in several of their key films. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor - a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.
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The Poison in the Gift
Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village
Gloria Goodwin Raheja
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the "purity" of the Brahman priest and the "temporal power" of the dominant caste or the king.
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Rambling On
An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab
Bohumil Hrabal
Karolinum Press, 2016
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal’s Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.
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Rambling On
An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab
Bohumil Hrabal
Karolinum Press, 2014
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal’s Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.
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front cover of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art
Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art
Michael Zell
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a "love of art," not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic's vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.
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Returning the Gift
Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers' Festival
Edited by Joseph Bruchac
University of Arizona Press, 1994
An unprecedented gathering of more than 300 Native writers was held in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1992. The Returning the Gift Festival brought more Native writers together in one place than at any other time in history. "Returning the Gift," observes co-organizer Joseph Bruchac, "both demonstrated and validated our literature and our devotion to it, not just to the public, but to ourselves." In compiling this volume, Bruchac invited every writer who attended the festival to submit new, unpublished work; he then selected the best of the more than 200 submissions to create a collection that includes established writers like Duane Niatum, Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Elizabeth Woody, Linda Hogan, and Jeanette Armstrong, and also introduces such lesser-known or new voices as Tracy Bonneau, Jeanetta Calhoun, Kim Blaeser, and Chris Fleet.

The anthology includes works from every corner of the continent, representing a wide range of tribal affiliations, languages, and cultures. By taking their peoples' literature back to them in the form of stories and songs, these writers see themselves as returning the gift of storytelling, culture, and continuance to the source from which it came. In addition to contributions by 92 writers are two introductory chapters: Joseph Bruchac comments on the current state of Native literature and the significance of the festival, and Geary Hobson traces the evolution of the event itself.
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front cover of Sacrifice As Gift
Sacrifice As Gift
Michon M. Matthiesen
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Sacrifice as Gift is a timely presentation of a forgotten vision of eucharistic sacrifice, one that reconfigures the current philosophical and theological divide between sacrifice and gift.
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Theatre for Children in Hospital
The Gift of Compassion
Persephone Sextou
Intellect Books, 2016
Recent decades have seen a new appreciation develop for applied theater and the role of arts-based activities in health care. This book looks specifically at the place of theater for children who are hospitalized, showing how powerfully it can enhance their social and mental well-being. Child-led performances, for example, can be used as a technique to distract young patients from hospitalization, prepare them for painful procedures, and teach them calming techniques to control their own pre- or post-operative stress. Persephone Sextou details the key theoretical contexts and practical features of theater for children, in the process offering motivation, guidance, and inspiration for practitioners who want to incorporate performance into their treatment regimen.
 
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front cover of The Work and the Gift
The Work and the Gift
Scott Cutler Shershow
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for instance, to work for a wage and a living, dooming ourselves forever to the curse of daily toil; and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as a labor of love. We ask ourselves to give with no thought of return; yet we still tell ourselves to give only to the deserving and only where our giving will do some good.

Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler, Scott Cutler Shershow here explores the predictions of political thinkers on both the left and the right that work is fundamentally changing, or even disappearing; the debates among anthropologists and historians about an archaic gift-economy that preceded capitalism and might reemerge in its wake; contemporary political battles over charity and social welfare; and attempts by modern and postmodern artists to destabilize the work of art as we know it.

Ultimately, Shershow joins other contemporary thinkers in envisioning a community of unworking, grounded neither in ideals of production and progress, nor in an ethic of liberal generosity, but simply in our fundamental being-in-common. What results is a brilliant intervention in critical theory and social thought that will be of enormous value to students of literary criticism, anthropology, and philosophy alike.
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