front cover of Audionarratology
Audionarratology
Lessons from Radio Drama
Edited by Lars Bernaerts and Jarmila Mildorf
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Radio drama has been around for more than one hundred years and is still vibrant in many countries. A narrative-dramatic genre and art form in its own right, radio drama has traditionally crossed medial and generic boundaries and continues to do so in our age of digitization. Audionarratology: Lessons from Audio Drama, edited by Lars Bernaerts and Jarmila Mildorf, explores radio drama from a narratological angle. The contributions cover key questions surrounding audiophonic meaning-making, storyworld creation, mediation, focalization, suspense, unreliability, and ambiguity as well as the relationship between script and performance, seriality, antinarrative tendencies, and radio drama’s political implications now and in its early days. The book thus explores the interplay between sound, voices, music, language, silence, electroacoustic manipulation, and narrative structures. Providing examples from American, Australian, British, Dutch, and German radio drama—such as I Love a MysteryThe War of the Worlds, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—this book has important insights for scholars working in transmedial narratology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and communication studies as well as for practitioners and lovers of radio drama alike.
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front cover of Biologically-Inspired Radar and Sonar
Biologically-Inspired Radar and Sonar
Lessons from nature
Alessio Balleri
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2017
Nature presents examples of active sensing which are unique, sophisticated and incredibly fascinating. There are animals that sense the environment actively, for example through echolocation, which have evolved their capabilities over millions of years and that, as a result of evolution, have developed unique in-built sensing mechanisms that are often the envy of synthetic systems.
[more]

front cover of Buy It Now
Buy It Now
Lessons from eBay
Michele White
Duke University Press, 2012
In Buy It Now, Michele White examines eBay and its emphasis on community and social norms, revealing the cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that are reinforced throughout the site. She shows how instructional texts, rule systems, and advertisements "configure the user," allowing eBay to indicate how the site is supposed to function while also upholding particular values and practices. White details how eBay reinforces stereotypes about gender and sexuality, looking, for example, at descriptions included in wedding dress listings, and how eBay directs individuals to the "Adult Only" part of the website when they use the search terms "gay" and "lesbian." She discloses the ways that eBay promises a caring community but its "Black Americana" category reproduces racism by allowing sellers' narratives that excuse and romanticize slavery and insult African Americans. White also looks at how participants challenge eBay's categories, rules, and values, examining widely used strategies of resistance by sellers and buyers in the lesbian and gay interest listings. By analyzing the organizational and cultural logics present in eBay, White emphasizes how other Internet settings, including craigslist, are not as transparent, community-oriented, and empowering as they claim. She proposes methods for researching and reconceptualizing new media sites.
[more]

front cover of The Classrooms All Young Children Need
The Classrooms All Young Children Need
Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley
Patricia M. Cooper
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. In The Classrooms All Young Children Need, Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley’s many books and articles, charting the evolution of Paley’s thinking while revealing the seminal characteristics of her teaching philosophy. This careful analysis leads Cooper to identify a pedagogical model organized around two complementary principles: a curriculum that promotes play and imagination, and the idea of classrooms as fair places where young children of every color, ability, and disposition are welcome.

With timely attention paid to debates about the reduction in time for play in the early childhood classroom, the role of race in education, and No Child Left Behind, The Classrooms All Young Children Need will be embraced by anyone tasked with teaching our youngest pupils.

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front cover of Coastal Hazard Management
Coastal Hazard Management
Lessons and Future Directions from New Jersey
Psuty, Norbert P.
Rutgers University Press, 2002

As with most shorelines around the world, New Jersey beaches are slowly, but inexorably, being eroded, threatening coastal structures and development. In some years more sand is deposited than removed, but all of the state’s monitoring devices show that sea level is gradually rising and pushing the New Jersey shoreline inland. The shore is a valuable resource, and its natural, cultural, and economic attractions draw a multitude of permanent and temporary residents each year, extending housing and commercial development onto areas that were once swampland. Not surprisingly, development at the water’s edge has been accompanied by an increasing exposure to the natural hazards of the coastal zone--erosion, flooding, and wind damage.

In this book, Norbert Psuty and Douglas Ofiara incorporate perspectives from the areas of coastal sciences, economics, public policy, and land-use planning in creating a systematic plan for coastal management and protection. It has been more than a decade since New Jersey developed the nation’s first state shore protection plan, and this volume provides a timely evaluation of its achievements and future challenges. This self-contained book provides all of the relevant theories, models, and examples so the reader will not need to refer to any other literature to gain an understanding of the issues and policies surrounding shore protection. It is the authoritative handbook for practitioners and policy makers in many fields, including coastal science and management and engineering, as well as public policy and economics.

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front cover of Cooperatives across Clusters
Cooperatives across Clusters
Lessons from the Cranberry Industry
Anil Hira
Oregon State University Press, 2024

Most agricultural production is of commodity or undifferentiated products. Producers suffer from a roller-coaster ride of price swings, over- or under-production, weather and pest threats, and the inability of family famers to capture anything beyond a small percentage of the final price.

Cooperatives Across Clusters provides lessons from the cranberry industry, a commodity product organized mostly into family farms in seven different clusters around North America. The industry is remarkable in that it's substantially organized around one large cooperative, Ocean Spray. The authors examine how the cooperative came to be, the challenges of coordination and industry leadership across the diverging clusters, and the lessons for cooperation for other agricultural industries.

The book provides a multi-layered contribution to agricultural economics. First, it examines location decisions and what factors supersede growing conditions to allow industries to arise around production. Second, it explores pathways available for farmers to try to overcome, through cooperative organization, the natural boom-bust cycles of commodity price swings. Third, it looks at how cooperative decisions are made, and the challenges of providing industry leadership, including research and development and collective marketing, through a cooperative that faces continual defections and new problems. Finally, through in-depth historical, statistical, and field research, it provides a comprehensive study of the cranberry industry and suggests ways farmers can grow the industry. Agricultural policymakers, farmers, industry specialists, and researchers of agriculture and clusters more generally will find this to be an important and informative new resource.

[more]

front cover of Corruption and Reform
Corruption and Reform
Lessons from America's Economic History
Edited by Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world’s least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today’s most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new ways to steal from taxpayers and swindle investors. In Corruption and Reform, contributors explore this shadowy period of United States history in search of better methods to fight corruption worldwide today.

Contributors to this volume address the measurement and consequences of fraud and corruption and the forces that ultimately led to their decline within the United States. They show that various approaches to reducing corruption have met with success, such as deregulation, particularly “free banking,” in the 1830s. In the 1930s, corruption was kept in check when new federal bureaucracies replaced local administrations in doling out relief.  Another deterrent to corruption was the independent press, which kept a watchful eye over government and business. These and other facets of American history analyzed in this volume make it indispensable as background for anyone interested in corruption today.
[more]

front cover of COVID Diagnosed the System
COVID Diagnosed the System
Lessons from the Pandemic in Massachusetts Prisons
Bridget Conley
Rutgers University Press

The American criminal justice system was in flux in 2020, a clash of possibilities for reform, retrenchment, and radical change—nowhere more so than in Massachusetts, which had just passed major criminal justice reform. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the moment with life-threatening force, ravaging people held in prisons and jails across the country. However, it did not so much create new deprivations and suffering as it exposed prisons as sites of physical, institutional, and psychological violence that do not make communities safer. At the same time, advocates for people in prisons—including many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people—seized on the pandemic’s disruptions to demand change. Detailing the first year of the pandemic inside the Massachusetts state prison system, this book argues that the history of the pandemic inside prisons exposed both the cruelties of incarceration and the power of change when it is led by directly affected people. 

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front cover of The Death and Life of the Single-Family House
The Death and Life of the Single-Family House
Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City
Nathanael Lauster
Temple University Press, 2016

Vancouver today is recognized as one of the most livable cities in the world as well as an international model for sustainability and urbanism. Single-family homes in this city are “a dying breed.” Most people live in the various low-rise and high-rise urban alternatives throughout the metropolitan area.

The Death and Life of the Single-Family House explains how residents in Vancouver attempt to make themselves at home without a house. Local sociologist Nathanael Lauster has painstakingly studied the city’s dramatic transformation to curb sprawl. He tracks the history of housing and interviews residents about the cultural importance of the house as well as the urban problems it once appeared to solve.

Although Vancouver’s built environment is unique, Lauster argues that it was never predestined by geography or demography. Instead, regulatory transformations enabled the city to renovate, build over, and build around the house. Moreover, he insists, there are lessons here for the rest of North America. We can start building our cities differently, and without sacrificing their livability.

[more]

front cover of Debts & Lessons
Debts & Lessons
Lynn Xu
Omnidawn, 2013
The poems in Lynn Xu’s striking debut collection, Debts & Lessons, travel under the power of history’s illusory engine and echo its ululations of love, violence, and lament. Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this book also finds its way across oceans and between languages, as the poet looks to the dead for guidance amid the abstractions of contemporary life. Xu pays her phantoms (and her readers) with the dream-currency of hallucinatory songs, which balance her finely-tuned ear against a world of awakenings.
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front cover of Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling
Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling
Lessons from the Inside
Scott H. Decker and Margaret Townsend Chapman
Temple University Press, 2008
Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling features interviews with 34 convicted drug smugglers -- most of them once major operators -- detailing exactly how drugs are smuggled into the U.S. from Latin America.  These sources provide tangible evidence of the risks, rewards, and organization of international drug smuggling.

Quoting frequently from their interviews, Decker and Chapman explain how individuals are recruited into smuggling, why they stay in it, and how their roles change over time.  They describe the specific strategies their interviewees employed to bring drugs into the country and how they previously escaped apprehension.  Over-all, the authors find that drug smuggling is organized in a series of networks which are usually unconnected.

This extraordinarily informative book will be of particular interest to law enforcement officials and policymakers, but it will appeal to anyone who wants to know how the drug business actually works.
[more]

front cover of Ed Garvey Unvarnished
Ed Garvey Unvarnished
Lessons from a Visionary Progressive
Rob Zaleski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Ed Garvey (1940–2017) was one of the most influential and colorful progressive politicians in Wisconsin's history. Growing up in what was a conservative rural town, he got his first taste of liberal activism at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, became the first executive director of the National Football League Players' Union, led two spirited campaigns against Bob Kasten and Tommy Thompson, and eventually cofounded the Fighting Bob Fest.

Shortly before he died, Garvey expressed his views on everything in a series of detailed, no-holds-barred interviews with journalist Rob Zaleski. In his trademark witty, blunt, and often abrasive style, he offered his impressions of the political climate, worries about the environment, and Act 10 protests on Capitol Square. Garvey's candor during these conversations provides deeper insight into the personal highs and lows he experienced over his rich life. Diehard followers will fondly remember his energetic campaigns, but they may be surprised to learn of his long-simmering disappointment after those losses. Ever timely and meaningful, Garvey's words offer a path for how the Democratic Party, both within Wisconsin and nationally, can regain its soul.
[more]

front cover of Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies
Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies
Lessons from the Indonesian Case
Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
University of Michigan Press, 2019

When and why do democratic political actors change the electoral rules, particularly regarding who is included in a country’s political representation? The incidences of these major electoral reforms have been on the rise since 1980.

Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies argues that elite inexperience may constrain self-interest and lead elites to undertake incremental approaches to reform, aiding the process of democratic consolidation. Using a multimethods approach, the book examines three consecutive periods of reform in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority country and third largest democracy, between 1999 and 2014. Each case study provides an in-depth process tracing of the negotiations leading to new reforms, including key actors in the legislature, domestic civil society, international experts, and government bureaucrats. A series of counterfactual analyses assess the impact the reforms had on actual election outcomes, versus the possible alternative outcomes of different reform options discussed during negotiations. With a comparative analysis of nine cases of iterated reform processes in other new democracies, the book confirms the lessons from the Indonesian case and highlights key lessons for scholars and electoral engineers.

[more]

front cover of Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions
Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions
Critical Reflections and Lessons from the Field
Edited by Ella Cockbain, Aiden Sidebottom, and Sheldon X. Zhang
University College London, 2025
Both a practical companion guide to and a critical reflection on the merits and shortcomings of evaluation in anti-trafficking efforts. 

Despite vast investment in anti-trafficking measures worldwide, there is a stark lack of evidence of effective interventions. It is unethical and ineffective to keep throwing money at anti-trafficking efforts without a more nuanced understanding of how they can help and harm. After all, advances in crime prevention and harm reduction both rely heavily on evaluation science. Bringing together contributors from across different perspectives, disciplines, backgrounds, and geographies, Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions focuses on the sharp end of criminal abuses. It offers both practical guidance and critical reflections on the promises and pitfalls of evaluation for anti-trafficking interventions. The book also introduces foundational theory and practice around evaluations (including both qualitative and quantitative evidence), highlights innovative new directions, and draws lessons from real-world case studies. It is designed to function both as a practical companion guide and to stimulate reflection on the tensions and constraints of funding, doing, and assessing evaluations in this domain. 
[more]

front cover of Food Margins
Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer
Cathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness 
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer


In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.

[more]

front cover of Food Margins
Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer
Cathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness 
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer


In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.

[more]

front cover of Gardening with Perennials
Gardening with Perennials
Lessons from Chicago's Lurie Garden
Noel Kingsbury
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For gardeners, inspiration can come from the most unexpected places. Perennial enthusiasts around the world might be surprised to find their muse in the middle of a bustling city. Lurie Garden, a nearly three-acre botanic garden in the center of Chicago’s lakefront in Millennium Park, is a veritable living lab of prairie perennials, with a rich array of plant life that both fascinates and educates as it grows, flowers, and dies back throughout the year. Thousands of visitors pass through each year, and many leave wondering how they might bring some of the magic of Lurie to their own home gardens.

With Gardening with Perennials horticulturalist and garden writer Noel Kingsbury brings a global perspective to the Lurie oasis through a wonderful introduction to the world of perennial gardening. He shows how perennials have much to offer home gardeners, from sustainability—perennials require less water than their annual counterparts—to continuity, as perennials’ longevity makes them a dependable staple.

Kingsbury also explains why Lurie is a perfect case study for gardeners of all locales. The plants represented in this urban oasis were chosen specifically for reliability and longevity. The majority will thrive on a wide range of soils and across a wide climatic range. These plants also can thrive with minimal irrigation, and without fertilizers or chemical control of pests and diseases. Including a special emphasis on plants that flourish in sun, and featuring many species native to the Midwest region, Gardening with Perennials will inspire gardeners around the world to try Chicago-style sustainable gardening.
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front cover of Gender and Sustainability
Gender and Sustainability
Lessons from Asia and Latin America
Edited by María Luz Cruz-Torres and Pamela McElwee
University of Arizona Press, 2012
This is one of the first books to address how gender plays a role in helping to achieve the sustainable use of natural resources. The contributions collected here deal with the struggles of women and men to negotiate such forces as global environmental change, economic development pressures, discrimination and stereotyping about the roles of women and men, and diminishing access to natural resources—not in the abstract but in everyday life. Contributors are concerned with the lived complexities of the relationship between gender and sustainability.

Bringing together case studies from Asia and Latin America, this valuable collection adds new knowledge to our understanding of the interplay between local and global processes. Organized broadly by three major issues—forests, water, and fisheries—the scholarship ranges widely: the gender dimensions of the illegal trade in wildlife in Vietnam; women and development issues along the Ganges River; the role of gender in sustainable fishing in the Philippines; women’s inclusion in community forestry in India; gender-based confrontations and resistance in Mexican fisheries; environmentalism and gender in Ecuador; and women’s roles in managing water scarcity in Bolivia and addressing sustainability in shrimp farming in the Mekong Delta.

Together these chapters show why gender issues are important for understanding how communities and populations deal daily with the challenges of globalization and environmental change. Through their rich ethnographic research, the contributors demonstrate that gender analysis offers useful insights into how a more sustainable world can be negotiated—one household and one community at a time.

Contributors
 
Stephanie Buechler
María Luz Cruz-Torres
Linda D’Amico
Georgina Drew
James Eder
Lisa L. Gezon
Pamela McElwee
Neera Singh
Hong Anh Vu
Amber Wutich
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front cover of How Political Parties Mobilize Religion
How Political Parties Mobilize Religion
Lessons from Mexico and Turkey
Luis Felipe Mantilla
Temple University Press, 2021

Political mobilization tends to take different forms in contemporary Catholic- and Sunni-majority countries. Luis Felipe Mantilla attributes this dynamic to changes taking place in religious communities and the political institutions that govern religious political engagement. 

In How Political Parties Mobilize Religion, Mantillaevenhandedly traces the emergence and success of religious parties in Mexico and Turkey, two countries shaped by assertive secular regimes. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious parties are highly responsive to political institutions, such as electoral laws, as well as to the structure of broader religious communities. 

Whereas in both countries, the electoral success of religious mobilizers was initially a boon for democracy, in Mexico it was marred by political mismanagement and became entangled with persistent corruption and escalating violence. In Turkey, the democratic credentials of religious mobilizers were profoundly eroded as the government became increasingly autocratic, concentrating power in very few hands and rolling back basic liberal rights. 

Mantilla investigates the role religious mobilization plays in the evolution of electoral politics and democratic institutions, and to what extent their trajectories reflect broader trends in political Catholicism and Islam.

[more]

front cover of How to Protest
How to Protest
Lessons on Nonviolent Action
Megan Hershey, Illustrations by Matthew Cahill
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Many people around the world are frustrated with their governments yet do not know what actions to take. Protest may feel out of reach, like something only seasoned activists can do. This accessible guide explores the creativity, joy, and accessibility of peaceful protest. Megan Hershey introduces readers to twenty-five specific and inspiring nonviolent protest methods through real-life examples from the past fifty years. Each chapter includes a short, vivid description of a bold nonviolent action taken by everyday people who demanded that their leaders listen to them. From patriotic choir concerts in Estonia to live painted pigs at the Ugandan parliament, these unique protest strategies will inspire those looking to effect change and offer encouragement from past successes.

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front cover of Infinite Phenomenology
Infinite Phenomenology
The Lessons of Hegel's Science of Experience
John Russon
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Infinite Phenomenology builds on John Russon’s earlier book, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of the Phenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely, the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and the Science of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon’s earlier work, Infinite Phenomenology will remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel’s essential, yet difficult, text.

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front cover of In-laws and Outlaws
In-laws and Outlaws
Lessons in Research and Friendship and a Report from the Archives
Sarah Barringer Gordon
Utah State University Press, 2007
Eleventh volume in the Leonard Arrington Lecture Series.
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front cover of Inventories and Surveys for Heritage Management
Inventories and Surveys for Heritage Management
Lessons for the Digital Age
David Myers
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
This open-access publication provides essential guidance on digital inventories and surveys for the identification, conservation, and management of heritage places.

A critical first step in the conservation of cultural heritage is to identify and understand the places we want to protect. Inventories and surveys are essential tools in this effort, and their use in managing national, regional, and local heritage is mandated in heritage-related legislation across the globe. Despite the widespread understanding of the importance of inventories and surveys, however, practical, up-to-date guidance on how they should be created, implemented, and maintained has been substantially lacking—until now.
 
This publication draws from the Getty Conservation Institute’s ongoing work with heritage inventories and on the Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources’ experience with SurveyLA. It provides technical advice, guidance, and lessons learned for employing inventories and surveys as tools for heritage conservation and management.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/inventories-and-surveys. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book.
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front cover of Jamón and Halal
Jamón and Halal
Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía
Christina Civantos
Amherst College Press, 2022
Contemporary Spain reflects broader patterns of globalization and has been the site of tensions between nationalists and immigrants. This case study examines a rural town in Spain’s Andalucía in order to shed light on the workings of coexistence. The town of Órgiva’s diverse population includes hippies from across Europe, European converts to Sufi Islam, and immigrants from North Africa. Christina Civantos combines the analysis of written and visual cultural texts with oral narratives from residents. In this book, we see that although written and especially televisual narratives about the town highlight tolerance and multiculturalism, they mask tensions and power differentials. Toleration is an ongoing negotiation, and this book shows us how we can identify the points of contact that create robust, respect-based tolerance.

“This is a book that is both a personal account and a rigorous academic study. It is a model for the kind of engaged humanistic work we are now beginning to see as a hallmark of the post-theory moment, and one that remembers the hard lessons of ethnographic fieldwork as well as the challenging foundational work from philosophically-tinged theory.” —Debra A. Castillo, Cornell University

“Filled with rich descriptions and interwoven personal anecdotes of both Civantos and her interlocuters that complement scholarly analysis.” —Jessica R. Boll, Carroll University
[more]

front cover of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism
Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism
Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs
Jonathan Graubart
Temple University Press, 2023
Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism examines the liberal Zionist and Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives that developed in the decades following Israeli statehood. In his timely book, Jonathan Graubart. advances a non-statist vision of Jewish self-determination to be realized in a binational political arrangement that rejects Apartheid practices and features a just and collaborative coexistence of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. The book’s vision advances a distinct Jewish self-determination committed to cultural enrichment and emancipation, internationalism, and the fostering of new political, social, and economic channels for attaining genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.  

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism also engages a Humanist Zionist vision to confront the Zionist movement’s foundational sins and demands a full reckoning with the Palestinians. Graubart focuses on two of Humanist Zionism’s most insightful thinkers, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, putting them “in conversation” with each other, and synthesizing their collective insights and critical Jewish perspectives alongside the ideas of Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Ella Shohat, Edward Said, and other philosophers and academics. Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism concludes that an updated, binational program is the best path forward.
 
[more]

front cover of Law and Employment
Law and Employment
Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean
Edited by James J. Heckman and Carmen Pages
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Law and Employment analyzes the effects of regulation and deregulation on Latin American labor markets and presents empirically grounded studies of the costs of regulation.

Numerous labor regulations that were introduced or reformed in Latin America in the past thirty years have had important economic consequences. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Carmen Pagés document the behavior of firms attempting to stay in business and be competitive while facing the high costs of complying with these labor laws. They challenge the prevailing view that labor market regulations affect only the distribution of labor incomes and have little or no impact on efficiency or the performance of labor markets. Using new micro-evidence, this volume shows that labor regulations reduce labor market turnover rates and flexibility, promote inequality, and discriminate against marginal workers.

Along with in-depth studies of Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Jamaica, and Trinidad, Law and Employment provides comparative analysis of Latin American economies against a range of European countries and the United States. The book breaks new ground by quantifying not only the cost of regulation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and in the OECD, but also the broader impact of this regulation.
[more]

front cover of Leadership
Leadership
Lessons from a Life in Diplomacy
Simon Mcdonald
Haus Publishing, 2023
A British diplomat shares lessons on leadership gained over his expansive career. 

Simon McDonald argues that we should reflect on the nature and strategies of leadership before entering a leadership role, and we should look to examples of others to help us in shaping our own approaches.

Over nearly four decades in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service, McDonald worked for four permanent under-secretaries and a dozen senior ambassadors before becoming a permanent under-secretary himself and leading the Service—which has over 14,000 staff members in 270 countries—for five years. He also worked directly for six foreign secretaries and under five prime ministers. Observing these people undertaking such important and difficult work, McDonald saw the behaviors which helped them achieve their objectives, as well as those which hindered them.

In this book, McDonald synthesizes the skills he’s learned through his many years working in diplomacy, offering an insightful contribution amid heightening debates over the leadership of the United Kingdom. Considering the future of British leadership, he makes a case for the reform of the monarchy, the cabinet, civil service, and, in particular, the House of Lords, of which he has been a member since 2021.
 
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front cover of Leaving a Legacy
Leaving a Legacy
Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake
Philip Diller
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
In the midst of a fast-paced profession, it is increasingly a challenge to pause and reflect on where a person’s life is heading. All can feel overwhelming. In these moments, when nothing seems stable, it can be instructive to pause and study individuals from previous generations who lived fully and left a lasting legacy. To find valuable lessons and perspective on the present, author Dr. Phillip Diller has often turned to man, citizen, writer, educator, and physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, who lived from 1785-1852.
 

Leaving a Legacy: Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake is a selective collection of excerpts from the vast writings from the nineteenth-century doctor and medical pioneer Daniel Drake. From Drake’s life, documented here in his own words from excerpts of lectures, personal journal entries, presentations, speeches, books, and letters to his children, readers learn about the scope of his accomplishments in medicine, contributions to his community, and dedication to his family. Diller goes beyond biography to contextualize Drake’s life choices and what made him a role model for today’s physicians. Diller selected one hundred and eighty thematically arranged excerpts, which he paired with original reflection questions to guide the reader through thought-provoking prompts. In doing so, Diller presents the lessons from Drake’s remarkable life and work as a guide for others who wish to build an enduring legacy.

Designed to appeal to early and mid-career professionals, particularly those in the medical field, Drake and Diller offer readers a way to enhance life with small actions that can leave a legacy in any community—professional or personal. Documented previously as a man whose life was remarkable for the breadth and depth of his professional accomplishments, Drake’s countless contributions are showcased here to demonstrate the impact he truly had in his time and for generations to come. Engaging with Drake and Diller’s thoughtful and principled voices provides a lasting perspective for those trying to find their purpose in the present.  


 
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front cover of Left Populism in Europe
Left Populism in Europe
Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos
Marina Prentoulis
Pluto Press, 2021
While the right is harnessing populist rhetoric to great effect, the left's attempts have been much less successful. The Syriza government in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain have both failed to change the neoliberal status quo and introduce democratic socialism in their countries. Other movements however, like the Spanish party Podemos, have seen greater gains and are now in government in Spain. In this book, Marina Prentoulis evaluates the transformational process of left populism across grassroots, national and European levels and asks what we can do to better harness the power of broad-based, popular left politics. Bringing a wealth of experience in political organizing, she argues that left populism is a political logic that brings together isolated demands against a common enemy with an egalitarian pluralism that could transform economic and political institutions in a radical democratic direction. But each party does this differently, and the key to understanding where to go from here lies in a serious analysis of the roots of each movement's base, the forms of party organization, and the particular national contexts. Avoiding reductive terms like 'pasokification', this is a clear and holistic approach to left populism that will inform anyone wanting to understand and move forward positively in a bleak time for the Left in Europe.
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The Legacy of Hurricane Mitch
Lessons from Post-Disaster Reconstruction in Honduras
Marisa O. Ensor
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Around the world disaster vulnerability is on the rise. The incidence and intensity of disasters have increased in recent decades with lives being shattered and resources being destroyed across broad geographic regions each year.

As it swept across the Honduran landscape, the exceptional size, power and duration of Hurricane Mitch abruptly and brutally altered the already diminished economic, social, and environmental conditions of the population. In the aftermath of the disaster a group of seven socio-environmental scientists set out to investigate the root causes of the heightened vulnerability that characterized pre-Mitch Honduras, the impact of the catastrophe on the local society, and the subsequent recovery efforts. Edited by Marisa O. Ensor, this volume presents the findings of their investigation.

The Legacy of Hurricane Mitch offers a comprehensive analysis of the immediate and long-term consequences of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and environmental assessments, this volume illustrates the importance of adopting an approach to disaster research and practice that places “natural” trigger events within their political, cultural, and socio-economic contexts. The contributors make a compelling case against post-disaster recovery efforts that limit themselves to alleviating the symptoms, rather than confronting the root causes of the vulnerability that prefigured the disaster.
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Lessons and Legacies I
The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World
Peter Hayes
Northwestern University Press, 1991
Nearly half a century after the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Europe, the Holocaust is now moving from the domain of experience to that of history. It is becoming the subject of recorded rather than living memory. Is real comprehension of the development and horror of the Nazi onslaught accessible to us? If so, through what intellectual processes or categories of understanding, and in the face of what temptations or diversions? How can we preserve, expand, and apply our knowledge of why and how barbarity came to prevail? What meaning can present and future generations derive from the catastrophe? These are the vital questions addressed by the essays in this volume.
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Lessons and Legacies II
Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World
Donald G. Schilling
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In the years following the demise of the Third Reich, the task of Holocaust education fell predominantly to survivors. Now, as the generation of survivors passes along this responsibility, growing numbers of individuals and institutions are committed to Holocaust education.

Lessons and Legacies II focuses on matters unique to Holocaust education. Consisting of selected papers delivered at the second Lessons and Legacies conference in 1992, the volume is organized in three sections: Issues, Resources, and Applications. Taken individually, the essays speak directly to specific concerns surrounding Holocaust education: the growing maturity of the Holocaust as a field of study; the difficult issue of explaining the perpetrators' behavior; the process of decision-making within Jewish communities during the Holocaust; issues of gender and family; the scope and content of survivor literature; and the structure of courses and the implications of being an educator in the field. Taken as a whole, the volume speaks to the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching and scholarship in this important field.
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Lessons and Legacies III
Memory, Memorialization, and Denial
Peter Hayes
Northwestern University Press, 1999
The process of looking back on the Holocaust is one of a double nature: it can bring both enlightenment and a paralyzing pain, particularly for its survivors. This volume addresses the process of looking back, the challenges to understanding of unimaginable horrors that took place, and how academia, media, popular attitudes, and even judicial mind-sets handle that process.

A collection of nineteen essays, this book is organized into four sections: the first focuses on how various fields of study can open new perspectives on the Holocaust and sharpen old ones; the second examines culture and politics in Germany before and after 1933; the third addresses the problems associated with the memorialization of those years; and the final section examines the shocking denials of the Holocaust.
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Lessons and Legacies IV
Reflections on Religion, Justice, Sexuality, and Genocide
Larry V. Thompson
Northwestern University Press, 2003
In authoritative, nonpolemical essays on some of the latest and most contentious issues surrounding the Holocaust, the contributors to this volume revisit some topics central to Holocaust studies, such as the stance of the papacy and the concern about the uses to which the meaning of the Holocaust has been put, while expanding research into less-examined areas such as propriety, sexuality, and proximity.

Variously concerned with issues of guilt and victimization, the essays examine individuals like Pius XII and Romano Guardini and the institutions of organized religion as well as the roles of the Jewish Councils and the retributive judicial proceedings in Hungary. They reveal that victimization within the Holocaust experience is surprisingly open-ended, with Jewish women doubly victimized by their gender; postwar Germans viewing themselves as the epoch's greatest victims; Poles, whether Jewish or not, victimized beyond others because of their proximity to the epicenter of the Holocaust; and German university students corrupted by ideological inculcation and racist propaganda.

Though offering no "positive lessons" or comforting assurances, these essays add to the ongoing examination of Holocaust consequences and offer insightful analyses of facets previously minimized or neglected. Together they illustrate that matters of gender, sexuality, and proximity are crucial for shaping perceptions of a Holocaust reality that will always remain elusive.
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Lessons and Legacies IX
Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future
Jonathan Petropoulos
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future contains the highlights from the ninth "Lessons and Legacies" conference. The conference, held during the height of the genocide in Darfur, sought to reexamine how the darkness of the Holocaust continues to shadow human existence more than sixty years after World War II left the Third Reich in ruins.

The collection opens with Saul Friedländer’s call for interdisciplinary approaches to Holocaust research. The essays that follow draw on the latest methodologies in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, religion, film, and gender studies, among others. Together both the leading scholars of the Holocaust and the next generation of scholars engage the difficult reality—as raised by editors Petropoulos, Rapaport, and Roth in their introduction—that the legacies of the Holocaust have not proved sufficient in intervening against human-made mass death, let alone preventing or eliminating it.

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Lessons and Legacies V
The Holocaust and Justice
Ronald Smelser
Northwestern University Press, 2002
How can one link the Holocaust and justice, given the enormity of the Holocaust? Is justice even possible for a crime of such magnitude, and if so, what kind of justice? Weighing these questions and their implications, a group of distinguished scholars attempts to untangle the complex and often contradictory conjunction of the Holocaust and justice.

Seeking a historical context, the contributors ask, What were the political, social, psychological, and ideological prerequisites for this tragedy? Considering the courts and trials both during and immediately after World War II, and recent cases against aging perpetrators, the contributors examine the legal circumstances for trying to provide justice, the dimming impact of passing time, and other issues that complicate litigation. Their inquiry extends to questions about memory--how it is shaped and reshaped and whether it can be reliable--and about the re-creation of events of the Holocaust by a second generation. Does reassembling the evidence through the lenses of a later generation provide a deeper understanding, and does this understanding include a sense of justice accomplished?
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Lessons and Legacies VI
New Currents in Holocaust Research
Jeffry Diefendorf
Northwestern University Press, 2004
In the courtroom and the classroom, in popular media, public policy, and scholarly pursuits, the Holocaust-its origins, its nature, and its implications-remains very much a matter of interest, debate, and controversy. Arriving at a time when a new generation must come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust or forever lose the benefit of its historical, social, and moral lessons, this volume offers a richly varied, deeply informed perspective on the practice, interpretation, and direction of Holocaust research now and in the future. In their essays the authors-an international group including eminent senior scholars as well those who represent the future of the field-set the agenda for Holocaust studies in the coming years, even as they give readers the means for understanding today's news and views of the Holocaust, whether in court cases involving victims and perpetrators; international, national, and corporate developments; or fictional, documentary, and historical accounts.

Several of the essays-such as one on nonarmed "amidah" or resistance and others on the role of gender in the behavior of perpetrators and victims-provide innovative and potentially significant interpretive frameworks for the field of Holocaust studies. Others; for instance, the rounding up of Jews in Italy, Nazi food policy in Eastern Europe, and Nazi anti-Jewish scholarship, emphasize the importance of new sources for reconstructing the historical record. Still others, including essays on the 1964 Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards and on the response of the Catholic Church to the question of German guilt, bring a new depth and sophistication to highly charged, sharply politicized topics. Together these essays will inform the future of the Holocaust in scholarly research and in popular understanding.
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Lessons and Legacies VII
The Holocaust in International Perspective
Dagmar Herzog
Northwestern University Press, 2006
As the discipline of Holocaust studies matures, new questions and themes come to the fore. Among these are critical issues that receive serious scholarly attention, often for the first time, in this collection of essays by some of the world's most respected experts in the field. Greed and theft as motives for Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders; sexual violence and what it tells us about the experiences of both victims and perpetrators; collaboration with Nazis among the local populations of the ever-moving Eastern front; the durability of anti-Semitism after 1945; and the perspectives of the Soviet military and Soviet leadership on Nazi crimes: these are some of the topics the authors address as they extend the boundaries of Holocaust scholarship beyond the central loci of the planning and execution of technologized mass murder--Germany and Poland--and into ghettos and killing fields in Ukraine and Belarus, as well as spaces whose boundaries and national identities changed repeatedly. The authors also look to Western Europe and consider the expropriation of Dutch Jews and the exigencies of post-Holocaust filmmaking in France; they draw insights from recent genocides such as those in Cambodia and Rwanda, and provide new critical analyses of the course and meaning of contested responses to the Shoah in nations and locations long and deeply studied.

A thorough, thoughtful, and insightful introduction clarifies the volume's themes and concisely places them within the larger context of Holocaust scholarship; and an introductory essay by Omer Bartov brings into focus the numerous paradoxes structuring early twenty-first-century retrospective thinking about the significance of the Holocaust as a central theme of the twentieth century.
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Lessons and Legacies VIII
From Generation to Generation
Doris L. Bergen
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Primo Levi opened his memoir Survival in Auschwitz with a call to remember, reflect upon, and teach about the Holocaust—or to face the rejection of subsequent generations. The transmittal of this urgent knowledge between generations was the theme of the eighth Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust, and it is the focus of this volume. The circular formulation—from generation to generation—points backward and forward: where do we locate the roots of the Holocaust, and how do its repercussions manifest themselves? The contributors address these questions from various perspectives—history, cultural studies, psychiatry, literature, and sociology. They also bring to bear the personal aspect of associated issues such as continuity and rupture. What has the generation of the Shoah passed on to its descendants? What have subsequent generations taken from these legacies? Contributions by scholars, some of whom are survivors and children of survivors, remind us that the Holocaust does—and must—remain present from generation to generation.

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Lessons and Legacies, Volume XV
The Holocaust: Global Perspectives, National Narratives, Local Contexts
Erin McGlothlin; Avinoam Patt
Northwestern University Press, 2024

The contributions to this volume not only indicate the intellectual vibrancy and diversity of cutting-edge research in Holocaust studies but also reflect multiple approaches to the necessary work of expanding the canon of research in the field and of adopting varied disciplinary perspectives, engaging with global perspectives as well as local studies.


This collection’s chapters manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory; at the same time, however, as the interdisciplinary nature of these chapters indicate, these categories should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or discrete. On the contrary, they overlap and intersect in compelling ways, demonstrating the dynamic character of contemporary Holocaust studies, which views history, narrative representation, and commemoration as mutually informative. Further, the contributors continue the recent trend in Holocaust studies whereby specific regional and national narratives are integrated into a more global approach to the event: Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. 

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Lessons and Legacies, Volume XVI
Rethinking Paradigms
Sarah Phillips Casteel and Jennifer V. Evans
Northwestern University Press, 2027

Bringing forth new perspectives previously unrepresented in Holocaust studies

Lessons and Legacies, Volume XVI: Rethinking Paradigms does the difficult but crucial work of thinking through new methods and modes of representation that speak to where we find ourselves in Holocaust studies today, responding to—and developing new tools to analyze—the shifting shape of Holocaust memory: spatially, temporally, and in and across diverse media. The collection foregrounds the challenges visual sources pose to how we think about the Holocaust, including how it is represented differently in visual media, from photography to graphic novels, and establishes translation as a crucial concept for reframing Holocaust testimony and memory. The contributing authors also model ethical, nuanced ways to conduct comparative, connective work that challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Holocaust. The volume concludes with a section on memory work and activism that approaches the subject of post-1945 memory through different lenses to surface lesser-known aspects of Holocaust history.

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Lessons and Legacies X
Back to the Sources: Reexamining Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders
Sara R Horowitz
Northwestern University Press, 2012
The essays in the tenth volume of Lessons and Legacies offer a sense of the issues that run through current thinking about the Holocaust and ideas about the different ways we engage with a broad range of sources. New sources ranging from traditional archival finds to microhistories accessible via newer technology infuse Holocaust research. At the same time, the fields of Holocaust research and Jewish studies have an increasing impact upon other disciplines. Overall, the editor and writers find that the integration of insights, methodologies, critiques, and questions from psychology, literary studies, visual arts, and other fields with those of history, political science, and other social sciences sharpens the tools of analysis. The essays in this volume testify to the evolution of the field of Holocaust studies and also indicate a future direction.
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Lessons and Legacies XI
Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World
Edited and with an introduction by Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes
Northwestern University Press, 2015
“Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World” was the theme of the eleventh Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust. The eighteen essays published here, which sprung from the conference, reflect questions that Holocaust scholars are asking in the face of shifting political, economic, social, and disciplinary contexts. These questions are addressed from various perspectives including Jewish studies, history, cultural studies (film and memory), literary studies, legal studies, and geography. The book opens with the contentious issues raised in the keynote addresses of Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder, which highlight the fact that the Holocaust, a once untold history, is now a central component of a wide-ranging scholarship not limited to German history.
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Lessons and Legacies XII
New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education
Edited and with an introduction by Wendy Lower and Lauren Faulkner Rossi
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Lessons and Legacies XII explores new directions in research and teaching in the field of Holocaust studies. The essays in this volume present the most cutting-edge methods and topics shaping Holocaust studies today, from a variety of disciplines: forensics, environmental history, cultural studies, religious studies, labor history, film studies, history of medicine, sociology, pedagogy, and public history. This rich compendium reveals how far Holocaust studies have reached into cultural studies, perpetrator history, and comparative genocide history. Scholars, laypersons, teachers, and the myriad organizations devoted to Holocaust memorialization and education will find these essays useful and illuminating.
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Lessons and Legacies XIII
New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory
Edited and with an introduction by Alexandra Garbarini and Paul B. Jaskot
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Lessons and Legacies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust is an edited collection of thirteen original essays that reflect current research on the Holocaust in a range of disciplines.
 
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Lessons and Legacies XIV
The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century; Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age
Edited and with an introduction by Tim Cole and Simone Gigliotti
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.

Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.

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Lessons from a Multispecies Studio
Uncovering Ecological Understanding and Biophilia through Creative Reciprocity
Julie Andreyev
Intellect Books, 2021
A collection of nonfiction, first-person writings about creative collaborations with local animals and ecologies. 

In this highly original book, Julie Andreyev explores agency and consciousness through her encounters with other lifeforms—companion dogs, wild birds, mineral beings, plant life, and forest communities—to illuminate the ways creativity can play a part in generating a renewed sense of wonder and kinship with nature. Drawing from her extensive work in interspecies collaborative art, each chapter weaves together personal reflection, interdisciplinary research, and critical thought with new media, sound, generative, indeterminacy, and other art methods. The threads converge on this main point: the need to move away from anthropocentrism and towards ecological understanding through reciprocity and biophilia. The local journeys in each chapter are guided by more-than-human ways of knowing, which provide an expanded sense of the world and underscore the imperative to act. This book invites readers to step into other worlds, re-sense life, and re-think their relationship with the planet and all of its inhabitants. In proposing an expanded field of aesthetics, Andreyev offers new applied approaches from interspecies art to help shape and evolve human outlooks, emotions, and actions.
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Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman
Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective
Janis B. Nuckolls
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers.

This book is a fascinating look at ideophones—words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers’ discourse—both linguistic and cultural—because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena’s utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices.

Cadena’s narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.
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Lessons from East Asia
Danny M. Leipziger, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2001
This compilation of case studies and cross-country essays focuses on the role of public policy in the experience of East Asian economies. A major theme running through the volume is regional learning and regional contagion -- the spread of that learning. Beginning with the model and experience of Japan and continuing with the impressive achievements of countries originally considered unviable in the 1950s and 1960s, like Korea and Taiwan, contributors demonstrate how regional policy lessons permeated borders easily. The 1980s brought further lessons and flows of capital to the second generation of rapid industrializers. And the 1990s have seen regional contagion benefit new aspirants like Vietnam. As the chapters cumulatively reveal, however, the transferability of lessons depends on the institutional framework in which policy is formulated, the consistency of policy, and the quality of implementation. Part 1 includes the case studies for the first generation of rapidly developing East Asian economics -- the tigers -- while Part 2 incorporates the later generation success stories -- the cubs -- plus the Philippines, a country only now beginning to show significant progress. Part 3 includes cross-country essays on public investment, foreign direct investment, and cross-country patterns that synthesize the lessons learned and propose actions for other development aspirants to pursue. The essays aim to fill two major gaps -- the paucity of country-specific work on the institutional side of development policy and the failure to explain the mixed record of industrial policies in East Asia. The volume will appeal to students, scholars, and policymakers in development economics. This title was formally part of the Studies in International Trade Policy Series, now called Studies in International Economics.
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Lessons from Little Rock
Terrance Roberts
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2009
Sober news reports of a U.S. Army convoy rumbling across the bridge into Little Rock cannot overpower this intimate, powerful, personal account of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Showing what it felt like to be one of those nine students who wanted only a good high school education, Roberts’s rich narrative and candid voice take readers through that rocky year, helping us realize that the historic events of the Little Rock integration crisis happened to real people—to children, parents, our fellow citizens.
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Lessons from Sarajevo
A War Stories Primer
Jim Hicks
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
In today's world, our television screens are filled with scenes from countless conflicts across the globe—commanding our attention and asking us to choose sides. In this insightful and wide-ranging book, Jim Hicks treats historical representation, and even history itself, as a text, asking questions such as Who is speaking?, Who is the audience?, and What are the rules for this kind of talk? He argues that we must understand how war stories are told in order to arm ourselves against them. In a democracy, we are each responsible for policy decisions taken on our behalf. So it is imperative that we gain fluency in the diverse forms of representation (journalism, photography, fiction, memoir, comics, cinema) that bring war to us.

Hicks explores the limitations of the sentimental tradition in war representation and asks how the work of artists and writers can help us to move beyond the constraints of that tradition. Ranging from Walt Whitman's writings on the Civil War to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and focusing on the innovative and creative artistic expressions arising out of the wars of the former Yugoslavia, Hicks examines how war has been perceived, described, and interpreted. He analyzes the limitations on knowledge caused by perspective and narrative position and looks closely at the distinct yet overlapping roles of victims, observers, and aggressors. In the end, he concludes, war stories today should be valued according to the extent they make it impossible for us to see these positions as assigned in advance, and immutable.
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Lessons from "Take Me Home, Country Roads"
Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes
Sarah L. Morris
West Virginia University Press, 2025
You may have heard it at a football game, in an advertisement, or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand, at Oktoberfest in Belgium, or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays, the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is ubiquitous, unmistakable, universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver in 1971, the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences, carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages. 

This book examines “Country Roads” as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining “Country Roads” as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, this work untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.
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Lessons from the Great Gardeners
Forty Gardening Icons and What They Teach Us
Matthew Biggs
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Like heirloom seeds and grafts from trees, advice from great gardeners handed down through the centuries has shaped the science and art of gardens across the globe. Spanning gardeners from fifteenth-century Japan to the contemporary United States, Lessons from the Great Gardeners profiles forty groundbreaking botanists, nurserymen, and tillers of earth, men and women whose passion, innovation, and green thumbs endure in the formal landscapes and vegetable patches of today.

Entries for each gardening great highlight their iconic plants and garden designs, revealing both the gardeners’ own influences and the seeds—sometimes literal—that they sowed for gardens yet to sprout. From André Le Nôtre in seventeenth-century France, who drew on his training as an architect and hydraulic engineer to bring the topiary form to Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles, to the work of High Line and Lurie Garden designer Piet Oudolf, and Thomas Jefferson’s advice on creating protected garden microclimates for help growing early crops and tender fruit like figs (with peas, a Jefferson favorite), Lessons from the Great Gardeners is a resource as rich as the soil from which it springs.

Featuring lush illustrations harvested from the archives of the Royal Horticultural Society, as well as sections on a dozen international gardens that showcase the lessons of the greats, this homage to the love of good, clean dirt is sure to inspire readers to get out in the sun and dig.
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Lessons from the Intersexed
Kessler, Suzanne J
Rutgers University Press, 1998

From the moment intersexuality-the condition of having physical gender markers (genitals, gonads, or chromosomes) that are neither clearly female nor male-is suspected and diagnosed, social institutions are mobilized in order to maintain the two seemingly objective sexual categories. Infants' bodies are altered, and what was "ambiguous" is made "normal." Kessler's interviews with pediatric surgeons and endocrinologists reveal how the intersex condition is normalized for parents and she argues that the way in which intersexuality is managed by the medical and psychological professions displays our culture's beliefs about gender and genitals.

Parents of intersexed children are rarely heard from, but in this book they provide another perspective on reasons for genital surgeries and the quality of medical and psychological management. Although physicians educate parents about how to think about their children's condition, Kessler learned from parents of intersexed children that some parents are able to accept atypical genitals. Based on analysis of the medical literature and interview with adults who had received treatment as interesexed children, Kessler proposes new approaches for physicians to use in talking with parents and children. She also evaluates the appearance of a politicized vanguard, many of who are promoting an intersexual identity, who seek to alter the way physicians respond to intersexuality.

Kessler explores the possibilities and implications of suspending a commitment to two "natural" genders and addresses gender destabilization issues arising from intersexuality. She thus compels readers to re-think the meaning of gender, genitals, and sexuality.

"This is a brave book. Kessler says things that need to be said, and she says them clearly, concisely, and with respect for the people whose lives are most affected by the questions she confronts. A must read for anyone concerned with intersex issues." --Holly Devor, author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society.

"While the physician's response to an infant with ambiguous genitalia has been to produce categories like the 'successful vagina' and the 'good enough penis,' Kessler takes her cues from intersexuals themselves. This book is a brilliant and long overdue call for the reevaluation of gender variability." --Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity

"Fascinating in what it tells us not only about situation in which sex assignment is uncertain but about the astonishingly weak empirical foundations on which the medical orthodoxies of binary sex and gender are built. A must for anyone interested in the ways widely accepted social beliefs and scientific explanations generate and reinforce each other." --Ruth Hubbard, author of The Politics of Women's Biology and Exploding the Gene Myth

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Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process
Edited by Timothy J. White; Foreword by Martin Mansergh
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
From the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, Northern Ireland was the site of bitter conflict between those struggling for reunification with the rest of Ireland and those wanting the region to remain a part of the United Kingdom. After years of strenuous negotiations, nationalists and unionists came together in 1998 to sign the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland's peace process has been deemed largely successful. Yet remarkably little has been done to assess in a comprehensive fashion what can be learned from it.
            Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process incorporates recent research that emphasizes the need for civil society and a grassroots approach to peacebuilding while taking into account a variety of perspectives, including neoconservatism and revolutionary analysis. The contributions, which include the reflections of those involved in the negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, also provide policy prescriptions for modern conflicts.
            This collection of essays in Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process fills a void by articulating the lessons learned and how—or whether—the peace processes can be applied to other regional conflicts.
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Lessons from the Past
The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose
Frances Pownall
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Because of the didactic nature of the historical genre, many scholars ancient and modern have seen connections between history and rhetoric. So far, discussion has centered on fifth-century authors -- Herodotus and Thucydides, along with the sophists and early philosophers. Pownall extends the focus of this discussion into an important period. By focusing on key intellectuals and historians of the fourth century (Plato and the major historians -- Xenophon, Ephorus, and Theopompus), she examines how these prose writers created an aristocratic version of the past as an alternative to the democratic version of the oratorical tradition.
Frances Pownall is Professor of History and Classics, University of Alberta.
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Lessons in Drag
A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties
Kareem Khubchandani with LaWhore Vagistan
Brandeis University Press, 2025
Scholarship and performance combine to show how drag can be a blueprint for critique, care, teaching, and worldmaking. 
 
Lessons in Drag brings to life a vibrant and thought-provoking dialogue between scholar Kareem Khubchandani and his drag persona LaWhore Vagistan. Beginning with an intimate interview, the book unfolds in alternating chapters where the two exchange insights, stories, and critiques. Khubchandani delves into the lessons LaWhore’s drag practice offers about academia—shaping his approaches to research, teaching, and writing—while Vagistan reveals how Khubchandani’s scholarship influences her performances, inspiring her understanding of fashion, music, divas, and aunties. Together, their reflections and conversations weave a compelling tapestry of drag’s instructive power. Witty, bold, and deeply personal, Lessons in Drag is both an invitation to explore drag as a practice and a celebration of its transformative potential.
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Lessons in Gratitude
A Memoir on Race, the Arts, and Mental Health
Aaron P. Dworkin
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Lessons in Gratitude tells the story of Aaron Dworkin, a MacArthur Fellow, social entrepreneur, and spoken word artist who has dedicated his life’s work to changing the face of classical arts in the world. The themes of persistence, passion, and loyalty shine through stories of an unhappy childhood, a lifelong search for identity, and the obstacles of race, culture, and class. Readers will learn how the author greets these challenges and how they drove him to make a difference for people who are shut out of opportunity. Persistence in the face of multiple failures and false starts ultimately led Dworkin to create the Sphinx Organization, whose mission is to address the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx people in the field of the classical arts. 

Aaron’s unique journey, which begins with his adoption by a white Jewish couple from Chicago at two weeks of age, leads him to the ultimate reunification with his birth family at the age of 31. Lessons of Gratitude is a coming of age story that examines the difficulties of biracial identity across generations and the challenges that mixed race families still face today. It is also a painful and honest adoption memoir, further complicating the narrator’s experiences of racial identity throughout his life and shaping his experiences with his own children. Through his work in the arts and the impact of this work, Dworkin has been able to “pay forward” the first thing that offered him unconditional love—music.
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Lessons in Gratitude
A Memoir on Race, the Arts, and Mental Health
Aaron P. Dworkin
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Lessons in Gratitude tells the story of Aaron Dworkin, a MacArthur Fellow, social entrepreneur, and spoken word artist who has dedicated his life’s work to changing the face of classical arts in the world. The themes of persistence, passion, and loyalty shine through stories of an unhappy childhood, a lifelong search for identity, and the obstacles of race, culture, and class. Readers will learn how the author greets these challenges and how they drove him to make a difference for people who are shut out of opportunity. Persistence in the face of multiple failures and false starts ultimately led Dworkin to create the Sphinx Organization, whose mission is to address the underrepresentation of Black and Latino people in the field of the classical arts. 

Aaron’s unique journey, which begins with his adoption by a white Jewish couple from Chicago at two weeks of age, leads him to the ultimate reunification with his birth family at the age of 31. Lessons in Gratitude is a coming of age story that examines the difficulties of biracial identity across generations and the challenges that mixed race families still face today. It is also a painful and honest adoption memoir, further complicating the narrator’s experiences of racial identity throughout his life and shaping his experiences with his own children. Through his work in the arts and the impact of this work, Dworkin has been able to “pay forward” the first thing that offered him unconditional love—music.
[more]

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Lessons in Laughter
The Autobiography of a Deaf Actor
Bernard Bragg
Gallaudet University Press, 1989

To succeed as an actor is a rare feat. To succeed as a deaf actor is nothing short of amazing. Lessons in Laughter is the story of Bernard Bragg and his astonishing lifelong achievements in the performing arts.

Born deaf of deaf parents, Bernard Bragg has won international renown as an actor, director, playwright, and lecturer. Lessons in Laughter recounts in stories that are humorous, painful, touching, and outrageous, the growth of his dream of using the beauty of sign language to act. He starred in his own television show “The Quiet Man,” helped found The National Theatre of the Deaf, and traveled worldwide to teach his acting methods.

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Lessons in Leadership
Steve Adubato, PhD
Rutgers University Press, 2016
In this practical guide, Emmy Award-winning public broadcasting anchor Steve Adubato teaches readers to be self-aware, empathetic, and more effective leaders at work and at home. His powerful case studies spotlighting dozens of leaders—from Pope Francis to New Jersey governor Chris Christie—are complemented by concrete tips and tools based in real-life scenarios. With Lessons in Leadership, readers can learn to steer others through difficult economic times, to mentor rising leaders, to provide straight talk to underperforming employees, and even how to lead a company through a significant change. 
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Lessons in Modern Hebrew
Level 1
Edna Amir Coffin
University of Michigan Press, 1977
A comprehensive introduction to modern Israeli Hebrew, Lessons in Modern Hebrew: Level I and Level II provide English-speaking students and well-motivated individuals with all the basic classroom tools necessary for mastery of the language. The lessons introduce the student to the core vocabulary which is then included in reading passages, conversational text, and written communication. All grammatical features of modern Hebrew are thoroughly explained and reinforced by drills and exercises. The books have been classroom-tested at the University of Michigan. Both audio-lingual and cognitive approaches are used.
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Lessons in Mortality
Doctors and Patients Struggling Together
Allen B. Weisse, M.D.
University of Missouri Press, 2006
It doesn’t take a trip to the doctor to know that the bond between physicians and patients isn’t what it used to be. Specialization, rising costs, managed care, the insurance industry, the shadow of litigation—so many factors have changed what was once a traditional relationship grounded in respect and caring. 
            In light of the altered climate in health care, this thoughtful book deals with the way that today’s doctors and patients view themselves and one another. Allen Weisse has observed the changing medical scene during half a century of treating patients and training future physicians, and he writes frankly here about how doctors and patients have come to deal with illness in the twenty-first century. 
Weisse first recalls his own brush with death as a young man diagnosed with testicular cancer—a time when one thinks of God and Death and little else. He then shares true stories of how different people have dealt with cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious disease, AIDS, and other dire diagnoses—narratives enhanced by professional savvy and enriched by the kind of empathy that the survivor of such a calamity can provide.
Drawing from a storehouse of experiences shared by colleagues, patients, and friends, Weisse writes with passion, conviction, and clarity to encourage a renewal of the openness and trust that seem to be lacking in today’s doctor-patient relationships. These are accounts both uplifting and disturbing—some sad, others tinged with humor—intended to make doctors and patients alike come to a fuller realization that we are all together in this delicate but crucial business of staying alive.
            While not quite foreseeing a return to the Norman Rockwell image of the family physician, Weisse urges the kind of care and compassion that patients often feel is lacking from their doctors, and he reassures victims of seemingly hopeless conditions that, despite the obstacles they often face, there are still health care professionals who truly have their patients’ welfare foremost in mind. Lessons in Mortality is just what the doctor ordered for a health care system in crisis: an honest look at the medical profession that encourages greater understanding on the part of both physicians and patients, reminding us that what we most need is one another.
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Lessons of Romanticism
A Critical Companion
Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, eds.
Duke University Press, 1998
Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, Lessons of Romanticism strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology—in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context—ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies.
With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and pedagogical purposes of art exhibits in London, the materiality of late Romantic salon culture, the extracanonical status of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, and Romantic imagery in Beethoven’s music and letters, Lessons of Romanticism reveals the practices that were at the heart of European Romantic life. Focusing on the six decades from 1780 to 1832, this collection is arranged thematically around gender and genre, literacy, marginalization, canonmaking, and nationalist ideology. As Americanists join with specialists in German culture, as Austen is explored beside Beethoven, and as discussions on newly recovered women’s writings follow fresh discoveries in long-canonized texts, these interdisciplinary essays not only reflect the broad reach of contemporary scholarship but also point to the long-neglected intertextual and intercultural dynamics in the various and changing faces of Romanticism itself.

Contributors. Steven Bruhm, Miranda J. Burgess, Joel Faflak, David S. Ferris, William Galperin, Regina Hewitt, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, H. J. Jackson, Theresa M. Kelley, Greg Kucich, C. S. Matheson, Adela Pinch, Marc Redfield, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Marlon B. Ross, Maynard Solomon, Richard G. Swartz, Nanora Sweet, Joseph Viscomi, Karen A. Weisman, Susan I. Wolfson


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Letters from the Editor
Lessons on Journalism and Life
William F. Woo & Philip Meyer
University of Missouri Press, 2007

  William F. Woo, born in China, was the first person outside the Pulitzer family to edit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the first Asian American to edit a major American newspaper. After forty years in the newsroom, Woo embarked on a second career in 1996 teaching journalism at Stanford University, where he wrote weekly informal essays to his students in the same personal style that characterized his columns for the Post-Dispatch. Each made a philosophical point about journalism and society and their delicate relationship over the last half of the twentieth century.

            Woo was revered as both a writer and a reporter, and this volume collects some of the best of those essays to the next generation of journalists on their craft’s high purpose. As inspiration for students from someone who knew the ropes, it distills the essence of the values that define independent journalism while offering them invaluable food for thought about their future professions.

            The essays touch on a wide range of subjects. Woo reflects on journalism as a public trust, requiring the publication of stories that give readers a better understanding of society and equip them to change it for the better. He also ponders print journalism conducted in the face of broadcast and online competition along with the transformation of newspapers from privately owned to publicly traded companies. Here too are personal reflections on the Pulitzer family’s impact on journalism and on the tensions between a journalist’s personal and professional life, as well as the conflicts posed by political advocacy versus free speech or a reporter’s expertise versus a newspaper’s credibility.

            Woo’s idealistic spirit conveys the virtues of his era’s newspaper journalism to the next generation of journalists—and most likely to the next generation of news media as well. Even as new students of journalism have an eye on an electronic future, Woo’s essays come straight from a newsman’s heart and soul to remind them of values worth preserving.

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The Long Schoolroom
Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle
Allen Grossman
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Allen Grossman's combined reputation as a poet and as a professor of poetry gives him an unusual importance in the landscape of contemporary American poetry. In this new collection Grossman revisits the "Long Schoolroom" of poetic principle--where he eventually learned to reconsider the notion that poetry was cultural work of the kind that contributed unambiguously to the peace of the world.
The jist of what he learned--of what his "lessons" taught him--was (in the sentence of Oliver Wendell Holmes): "Where most men have died, there is the greatest interest." According to Grossman, violence arises not merely from the "barbarian" outside of the culture the poet serves, but from the inner logic of that culture; not, as he would now say, from the defeat of cultural membership but from the terms of cultural membership itself.
Grossman analyzes the "bitter logic of the poetic principle" as it is articulated in exemplary texts and figures, including Bede's Caedmon and Milton. But the heart of The Long Schoolroom is American, ranging from essays on Whitman and Lincoln to an in-depth review of the work of Hart Crane. His final essays probe the example of postmodern Jewish and Christian poetry in this country, most notably the work of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsburg, as it searches for an understanding of "holiness" in the production and control of violence.
Allen Grossman is author of The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New and Selected, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers (with Mark Halliday), and most recently, The Philosopher's Window. He is Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.
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The Making of a Chicano Militant
Lessons from Cristal
Jose Angel Gutierrez
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

    Texas, for years, was a one-party state controlled by white democrats. In 1962, a young eighteen-year-old heard the first rumblings of Chicano community organization in the barrios of Cristal. The rumor in the town was that five Mexican Americans were going to run for all five seats on the city council. But first, poor citizens had to find a way to pay the $1.75 poll tax. Money had to be raised—through bake sales of tamales, cake walks, and dances. So began the political activism of José Angel Gutiérrez.
    Gutiérrez's autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant, is the first insider's view of the important political and social events within the Mexican American communities in South Texas during the 1960s and 1970s. A controversial and dynamic political figure during the height of the Chicano movement, Gutiérrez offers an absorbing personal account of his life at the forefront of the Mexican-American civil rights movement—first as a Chicano and then as a militant.
    Gutiérrez traces the racial, ethnic, economic, and social prejudices facing Chicanos with powerful scenes from his own life: his first summer job as a tortilla maker at the age of eleven, his racially motivated kidnapping as a teenager, and his coming of age in the face of discrimination as a radical organizer in college and graduate school. When Gutiérrez finally returned to Cristal, he helped form the Mexican American Youth Organization and, subsequently the Raza Unida Party to confront issues of ethnic intolerance in his community. His story is soon to be a classic in the developing literature of Mexican American leaders.

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Master Class
Lessons from Leading Writers
Nancy Bunge
University of Iowa Press, 2005

Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers gathers more than two decades of wisdom from twenty-nine accomplished authors. It offers previously unpublished interviews along with freshly edited versions of ten interviews from Nancy Bunge's well-received previous collection, Finding the Words. The first section, Theory, incorporates interviews which document the golden age of writing programs in which authors with a strong sense of social and cultural responsibility taught as seriously as they wrote. These conversations delve into the writers' philosophies and teaching methods. The second section, Practice, presents interviews with authors who discuss how they've approached the writing of particular works. Altogether the interviews introduce authors as inspirational models and provide insightful techniques for other writers to try. One piece of advice recurs with striking consistency: to produce fresh, interesting work, aspiring writers must develop a passionate self-trust. This rule has an essential corollary: improving as a writer means constantly stretching oneself with new information and skills. Sure to interest writing and literature teachers as well as writers at every stage of development, Master Class is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate writing courses.

Interviews with Marvin Bell, Ivan Doig, Sandra Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Etheridge Knight, Margot Livesey, Larry McMurtry, James Alan McPherson, Clarence Major, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sue Miller, N. Scott Momaday, Kyoko Mori, Thylias Moss, W. S. Penn, Kit Reed, Alix Kates Shulman, William Stafford, Wallace Stegner, Ruth Stone, Scott Turow, Katherine Vaz, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Richard Wilbur, Richard Yates, and Helen Yglesias.

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Medicine Trail
The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon
Melissa Jayne Fawcett
University of Arizona Press, 2000

Contrary to the fictional account of James Fenimore Cooper, the Mohegan/Mohican nation did not vanish with the death of Chief Uncas more than three hundred years ago. In the remarkable life story of one of its most beloved matriarchs—100-year-old medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon—Medicine Trail tells of the Mohegans' survival into this century.

Blending autobiography and history, with traditional knowledge and ways of life, Medicine Trail presents a collage of events in Tantaquidgeon's life. We see her childhood spent learning Mohegan ceremonies and healing methods at the hands of her tribal grandmothers, and her Ivy League education and career in the white male-dominated field of anthropology. We also witness her travels to other Indian communities, acting as both an ambassador of her own tribe and an employee of the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Finally we see Tantaquidgeon's return to her beloved Mohegan Hill, where she cofounded America's oldest Indian-run museum, carrying on her life's commitment to good medicine and the cultural continuance and renewal of all Indian nations.

Written in the Mohegan oral tradition, this book offers a unique insider's understanding of Mohegan and other Native American cultures while discussing the major policies and trends that have affected people throughout Indian Country in the twentieth century. A significant departure from traditional anthropological "as told to" American Indian autobiography, Medicine Trail represents a major contribution to anthropology, history, theology, women's studies, and Native American studies.

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My Mother's Hip
Lessons From The World Of Eldercare
Luisa Margolies
Temple University Press, 2004
Some 400,000 hip fractures occur every year, the vast majority among the elderly; all too often these fractures are associated with death or severe disability. After her mother's double hip fracture, Luisa Margolies immersed herself in identifying and coordinating the services and professionals needed to provide critical care for an elderly person. She soon realized that the American medical system is ill prepared to deal with the long-term care needs of our graying society. The heart of My Mother's Hip is taken up with the author's day-to-day observations as her mother's condition worsened, then improved only to worsen again, while her father became increasingly anxious and disoriented. As both a devoted daughter and a skilled anthropologist, Margolies vividly renders her interactions with physicians, nurses, hospital workers, nursing home administrators, the Medicare bureaucracy, home care providers, and her parents. In the Lessons chapter that follows each episode, she discusses in a broader context the weighty decisions that adult children must make on their parents' behalf and the emotional toll their responsibility takes. Here she addresses the complex practical issues that commonly arise in such situations: understanding the consequences of hip fracture and its treatment, preparing health care proxies and advanced directives, enabling elders to remain at home, and the heartbreaking dilemma of prolonging life. Like many adult children, Margolies learned her lessons about eldercare in the midst of crises. This book is intended to ease the information-gathering and decision-making processes for others involved in eldercare.
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The New Chicago Way
Lessons from Other Big Cities
Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more.
 
Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago’s governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced.
 
Chicago government and its citizens must let go of the past to prepare for the future, argue Bachrach and Berg. A future filled with demographic, technological, and economic change requires a government capable of responding and adapting. Reforms can transform the city. The prescriptions for change provided in this book point toward a hopeful future: the New Chicago Way.
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Ohio under COVID
Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis
Katherine Sorrels, Vanessa Carbonell, Danielle Bessett, Lora Arduser, Edward Wallace, and Michelle L. McGowan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023

In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits.  

Ohio under COVID tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s bellwether state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities in a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. Chapters address topics such as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio. Ohio under COVID captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.

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Organizing Schools for Improvement
Lessons from Chicago
Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved—and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning?

The authors of this illuminating book identify a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors for improvement, including school leadership, the professional capacity of the faculty and staff, and a student-centered learning climate. In addition, they analyze the impact of social dynamics, including crime, critically examining the inextricable link between schools and their communities. Putting their data onto a more human scale, they also chronicle the stories of two neighboring schools with very different trajectories. The lessons gleaned from this groundbreaking study will be invaluable for anyone involved with urban education.

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Overcoming Divisiveness
Lessons from Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2021
As long as there have been groups of people, there have been divisions between them personal, ideological, racial, religious, ethnic, and more. The ideological divisions in society, particularly those in American society, have been the subject of a lot of discussion in recent years, and at times the divide between the various camps seems insurmountable.

If you’ve been troubled by the broader divides in society, or if there’s a conflict within your own life that’s been a source of pain and anxiety, some spiritually focused thoughts on how to create harmony between those opposing sides may be just what you need. But be warned: as Emanuel Swedenborg tells us, the first step to overcoming a conflict is to look within yourself.

Overcoming Divisiveness contains passages from Swedenborg’s works that give not only insights into the roots of interpersonal conflicts but also perspectives on how to overcome them. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to a group of related passages. Following each passage, you’ll find the core idea expressed in that passage along with a short description of what it entails, as well as questions for discussion or reflection that are intended to help illustrate how that concept can be directly and meaningfully applied to daily life. You are invited to read the passages from Swedenborg when you need inspiration, use the quotes and reflections as a starting point for a group discussion, or simply enjoy the material as food for your own spiritual journey. You might also find the passages to be inspiration for your own prayers, meditations, creative works, or other techniques for connecting with the Divine.
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Perennial Ceremony
Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden
Teresa Peterson
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Travel through a garden’s seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness—for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth

 

In this rich collection of prose, poetry, and recipes, Teresa Peterson shares how she found refuge from the struggle to reconcile her Christianity and Dakota spirituality, discovering solace and ceremony in communing with the earth. Observing and embracing the cycles of her garden, she awakens to the constant affirmation that healing and wellness can be attained through a deep relationship with land, plants, and waters. Dakota people call this way of seeing and being in the world mitakuye owasin: all my relations. Perennial Ceremony brings us into this relationship, as Peterson guides us through the Dakota seasons to impart lessons from her life as a gardener, gatherer, and lover of the land.

 

We see the awakening of Wetu (spring), a transitional time when nature comes alive and sweet sap flows from maples, and the imperfect splendor of Bdoketu (summer), when rain becomes a needed and nourishing gift. We share in the harvesting wisdom of Ptaŋyetu (fall), a time to savor daylight and reap the garden’s abundance, and the restorative solitude of Waniyetu (winter), when snow blankets the landscape and sharpens every sound. Through it all, Peterson walks with us along the path that both divides and joins Christian doctrine, everyday spiritual experience, and the healing powers of Indigenous wisdom and spirituality.

 

In this intimate seasonal cycle, we learn how the garden becomes a healing balm. Peterson teaches us how ceremony may be found there: how in the vegetables and flowers, the woods, the hillsides, the river valley—even in the feeding of friends and family—we can reclaim and honor our relationship with Mother Earth. She encourages us to bring perennial ceremony into our own lives, inviting us on a journey that brings us full circle to makoce kiŋ mitakuye: the land is my relative.

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The Politics of Health Care Reform
Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future
James A. Morone and Gary S. Belkin, eds.
Duke University Press, 1994
This distinguished collection stands out from the recent flurry of books on health reform by its sustained and sophisticated analysis of the political dimension. In The Politics of Health Care Reform, some of America’s best-known political scientists, historians, and legal scholars make sense of our most turbulent policy issue. They dig below the jargon and minutiae to explore the enduring questions of American politics, government reform, and health care.
The Politics of Health Care Reform explains how successful reforms occur in the United States and shows what is unique about health care issues. Theoretically informed, politically astute, historically nuanced, this volume takes an inventory of our health policy infrastructure. Here is an account of the institutions, ideas, and interests that shape health policy in the 1990s: Congress, the federal courts, interest groups, state governments, the public bureaucracy, business (large and small), the insurance industry, the medical profession. The volume offers a fresh look at such critical matters as public opinion, the politics of race and gender, and the lessons we can draw from other nations.
The Politics of Health Care Reform is the definitive collection of political science essays about health care. Expanded from two special issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, the most prominent scholarly journal in the field it helped create, this collection will enliven the present debate over health reform and instruct everyone who is concerned about the future of American health care.

Contributors. Lawrence Brown, Robert Evans, William Glaser, Colleen Grogan, Robert Hackey, Lawrence Jacobs, Nancy Jecker, Taeku Lee, Joan Lehman, David McBride, Ted Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, James A. Morone, Mark Peterson, David Rochefort, Rand Rosenblatt, David Rothman, Joan Ruttenberg, Mark Schlesinger, Theda Skocpol, Michael Sparer, Deborah Stone, Kenneth Thorpe

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Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace
Lessons from Peru and Ecuador, 1995–1998
By David R. Mares and David Scott Palmer
University of Texas Press, 2012

In January 1995, fighting broke out between Ecuadorian and Peruvian military forces in a remote section of the Amazon. It took more than three years and the interplay of multiple actors and factors to achieve a definitive peace agreement, thus ending what had been the region's oldest unresolved border dispute. This conflict and its resolution provide insights about other unresolved and/or disputed land and sea boundaries which involve almost every country in the Western Hemisphere.

Drawing on extensive field research at the time of the dispute and during its aftermath, including interviews with high-ranking diplomats and military officials, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace is the first book-length study to relate this complex border dispute and its resolution to broader theories of conflict. The findings emphasize an emerging leadership approach in which individuals are not mere captives of power and institutions. In addition, the authors illuminate an overlap in national and international arenas in shaping effective articulation, perception, and selection of policy.

In the “new” democratic Latin America that emerged in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, historical memory remains influential in shaping the context of disputes, in spite of presumed U.S. post–Cold War influence. This study offers important, broader perspectives on a hemisphere still rife with boundary disputes as a rising number of people and products (including arms) pass through these borderlands.

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Savage Energies
Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece
Walter Burkert
University of Chicago Press, 2001
We often think of classical Greek society as a model of rationality and order. Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece, whose potentially violent and destructive energies, Burkert argues, were harnessed to constructive ends through the interlinked uses of myth and ritual.

For example, in a much-cited essay on the Athenian religious festival of the Arrephoria, Burkert uncovers deep connections between this strange nocturnal ritual, in which two virgin girls carried sacred offerings into a cave and later returned with something given to them there, and tribal puberty initiations by linking the festival with the myth of the daughters of Kekrops. Other chapters explore the origins of tragedy in blood sacrifice; the role of myth in the ritual of the new fire on Lemnos; the ties between violence, the Athenian courts, and the annual purification of the divine image; and how failed political propaganda entered the realm of myth at the time of the Persian Wars.
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Simple Things
Lessons from the Family Farm
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
In this collection of thoughtful essays, Jerry Apps reflects on the “simple things” that made up everyday life on the farm—an old cedar fencepost, Fanny the farm dog, the trusty tools used for farmwork, the kerosene lantern the family gathered around each morning and evening. As he holds each item up to the light for a closer look, he plumbs his memories for the deeper meanings of these objects, sharing the values instilled in him during his rural boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s. He concludes that people who had the opportunity to grow up on family farms gained useful skills, important knowledge, and lifelong values that serve them well throughout their lives. Apps captures and shares those things for people who remember them and those who never had the benefit of living on a small farm.
 
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Sitting with Elephants
Lessons in Humility from the African Bush, Enhanced and Expanded Second Edition
Ronald Dulek, Illustrations by Abbey Ndlovu
University of Alabama Press, 2026

A professor of communication and strategy reveals deep lessons from life in the African bush.

Sitting with Elephants is a heartfelt memoir that follows a middle-aged American professor and his wife as they trade suburban life for a remote bush house in South Africa. What begins as a spontaneous decision becomes a life-changing experience—one shaped by lions at the backdoor, baboons in the rafters, and above all, a herd of elephants who frequent their yard like neighbors.

Told through a series of emails to their adult children and brought to life by vivid illustrations from Abbey Ndlovu, Ronald Dulek’s narrative explores the profound lessons nature teaches: patience, humility, and deep respect for the wild. As the couple learns to communicate with elephants and navigate the rhythms of bush life, they also reflect on the unexpected beauty of slowing down and embracing the unknown.

Blending lighthearted anecdotes with moments of quiet insight, Sitting with Elephants invites readers into a story of transformation—both personal and environmental. This second edition includes expanded content with new stories and reflections, offering a deeper look into the couple’s unforgettable time in the African bush.

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The Space Age Generation
Lives and Lessons from the Golden Age of Solar System Exploration
William Sheehan and Klaus Brasch
University of Arizona Press, 2024
In 1957 Sputnik launched toward the stars. President Kennedy then announced that the United States would send men to the Moon and then return them to Earth.These pivotal moments sparked an unequaled bound forward in human innovation and scientific exploration.

At the heart of this momentous time were the men and women working behind the scenes. Scientists, historians, and astronomers share their memories and contributions from this unparalleled era in essays told in their own words. They are the remarkable generation who witnessed and contributed to some of space science’s most stunning achievements. Here they have recorded their memories—their childhood inspirations, their challenges, failures, and triumphs—for future generations.

A unique and authoritative record of a momentous period in human history, The Space Age Generation highlights the golden age of space exploration and the people who made it happen.

Contributors
Leo Aerts
Alexander Basilevsky
Klaus Brasch
Clark R. Chapman
Dale P. Cruikshank
William K. Hartmann
William Leatherbarrow
Baerbel Koesters Lucchitta
Yvonne Pendleton
Peter H. Schultz
William Sheehan
Paolo Tanga
Charles A. Wood
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The Strangers We Became
Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq's Last Jews
Cynthia Kaplan Shamash
Brandeis University Press, 2015
This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia’s father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family. At the end of the school year, she returned to Holland to navigate her teen years in a culture that was much more sexually liberal than the one she had been born into, or indeed the one she was experiencing among Orthodox Jews in London. Shortly after finishing her schooling as a dentist, Cynthia moved to the United States in an attempt to start over. This vivid, beautiful, and very funny memoir will appeal to readers intrigued by spirituality, tolerance, the personal ramifications of statelessness and exile, the clashes of cultures, and the future of Iraq and its Jews.
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The Strategy of Campaigning
Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin
Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Condoleezza Rice
University of Michigan Press, 2010

The Strategy of Campaigning explores the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, two of the most galvanizing and often controversial political figures of our time. Both men overcame defeat early in their political careers and rose to the highest elected offices in their respective countries.

The authors demonstrate how and why Reagan and Yeltsin succeeded in their political aspirations, despite—or perhaps because of—their apparent “policy extremism”: that is, their advocacy of policy positions far from the mainstream. The book analyzes the viability of policy extremism as a political strategy that enables candidates to forge new coalitions and outflank conventional political allegiances.

Kiron K. Skinner is Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Carnegie Mellon University, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and the National Security Education Board.
 
Serhiy Kudelia is Lecturer of Politics at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine and advisor to Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine.
 

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Julius Silver Professor and Director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Condoleezza Rice is on a leave of absence from Stanford University, where she was a Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is currently serving as U.S. Secretary of State.

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There Has to Be a Better Way
Lessons from Former Urban Teachers
Mawhinney, Lynnette
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Book Award​

Teacher attrition has long been a significant challenge within the field of education. It is a commonly-cited statistic that almost fifty percent of beginning teachers leave the field within their first five years, to the detriment of schools, students, and their own career development. There Has to be a Better Way offers an essential voice in understanding the dynamics of teacher attrition from the perspective of the teachers themselves. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative research with former teachers from urban schools in multiple regions of the United States, Lynnette Mawhinney and Carol R. Rinke identify several themes that uncover the rarely-spoken reasons why teachers so often willingly leave the classroom. The authors go further to provide concrete recommendations for how school administrators can better support their practicing teachers, as well as how teacher educators might enhance preparation for the next generation of educators. Complete with suggested readings and discussion questions, this book serves as an indispensable resource in understanding and building an effective and productive educational workforce for our nation’s students. 
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Thunder Tree
Lessons from an Urban Wildland
Robert Michael Pyle
Oregon State University Press, 2011

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Transforming Places
Lessons from Appalachia
Edited by Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In this era of globalization's ruthless deracination, place attachments have become increasingly salient in collective mobilizations across the spectrum of politics. Like place-based activists in other resource-rich yet impoverished regions across the globe, Appalachians are contesting economic injustice, environmental degradation, and the anti-democratic power of elites. This collection of seventeen original essays by scholars and activists from a variety of backgrounds explores this wide range of oppositional politics, querying its successes, limitations, and impacts. The editors' critical introduction and conclusion integrate theories of place and space with analyses of organizations and events discussed by contributors. Transforming Places illuminates widely relevant lessons about building coalitions and movements with sufficient strength to challenge corporate-driven globalization.
 
Contributors are Fran Ansley, Yaira Andrea Arias Soto, Dwight B. Billings, M. Kathryn Brown, Jeannette Butterworth, Paul Castelloe, Aviva Chomsky, Dave Cooper, Walter Davis, Meredith Dean, Elizabeth C. Fine, Jenrose Fitzgerald, Doug Gamble, Nina Gregg, Edna Gulley, Molly Hemstreet, Mary Hufford, Ralph Hutchison, Donna Jones, Ann Kingsolver, Sue Ella Kobak, Jill Kriesky, Michael E. Maloney, Lisa Markowitz, Linda McKinney, Ladelle McWhorter, Marta Maria Miranda, Chad Montrie, Maureen Mullinax, Phillip J. Obermiller, Rebecca O'Doherty, Cassie Robinson Pfleger, Randal Pfleger, Anita Puckett, Katie Richards-Schuster, June Rostan, Rees Shearer, Daniel Swan, Joe Szakos, Betsy Taylor, Thomas E. Wagner, Craig White, and Ryan Wishart.
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Two Toms
Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor
Thomas H. Johnson
University of Utah Press, 2011

In 1969, Tom Wesaw was an 83-year-old Shoshone doctor and religious leader on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He could no longer drive, which posed problems in making house calls. The arrival of young anthropologist Tom Johnson changed that. Johnson would drive Wesaw, and cook, pump water, and build fires for sweat lodges. In exchange, the elder Tom would show the younger Tom his work. The two were together so often that the people of Wind River began to refer to them affectionately by one name: Two Toms. By the light of the lamp Wesaw gave him, Johnson would write down what he learned. The Shoshone doctor wanted his student to share everything he saw and heard. Now, in Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, he has.

Presented as an engaging narrative, Johnson’s book reveals details about the Shoshone culture and it chronicles the story of the friendship between these two men of different backgrounds. Filled with valuable anthropological information, this book is also highly readable and entertaining.
 
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What Matters in Medicine
Lessons from a Life in Primary Care
David Loxterkamp, MD
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Primary care has come into the limelight with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the unchecked and unsustainable rise in American health care expenditures, and the crest of Baby Boomers who are now Medicare-eligible and entering the most health care–intensive period of their lives. Yet how much is really known about primary care? What Matters in Medicine: Lessons from a Life in Primary Care is a look at the past, present, and future of general practice, which is not only the predecessor to the modern primary care movement, but its foundation. Through memoir and conversation, Dr. David Loxterkamp reflects on the heroes and role models who drew him to family medicine and on his many years in family practice in a rural Maine community, and provides a prescription for change in the way that doctors and patients approach their shared contract for good health and a happy life. This book will be useful to those on both sides of primary care, doctors and patients alike.

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What Role for Government?
Lessons from Policy Research
Richard J. Zeckhauser and Derek Leebaert, eds.
Duke University Press, 1983
The vital debates on government today are concerned with its social role, its participation in the economy, and its redistributive responsibilities. These functions, not defined in the Constitution, reflect the evolution of society and its values and the powerful but jerky hand of the political process.
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Why Architecture Matters
Lessons from Chicago
Blair Kamin
University of Chicago Press, 2001
For more than a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has been writing fiery, intelligent essays on the state of contemporary architecture. His subjects range from high-rises to highways, parks to public housing, Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry. Why Architecture Matters collects the best of Kamin's acclaimed columns, offering both a look at America's foremost architectural city and a taste of Kamin's penetrating, witty style of critique.
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Worker Participation
Lessons from Worker Co-ops of the Pacific Northwest
John Pencavel
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Once they accept a job, most Americans have little control over their work environments. In Worker Participation, John Pencavel examines some of those rare workplaces where employees both own and manage the companies they work for: the plywood cooperatives and forest worker cooperatives of the Pacific Northwest. Rather than relying on abstract theories, Pencavel reviews the actual experiences of these two groups of worker co-ops. He focuses on how worker-owned companies perform when compared to more traditional firms and whether companies operate more efficiently when workers determine how they are run. He also looks at the long-term viability of these enterprises and why they are so unusual. Most businesses are constantly caught in the battle over whether to use the firm's profits to pay labor or to increase capital. Worker cooperatives provide an appealing case study because the interests of labor and capital are aligned. If individuals have a role in setting goals, they should have an added incentive to help meet those goals, and productivity should benefit. On the other hand, observers have long argued that, since any single employee in a co-op reaps only a small benefit from working hard, workers may shirk work, and productivity can flag. Furthermore, co-ops often have difficulty raising capital, since they are constrained by how much money the workers have, and banks are often reluctant to lend them money. Using some fifteen years of data on forty mills in Washington State, Pencavel examines how worker co-ops really function. He assesses the practical problems of running a workplace where every employee is a boss. He looks at worker productivity, on-the-job injuries and financial risks facing owner-workers. He considers whether co-ops are inherently unstable and if they are plagued by infighting among the many worker-owners. Although many of the co-ops he studied have closed or been replaced by conventional businesses, Pencavel judges them to have been a success. Despite the risks inherent in such operations, allowing workers to make the decisions that profoundly affect them produces many benefits, including workplace efficiency and increased job security. However, Pencavel concludes, if more Americans are to enjoy such a working arrangement, labor laws will have to be changed, participation encouraged, and a more vigorous public debate about worker participation must take place. This book provides an excellent place to start the discussion.
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Writing Through Writer's Block
Lessons from Modern American Fiction
Aaron Colton
University of Iowa Press, 2025
Recent fiction is teeming with blocked writers: from John Updike’s Henry Bech to Stephen King’s Paul Sheldon and Mike Noonan. From David Foster Wallace’s Mark Nechtr to the autofictional figures of Jordan Castro, Salvador Plascencia, Nam Le, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Andrew Martin. Writing Through Writer’s Block offers the first book-length analysis of the archetype of the blocked writer. From the scenes of writer’s block enacted in these fictions, we gather pedagogical lessons that are germane to writers of all kinds—creative and academic, advanced and novice—and particularly useful for the growing contingency of faculty whose teaching responsibilities lie in both literature and academic writing.
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Written in the Sky
Lessons of a Southern Daughter
Patricia Foster
University of Alabama Press, 2023
"A powerful, often heart-wrenching collection of essays tackling the history of the American South."  —Kirkus Reviews
 
In Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, Patricia Foster presents a double portrait of place and family, a book of deeply personal essays that interrogate the legacy of racial tensions in the South, the constriction of caste and gender, and the ways race, class, and white privilege are entwined in her family story. After interviewing girls at Booker T. Washington High School in Tuskegee, Alabama, visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and exploring Africatown in Plateau, Alabama, Patricia Foster was moved to reflect on the racial scars and crossroads in her southern past as well as to reckon with the intimate places of her own wounding and grief.

The story of place, she discovers, emerges not only from family histories and cultural traditions but also from wrestling with a culture’s irreconcilable ideas: the hard push to determine what matters. What matters to her are the shadow stories beneath our mythologies, the complicated and radiant narratives that must be excavated and reckoned with, stories that have no neat or binary resolution, stories full of luminous moments and riveting facts, and stories where the secrets hide. Written in the Sky presents the best of nonfiction storytelling: searingly honest portraits, dramatic encounters, and lyrical narratives that will interest teachers and students as well as social justice advocates, policymakers, and readers compelled by stories of awakening and the white-hot beauty of language.
 
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