A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY71 start with M start with M
Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity.
Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.
What do biologists want? If, unlike their counterparts in physics, biologists are generally wary of a grand, overarching theory, at what kinds of explanation do biologists aim? How will we know when we have “made sense” of life? Such questions, Evelyn Fox Keller suggests, offer no simple answers. Explanations in the biological sciences are typically provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogeneous as their subject matter. It is Keller’s aim in this bold and challenging book to account for this epistemological diversity—particularly in the discipline of developmental biology.
In particular, Keller asks, what counts as an “explanation” of biological development in individual organisms? Her inquiry ranges from physical and mathematical models to more familiar explanatory metaphors to the dramatic contributions of recent technological developments, especially in imaging, recombinant DNA, and computer modeling and simulations.
A history of the diverse and changing nature of biological explanation in a particularly charged field, Making Sense of Life draws our attention to the temporal, disciplinary, and cultural components of what biologists mean, and what they understand, when they propose to explain life.
Mal Goode (1908–1995) became network news’s first African American correspondent when ABC News hired him in 1962. Raised in Homestead and Pittsburgh, he worked in the mills, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to become a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and later for local radio. With his basso profundo voice resonating on the airwaves, Goode challenged the police, politicians, and segregation, while providing Black listeners a voice that captured their experience. Race prevented him from breaking into television until Jackie Robinson dared ABC to give him a chance. Goode was uncompromising in his belief that network news needed Black voices and perspectives if it were to authentically reflect the nation’s complexities. His success at ABC initiated the slow integration of network news. Goode’s life and work are remarkable in their own right, but his struggles and achievements also speak to larger issues of American life and the African American experience.
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was an immediate succès de scandale when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in “perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery,” he found himself attacked on all sides—by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus’s ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.
Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay and Malthus’s preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus’s collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus’s many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.
Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself felt once again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus’s arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns.
Luc Ferry argues that modernity and the emergence of secular humanism in Europe since the eighteenth century have not killed the search for meaning and the sacred, or even the idea of God, but rather have transformed both through a dual process: the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human. Ferry sees evidence for the first of these in the Catholic Church's attempts to counter the growing rejection of dogmatism and to translate the religious tradition into contemporary language. The second he traces to the birth of modern love and humanitarianism, both of which demand a concern for others and even self-sacrifice in defense of values that transcend life itself. Ferry concludes with a powerful statement in favor of what he calls "transcendental humanism"—a concept that for the first time in human history gives us access to a genuine spirituality rooted in human beings instead of the divine.
Born by mistake, or connivance, to struggling parents in a small Lancashire cotton town in 1903, an uninspired Darlington inadvertently escaped the obscurity of farming life and rose instead, against all odds, to become within a few short years the world's greatest expert on chromosomes, and one of the most penetrating biological thinkers of the twentieth century. Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest questions--how species originate, how variation occurs, how Nature, both blind and foreboding, random and insightful, makes her way from deep past to unknown future. But Darlington did not stop there: Chromosomes held within their tiny confines untold, dark truths about man and his culture. This passionate conviction led the once famed Darlington down a path of rebuke, isolation, and finally obscurity.
As The Man Who Invented the Chromosome unfolds Darlington's forgotten tale--the Nazi atrocities, the Cold War, the crackpot Lysenko, the molecular revolution, eugenics, Civil Rights, the welfare state, the changing views of man's place in nature, biological determinism--all were interconnected. Just as Darlington's work provoked him to ask questions about the link between biology and culture, his life raises fundamental questions about the link between science and society.
Captured While Attempting to Smuggle Slaves to Freedom in 1844, the Only Man Branded in a Courtroom by a United States Marshal
Sailing around the Florida Keys in 1844, forty-five-year-old Jonathan Walker had a price on his head. On board the small boat he had built that winter in Alabama were seven fugitives from slavery. The Cape Cod sailor and abolitionist was wanted in Pensacola, Florida, for his crime: stealing slaves. The slaves’ owners had posted $100 each as reward money for their property and $1,000 for Walker’s apprehension. Only a day’s sail from their goal of freedom in British-controlled Bahamas, Walker and the slaves were stopped and seized by bounty hunters and taken to a Key West court. Ordered back to Pensacola for trial, Walker ended up spending a year in jail. He was fined and sentenced to stand in the pillory; in addition, he was to suffer a unique punishment in American history: while a packed courtroom watched, a United States marshal was ordered to use a hot branding iron to burn the letters SS, for “slave stealer,” into Walker’s right hand.
Walker survived his ordeal, spending much of his incarceration in isolation. Once released, he remained active in the antislavery movement even while he and his devoted wife Jane raised their nine children. His attempt to help form a new colony in Mexico for runaway American slaves also led to punishing experiences for Walker and one of his sons. Living later with his family in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the years before the Civil War, Walker made room in his crowded house to shelter runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad. He participated in abolitionist lecture tours across the North where he would be urged to reveal his branded hand—made famous by John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Branded Hand”—to astonished audiences. Too old to enlist in the Civil War, Walker instead headed to Virginia in the war’s final year to help educate African Americans fleeing Confederate forces. In The Man With the Branded Hand: The Life of Jonathan Walker, Abolitionist, distinguished journalist Alvin F. Oickle relates this entire remarkable story of a life devoted to the supposition that “all men are created equal.”
"How do we apply Chairman Mao's Thought to get fat pigs?" Squad Leader Ho (who knew the most about pigs) replied that, according to Chairman Mao, one must investigate the problem fully from all sides, and then integrate practice and theory. Ho concluded that the reason for our skinny pigs had to be found in one of three areas: the relationship between the pigs and their natural environment (excluding man); the relationship between the cadres and the pigs; and the relationship among the pigs themselves.
And so the city slickers, sent down to the countryside for political reeducation, set out to find the Thousand-Dollar Pig, much to the bemusement of the local peasants.
The sixteen stories collected in this remarkable book give firsthand accounts of daily life in contemporary China. From 250 interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Frolic has created charming vignettes that show how individuals from all parts of China led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest. We hear about oil prospectors, rubber growers, and factory workers, Widow Wang and her sit-in to get a larger apartment, the thoroughly corrupt Man Who Loved Dog Meat, the young people who flew kites to protest antidemocratic tendencies.
As fresh and original as the individual accounts are, common and timeless themes emerge: the sluggishness of an agrarian society in responding to modernization; the painful lack of resources in a poor and gigantic country; the constraints imposed on common people by the bureaucracy; the way in which individuals outwardly support the system and inwardly resist it; the limitations of heavy and conflicting doses of ideology in motivating individuals.
But there are also recurrent motifs of economic and social progress: production rises, illiteracy declines, and socialist values have impact. A new China has emerged, though change is occurring far more slowly than its leaders had intended.
Mao's People contains much new information on China both for the general reader and for specialists in the field. Above all, it is a completely engrossing and vivid glimpse into the ways of a nation we are only beginning to discover.
Born enslaved in 1861, by 1892 Margaret Murray Washington of Macon, Mississippi, married the twice-widowed race leader Booker T. Washington and joined the ranks of the rising black middle class. While one cannot discount the accomplishments of her storied husband, Washington’s own successes warrant further exploration. In this first biography of Margaret Murray Washington, author Sheena Harris discusses Washington’s importance as an active clubwoman, educational reformer, and integral partner to her husband and his success with the Tuskegee Institute.
Individual black, female leadership continues to be a blind spot in much scholarly historical literature. Washington was an important educator and clubwoman whose influence emanated from her own planning and actions. As Lady Principal, Washington was sincere and earnest in her campaign to improve Tuskegee Institute. She also transformed her community through her local club organizations. In addition, Washington cofounded the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1895) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (1896). Harris illustrates how Washington improved race relations as a whole through local and national organizations such as the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the NACW, and 1922 creation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Harris explains clearly that Washington took her leadership positions seriously and strategically worked to expand opportunities for blacks through such organizations.
Washington’s life provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the Black Women’s Club Movement and illuminates the experiences of a race woman who came of age during the Jim Crow South. Harris’s biography is a convincing portrait of an under-studied black woman in the early civil rights movement and places Washington within the pantheon of other important women of the era.
-Marian Seldes
"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."
-Oscar Brockett
Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72).
This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women.
Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.
Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.
Adler, through her exploration of the events central to Duras's career, including her affair with and eventual denunciation of a Nazi collaborator and her childhood in Indochina, reveals Duras as the consummate pragmatist. She has combed through archives, unearthed letters, studied unpublished manuscripts, and interviewed scores of Duras's friends, lovers, enemies, and colleagues—as well as Duras herself—and she emerges with the richest portrait we have of Duras's life: her upbringing, her student days at the Sorbonne, her career as a novelist and filmmaker, and her involvement in French politics through the most complex decades of the twentieth century. "The masks and the truth" was the headline of a French review of Marguerite Duras, and Adler explores both, probing the line between fiction and selfhood and between political activities and personal responsibility.
Here, in its intricate and often contradictory detail, is Marguerite Yourcenar's story, one in which loss and learning intertwined almost from the first and in which love assumed a strangely paradoxical place. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews with Yourcenar's friends, colleagues, and lovers, Josyane Savigneau's biography paints an intimate portrait of an artist who lived according to her own, occasionally contrary, terms: a Frenchwoman ardently in love with her native tongue, yet who lived half her life in New England; an avid seductress of women, who spent nearly forty years with one woman, yet fell in love early and late in her life with two young men; a powerful female writer whose most memorable protagonists were male, from Alexis of her first novel to the later historical characters Hadrian and Zeno. Savigneau weaves these and other contraries of Yourcenar's life into a vibrant and engrossing pattern.
Editor of "Le Monde des Livres," the literary pages of France's most influential newspaper, Savigneau first met Marguerite Yourcenar on assignment in 1984. What began as a professional relationship gradually turned into a friendship. Her personal insights into that life enrich this exhaustively documented text. Following the lead set by Yourcenar in her memoir Dear Departed, the biographer found herself "searching for a truth that is multiple, unstable, evasive, sometimes saddening, and at first glance scandalous but that one cannot approach without often feeling for human beings in all their frailty a certain measure of kinship and, always, a sense of pity." Yourcenar's profound intelligence and sympathy, her foibles and obsessions, her accomplishments and trials: all are revealed here in an uncompromising portrait of an incomparable artist.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 at the age of seventy-four, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has held pivotal roles in the evolution and revolutions of modern Latin American literature. Perhaps surprisingly, no complete history of Vargas Llosa’s works, placed in biographical and historical context, has been published—until now. A masterwork from one of America’s most revered scholars of Latin American fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life of Writing provides a critical overview of Vargas Llosa’s numerous novels while reinvigorating debates regarding conventional interpretations of the work.
Weaving analysis with discussions of the writer’s political commentary, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the author’s youthful identity as a leftist student of the 1960s to a repudiation of some of his earlier ideas beginning in the 1980s. Providing a unique perspective on the complexity, nuance, and scope of Vargas Llosa’s lauded early novels and on his passionate support of indigenous populations in his homeland, Williams then turns his eye to the recent works, which serve as a bridge between the legacies of the Boom and the diverse array of contemporary Latin American fiction writers at work today. In addition, Williams provides a detailed description of Vargas Llosa’s traumatic childhood and its impact on him—seen particularly in his lifelong disdain for authority figures—as well as of the authors who influenced his approach, from Faulkner to Flaubert. Culminating in reflections drawn from Williams’s formal interviews and casual conversations with the author at key phases of both men’s careers, this is a landmark publication that will spark new lines of inquiry into an intricate body of work.
But who was Leonowens and why did her story take hold? Although it has been known for some time that she was of Anglo-Indian parentage and that her tales about the Siamese court are unreliable, not until now, with the publication of Masked, has there been a deeply researched account of her extraordinary life. Alfred Habegger, an award-winning biographer, draws on the archives of five continents and recent Thai-language scholarship to disclose the complex person behind the mask and the troubling facts behind the myth. He also ponders the curious fit between Leonowens’s compelling fabrications and the New World’s innocent dreams—in particular the dream that democracy can be spread through quick and easy interventions.
Exploring the full historic complexity of what it once meant to pass as white, Masked pays close attention to Leonowens’s midlevel origins in British India, her education at a Bombay charity school for Eurasian children, her material and social milieu in Australia and Singapore, the stresses she endured in Bangkok as a working widow, the latent melancholy that often afflicted her, the problematic aspects of her self-invention, and the welcome she found in America, where a circle of elite New England abolitionists who knew nothing about Southeast Asia gave her their uncritical support. Her embellished story would again capture America’s imagination as World War II ended and a newly interventionist United States looked toward Asia.
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Best Regional Special Interest Boosk, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
In A Matter of Life and Death, anthropologist Marc Boglioli puts a human face on a group widely regarded as morally suspect, one that currently stands in the crossfire of America's so-called culture wars. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Addison County, Vermont, which took him from hunting camps and sporting goods stores to local bars and kitchen tables, Boglioli focuses on how contemporary hunters, women as well as men, understand their relationship to their prey. He shows how hunters' attitudes toward animals flow directly from the rural lifeways they have continued to maintain in the face of encroaching urban sensibilities. The result is a rare glimpse into a culture that experiences wild animals in a way that is at once violent, consumptive, and respectful, and that regards hunting as an enduring link to a vanishing past. It is a book that will challenge readers—hunters, non-hunters, and anti-hunters alike—to reconsider what constitutes a morally appropriate relationship with the non-human residents of this planet.
In Maurice Samuel: Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian, Alan T. Levenson captures the life, works, and milieu of the Romanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. A diaspora intellectual—or a rooted cosmopolitan, as Levenson describes him—Samuel made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture. A generalist in an age of experts, an independent scholar in an age of rabbis and professors, Samuel was one of the most productive and visible members of the group dubbed the “other” New York Jewish intellectuals.
His fame as a public intellectual and popular speaker were well warranted: no mere popularizer, Samuel contributed significantly to four seemingly unrelated but critical areas of modern Jewish thought. Samuel is characterized by some as principally a Zionist, by others as an accomplished translator and many Americans’ first entrée into the world of Yiddish literature, by still others as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism, and finally as a media-savvy Biblical critic, essayist, and radio personality. But he was all of these things, since Samuel succeeded in an era when it was possible to be a public intellectual without being an expert.
Drawing on Samuel’s vast literary opus, as well as previously unexplored archival material from three continents, this study writes Samuel back into the history of mid-twentieth-century American letters. Levenson argues that Samuel’s varied and substantive contributions demand reconsideration of our assumptions about the means and ends of cultural transmission, and merit him a place as one of twentieth-century American Jewry’s most significant cultural and intellectual voices.
Surely everyone wants to know the source of happiness, and indeed, economists and social scientists are increasingly interested in the study and effects of subjective well-being. Putting forward a rigorous method and new data for measuring, comparing, and analyzing the relationship between well-being and the way people spend their time—across countries, demographic groups, and history—this book will help set the agenda of research and policy for decades to come.
It does so by introducing a system of National Time Accounting (NTA), which relies on individuals’ own evaluations of their emotional experiences during various uses of time, a distinct departure from subjective measures such as life satisfaction and objective measures such as the Gross Domestic Product. A distinguished group of contributors here summarize the NTA method, provide illustrative findings about well-being based on NTA, and subject the approach to a rigorous conceptual and methodological critique that advances the field. As subjective well-being is topical in economics, psychology, and other social sciences, this book should have cross-disciplinary appeal.
For over thirty years, David F. Kelly has worked with medical practitioners, students, families, and the sick and dying to confront the difficult and often painful issues that concern medical treatment at the end of life. In this short and practical book, Kelly shares his vast experience, providing a rich resource for thinking about life's most painful decisions.
Kelly outlines eight major issues regarding end-of-life care as seen through the lens of the Catholic medical ethics tradition. He looks at the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means; the difference between killing and allowing to die; criteria of patient competence; what to do in the case of incompetent patients; the meaning and use of advance directives; the morality of hydration and nutrition; physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia; and medical futility. Kelly's analysis is sprinkled with significant legal decisions and, throughout, elaborations on how the Catholic medical ethics tradition—as well as teachings of bishops and popes—understands each issue. He provides a helpful glossary to supplement his introduction to the terminology used by philosophical health care ethics. Included in Kelly's discussion is his lucid description of why the Catholic tradition supports the discontinuation of medical care in the Terry Schiavo case. He also explores John Paul II's controversial papal allocution concerning hydration and nutrition for unconscious patients, arguing that the Catholic tradition does not require feeding the permanently unconscious.
Medical Care at the End of Life addresses the major issues that inform this last stage of caregiving. It offers a critical guide to understanding the medical ethics and relevant legal cases needed for clear thinking when individuals are faced with those crucial decisions.
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.
The poems are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.
Poems addressed to talented and influential women such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich, among others, pour gratitude and recognition into the collection. While many of the poems in Meditación Fronteriza are gentle and inviting, there are also moments that grieve for the state of the borderlands, calling for political resistance.
Melville’s mastery of the English language and heterodox views made him a source of both controversy and fascination to western readers, until his increasing commitment to artistry and contempt for artificial conventions led him to write Moby-Dick (1851) and its successor Pierre (1852). Although the former is considered his masterwork today, the books offended mid-nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities and alienated Melville from the American literary marketplace. The resulting eclipse of his popular reputation was deepened by his voluntary withdrawal from society, so that obituaries written after his death in 1891 frequently expressed surprise that he hadn’t died long before.
With most of his personal papers and letters lost or destroyed, his library of marked and annotated books dispersed, and first-hand accounts of him scattered, brief, and frequently conflicting, Melville’s place in American literary scholarship illustrates the importance of accurately edited documents and the value of new information to our understanding of his life and thought. As a chronologically organized collection of surviving testimonials about the author, Melville in His Own Time continues the tradition of documentary research well-exemplified over the past half-century by the work of Jay Leyda, Merton M. Sealts, and Hershel Parker. Combining recently discovered evidence with new transcriptions of long-known but rarely consulted testimony, this collection offers the most up-to-date and correct record of commentary on Melville by individuals who knew him.
Membranes to Molecular Machines explores just how late twentieth-century science came to think of our cells and bodies this way. This story is told through the lens of membrane research, an unwritten history at the crossroads of molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and the neurosciences, that directly feeds into today's synthetic biology as well as nano- and biotechnology. Mathias Grote shows how these sciences not only have made us think differently about life, they have, by reworking what membranes and proteins represent in laboratories, allowed us to manipulate life as "active matter" in new ways. Covering the science of biological membranes in the United States and Europe from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, this book connects that history to contemporary work with optogenetics, a method for stimulating individual neurons using light, and will enlighten and provoke anyone interested in the intersection of chemical research and the life sciences—from practitioner to historian to philosopher.
The research described in the book and its central actor, Dieter Oesterhelt, were honored with the 2021 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his contribution to the development of optogenetics.
Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist is the first English translation of the memoirs of Anbara Salam Khalidi, the iconic Arab feminist. At a time when women are playing a leading role in the Arab Spring, this book brings to life an earlier period of social turmoil and women's activism through one remarkable life.
Anbara Salam was born in 1897 to a notable Sunni Muslim family of Beirut. She grew up in 'Greater Syria', in which unhindered travel between Beirut, Jerusalem and Damascus was possible, and wrote a series of newspaper articles calling on women to fight for their rights within the Ottoman Empire. In 1927 she caused a public scandal by removing her veil during a lecture at the American University of Beirut.
Later she translated Homer and Virgil into Arabic and fled from Jerusalem to Beirut following the establishment of Israel in 1948. She died in Beirut in 1986. These memoirs have long been acclaimed by Middle East historians as an essential resource for the social history of Beirut and the larger Arab world in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Numerous documents attest to the horrific conditions endured by African slaves during the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. Less well known is the perspective of those who wielded power during this dark time in human history. The Bodleian Library fills that gap here with the memoirs of a principal figure in the slave trade, Captain Hugh Crow.
The first-hand account of a man who commanded one of the last legal slave vessels to cross the Atlantic, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain offers a revealing if frequently troubling look into the psyche of a slave trader. His chronicle leaves nothing to the imagination, as he recounts the harsh routine of daily life on a slave vessel, where on average a fifth of the crew—let alone the human cargo—never survived the crossing. Crow portrays himself as an “enlightened” slaver, a claim he justifies through the link between his close attention to his “negroes” and his financial success, and the songs composed for him by the slaves. His account also includes commentary on the social propriety of the slave trade and notes about the conditions on West Indian and Caribbean plantations as well as on slave ships. John Pinfold’s illuminating introduction recounts the life of Hugh Crow and sets him in the rich historical context of eighteenth-century mercantilism and its battle with the abolitionist movement. An eye-opening read, Life and Times of a Slave Trade Captain reveals an often overlooked facet in the complicated history of transatlantic slavery.
As a young Black orphan indentured to a Quaker family in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Zilpha Elaw (c. 1793–1873) decided to join the upstart Methodists in 1808. She preached her first sermon a decade later, ignoring her husband and the many church leaders, clergy, and laity who tried to silence her. Elaw’s memoir chronicles the first twenty years of her forty-year itinerant ministry during massive Protestant revivalism in the United States and England.
Elaw preached from Maine to Virginia, attracting multiracial and multidenominational audiences that included powerful men, wealthy White women, poor families, and enslaved communities. She moved from Bristol to Burlington, New Jersey, then to Nantucket, Massachusetts, and finally, in 1840, to London’s East End. In England, Elaw’s celebrity expanded, and at least twice she drew crowds so large they caused human stampedes and multiple injuries.
Blockett’s introduction and extensive annotations draw on newly unearthed information about the entirety of Elaw’s evangelism to provide context for this remarkable story of an antebellum Black woman’s personal and professional mobility.
Philadelphia native Wendell W. Young III was one of the most important American labor leaders in the last half of the twentieth century. An Acme Markets clerk in the 1950s and ’60s, he was elected top officer of the Retail Clerks Union when he was twenty-four. His social justice unionism sought to advance wages while moving beyond collective bargaining to improve the conditions of the working-class majority, whether in a union or not. Young quickly gained a reputation for his independence, daring at times to publicly criticize the policies of the city’s powerful AFL-CIO leadership and tangle with the city’s political machine.
Editor Francis Ryan, whose introduction provides historical context, interviewed Young about his experiences working in the region’s retail and food industry, measuring the changes over time and the tangible impact that union membership had on workers. Young also describes the impact of Philadelphia’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s and recounts his activism for civil rights and the anti-war movements as well as on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
The Memoirs of Wendell W. YoungIII provides the most extensive labor history of late twentieth-century Philadelphia yet written.
Even after 150 years, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is irresistibly compelling. But how can this idea—in which competition prevails—be consistent with all that we know about the thoroughly cooperative nature of life at the genetic and cellular level? This book reconciles these discrepancies.
Assembling a set of general principles, authors Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan build a comprehensive, unified theory that applies on the evolutionary time scale but also on the developmental and ecological scales where daily life is lived, and cells, organisms, and species interact. They present this story through a diversity of examples spanning the fundamental challenges that organisms have faced throughout the history of life. This shows that even very complex traits can be constructed simply, based on these principles. Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, The Mermaid’s Tale shows how life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The book reveals that the focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time—a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1925, and schooled in the British tradition, Anlyan attended Yale University as an undergraduate and medical student before coming to the relatively unknown medical school at Duke University in 1949 for an internship in general and thoracic surgery. He stayed on, first as a resident, then as a staff surgeon. By 1961, he was a full professor of surgery. In 1964, Anlyan was named dean of the medical school, the first in a series of administrative posts at the medical school and hospital. Anlyan’s role in the transformation of the Duke University Medical Center into an internationally renowned health system is manifest: he restructured the medical school and hospital and supervised the addition of almost four million square feet of new or renovated space. He hired outstanding administrators and directed a staff that instituted innovative programs and groundbreaking research centers, such as the Cancer Center and the Physician’s Assistant Program.
Anlyan describes a series of metamorphoses in his own life, in the world of medicine, in Durham, and at Duke. At the time of his prep school upbringing in Egypt, medicine was a matter of controlling infectious diseases like tuberculosis and polio. As he became an immigrant medical student and then a young surgeon, he observed vast advances in medical practice and changes in the financing of medical care. During his tenure at Duke, Durham was transformed from a sleepy mill and tobacco town into the “City of Medicine,” a place where patients routinely travel for open-heart surgery and cutting-edge treatments for cancer and other diseases.
Anyone interested in health care, medical education, and the history of Duke University will find Anlyan’s memoir of interest.
The Michel Henry Reader is an indispensable resource for those who are approaching Henry for the first time as well as for those who are already familiar with his work. It provides broad coverage of the major themes in his philosophy and new translations of Henry’s most important essays. Sixteen chapters are divided into four parts that demonstrate the profound implications of Henry’s philosophy of life: for phenomenology; for subjectivity; for politics, art, and language; and for ethics and religion.
Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), Russia’s first openly gay writer, stood at the epicenter of the turbulent cultural and social life of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad for over three decades. A poet of the caliber of Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and Marina Tsvetaeva (and acknowledged as such by them and other contemporaries), Kuzmin was also a prose writer, playwright, critic, translator, and composer who was associated with every aspect of modernism’s history in Russia, from Symbolism to the Leningrad avant-gardes of the 1920s.
Only now is Kuzmin beginning to emerge from the “official obscurity” imposed by the Soviet regime to assume his place as one of Russia’s greatest poets and one of this century’s most characteristic and colorful creative figures. This biography, the first in any language to be based on full and uncensored access to the writer’s private papers, including his notorious Diary, places Kuzmin in the context of his society and times and contributes to our discovery and appreciation of a fascinating period and of Russia’s long suppressed gay history.
With decades of combined teaching experience, McDermott and Benner Dixon share practical craft-of-writing advice with the reader, including over fifty engaging writing prompts to spark the creative process. These prompts guide readers toward the freedom and joy that comes with finding one’s authentic voice. Embracing both the painful and the playful, Millions of Suns is an ideal text for classrooms, professional development, or daily writing practice. Through humor, lyricism, and poignancy, the fundamental message of the book remains the same for newcomers and career authors. Let Millions of Suns open a door for you into your creative work, inviting imagination, memory, and inspiration into your writing life.
How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life.
Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela).
Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.
Minding Justice offers a comprehensive examination of the laws governing the punishment, detention, and protection of people with mental disabilities. Using famous cases such as those of John Hinckley, Andrea Yates, and Theodore Kaczynski, the book analyzes the insanity defense and related doctrines, the role of mental disability in sentencing, the laws that authorize commitment of "sexual predators" and others thought to be a threat to society, and the rules that restrict participation of mentally compromised individuals in the criminal and treatment decision-making processes.
Arguing that current legal doctrines are based on flawed premises and ignorance of the impairments caused by mental disability, Christopher Slobogin makes a case for revamping the insanity defense, abolishing the "guilty but mentally ill" verdict, prohibiting execution of people with mental disability, restructuring preventive detention, and redefining incompetency. A milestone in criminal mental health law, Minding Justice provides innovative solutions to ancient problems associated with criminal responsibility, protection of society from "dangerous" individuals, and the state's authority to act paternalistically.
Lawyer and journalist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Louis Houck is often called the “Father of Southeast Missouri” because he brought the railroad to the region and opened this backwater area to industrialization and modernization. Although Houck’s name is little known today outside Missouri, Joel Rhodes shows how his story has relevance for both the state and the nation.
Rhodes presents a more complete picture of Houck than has ever been available: reviewing his life from his German immigrant roots, considering his career from both social and political perspectives, and grounding the story in both state and national history. He especially tells how, from 1880 to the 1920s, this self-taught railroader constructed a network of five hundred miles of track through the wilderness of wetlands known as “Swampeast Missouri”—and how these “Houck Roads” provided a boost for population, agriculture, lumbering, and commerce that transformed Cape Girardeau and the surrounding area.
Rhodes discusses how Houck fits into the era of economic individualism—a time when men with little formal training shaped modern industry—and also gives voice to Houck’s critics and shows that he was not always an easy man to work with. In telling the story of his railroading enterprise, Rhodes chronicles Houck’s battle with the Jay Gould railroad empire and offers key insight into the development of America’s railway system, from the cutthroat practices of ruthless entrepreneurs to the often-comic ineptness of start-up rail lines.
More than simply a biography of a business entrepreneur, the book tells how Houck not only developed the region economically but also followed the lead of Andrew Carnegie by making art, culture, and formal education available to all social classes. Houck also served for thirty-six years as president of the Board of Regents of Southeast Missouri State Teacher’s College, and as a self-taught historian he wrote the first comprehensive accounts of Missouri’s territorial period.
A Missouri Railroad Pioneer chronicles a multifaceted career that transformed a region. Solidly researched, this lively narrative also offers an entertaining read for anyone interested in Missouri history.
Mo provides the most complete record of Udall's thirty-year congressional career ever published. It reveals how he challenged the House seniority system and turned the House Interior Committee into a powerful panel that did as much to protect the environment as any organization in the twentieth century. It shows Udall to have been a consensus builder for environmental issues who paved the way for the Alaska Lands Act of 1980, helped set aside 2.4 million acres of wilderness in Arizona, and fought for the Central Arizona Project, one of the most ambitious water projects in U.S. history. Carson and Johnson record Udall's early opposition to the Vietnam War at a time when that conflict was largely perceived as a just cause, as well as his early advocacy of campaign finance reform. They also provide a behind-the-scenes account of his run for the presidency—the first House member to seek the office in nearly a century—which gained him an intensely loyal national following.
Mo explores the paradoxes that beset Udall: He was a man able to accomplish things politically because people genuinely liked and respected him, yet he was a loner and workaholic whose focus on politics overshadowed his personal life. Carson and Johnson devote a chapter to the famous Udall sense of humor. They also look sensitively at his role as a husband and father and at his proud and stubborn bout with Parkinson's disease. Mo Udall will long be remembered for his contributions to environmental legislation, for his unflagging efforts in behalf of Arizona, and for the gentle humor with which he conducted his life. This book secures his legacy.
Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society. Affiliated with the Utah Division of State History, Utah Department of Heritage & Arts.
Stories of the ordinary people who helped build Salt Lake City emerge from a study of their often humble adobe houses. Rather than focusing on men and women in positions of power and influence, the emphasis here is on the lives of people who built their sturdy, simple homes from mud.
A Modest Homestead provides architectural descriptions of ninety-four extant adobe houses. These homes are for the most part unremarkable, except for their perhaps unexpected construction material. They are as basic as the people who built them—small tradesmen and farmers, laborers and domestics. Author Laurie Bryant discusses the neighborhoods in Salt Lake City where adobe houses have survived, often much renovated and disguised, and she showcases the houses not just as they appear today but as they were originally built. Almost all the houses now have additions and improvements, and without some dissection, they are not always recognizable. They now appear both comfortable and pleasant, which was not always the case in the nineteenth century. What emerges through closer examination and Bryant’s research is a fuller picture of the roughhewn life of many early Utahns.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.
In a career that took him from the cotton fields of East Texas to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall and beyond, Lightnin’ Hopkins became one of America’s greatest bluesmen, renowned for songs whose topics effortlessly ranged from his African American roots to space exploration, the Vietnam War, and lesbianism, performed in a unique, eccentric, and spontaneous style of guitar playing that inspired a whole generation of rock guitarists. Hopkins’s music directly and indirectly influenced an amazing range of artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, as well as bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and ZZ Top, with whom Hopkins performed.
Mojo Hand follows Lightin’ Hopkins’s life and music from the acoustic country blues that he began performing in childhood, through the rise of 1950s rock ’n’ roll, which nearly derailed his career, to his reinvention and international success as a pioneer of electric folk blues from the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors draw on 130 vivid oral histories, as well as extensive archival and secondary sources, to provide the fullest account available of the development of Hopkins’s music; his idiosyncratic business practices, such as shunning professional bookers, managers, and publicists; and his durable and indelible influence on modern roots, blues, rock ’n’ roll, singer-songwriter, and folk music. Mojo Hand celebrates the spirit and style, intelligence and wit, and confounding musical mystique of a bluesman who shaped modern American music like no one else.
Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that liberalized divorce and women's ability to control their property, opened up uncommon possibilities for Ott. Other structures, from domestic violence in the home to rampant sexism and ableism outside of it, remained a part of even affluent women's lives. Money, Marriage, and Madness tells a forgotten story of how the legal and medical cultures of the time shaped one woman—and what her life tells us about power and society in nineteenth century America.
Structured operatically into overture, acts, and postlude, The Monster I Am Today guides the reader through associative shifts from arias like “weather events” and Price’s forty-two-minute final ovation to memories of Simmonds’s coming of age in New Orleans. As he melds lyric forms with the biography of one of classical music’s greatest virtuosos, Simmonds composes a duet that spotlights Price’s profound influence on him as a person and an artist: “That’s how I hear: Her.”
Montana has been the "last best place" for so many people. A century ago, Native Americans gathered here to perform the Ghost Dance—a last, doomed attempt to make white settlers vanish and bring back the old ways of life. Today, people are still pouring into Montana, looking for the pristine wilderness they saw in A River Runs through It.
The reality of Montana—indeed, of all the West—has never matched the myths, but this book eloquently explores how the search for a perfect place is driving growth, development, and resource exploitation in Big Sky country. In ten personal essays, John Wright looks at such things as Montana myths; old-timers; immigrants; elk; ways of seeing the landscape; land conservation and land trusts; the fate of the Blackfoot, Bitterroot, and Paradise valleys; and some means of preserving the last, best places.
These reflections offer a way of understanding Montana that goes far beyond the headlines about militia groups and celebrities' ranches. Montana never was or will be a pristine wilderness, but Wright believes that much can be saved if natives and newcomers alike see what stands to be lost. His book is a wake-up call, not a ghost dance.
Beautifully written and illustrated, Montrose: Life in a Garden is Goodwin’s affectionate biography of her gardens, recounting how and why each section was developed over the years, including the Dianthus Walk, Nandinaland, Hellebore Slope, Mother-in-Law Walk, Snowdrop Woods, and Jo’s Bed. It is also a meticulous month-by-month chronicle of a specific year in these gardens—a year that saw a punishing drought that threatened Goodwin’s no-irrigation policy, a damaging December ice storm, and the beginnings of a plan to preserve Montrose in the future.
Working on her knees for long days throughout the year, Nancy Goodwin always has a vision of how her gardens will appear in twelve months or in twelve years. She will spend weeks, for instance, planting hundreds of snow drops along a woodsy path in order to enjoy a fleeting week of exquisite beauty in coming years. She never puts anything into the ground without imagining what form, color, and texture it will add to a bed. With tireless patience and unflagging optimism, Goodwin will wait years to see a single plant bloom.
Following Goodwin’s activities throughout the year, readers will learn the fundamentals of maintaining a four-season garden in Zone 7 in the South. Award-winning garden illustrator Ippy Patterson has provided more than 160 lavish illustrations of the gardens at Montrose and these meticulously detailed drawings appear throughout the book.
We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.
Winner of the Evans Handcart Prize 2009
Winner of the Mormon History Assn Best Biography Award 2009
By the early twentieth century, the era of organized Mormon colonization of the West from a base in Salt Lake City was all but over. One significant region of Utah had not been colonized because it remained in Native American hands--the Uinta Basin, site of a reservation for the Northern Utes. When the federal government decided to open the reservation to white settlement, William H. Smart--a nineteenth-century Mormon traditionalist living in the twentieth century, a polygamist in an era when it was banned, a fervently moral stake president who as a youth had struggled mightily with his own sense of sinfulness, and an entrepreneurial businessman with theocratic, communal instincts--set out to ensure that the Uinta Basin also would be part of the Mormon kingdom.
Included with the biography is a searchable CD containing William H. Smart's extensive journals, a monumental personal record of Mormondom and its transitional period from nineteenth-century cultural isolation into twentieth-century national integration.
Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties.
In examining the life and works of Anna Katharine Green, one discovers a slice of American life: in the social events of New York City, in the plight of young working women, in the moral dilemmas of upright citizens pursuing the American dream.
Cape Cod is known for its beaches, throngs of summer visitors, and the activities that accompany seaside living, but it is also home to many kettle ponds, which offer a more tranquil setting. Formed from glaciers breaking apart and so named due to a rounded shape that appears like a kettle, these waterways are home to a diverse array of wildlife, while remaining peaceful and even a bit hidden.
Big enough for a canoeist to feel solitude and serenity, small enough to not appear on large-scale maps, Centerville’s Long Pond (one of seven on the Cape that share this name), consists of fifty-one acres of crystal clear waters, fresh air, and the fish, turtles, waterfowl, ospreys, and otters that call this special place home. In A Moving Meditation, Stephen G. Waller offers an intimate look at the pond’s intriguing natural and human history; its abundant animal life, across the seasons; and the encroaching effects of climate change.
Tom Gola is a Philadelphia Big Five basketball icon. He led La Salle to the NIT championship in 1952 and the NCAA championship in 1954, and holds the NCAA record for most rebounds in a career. Gola also helped the Philadelphia Warriors win the NBA championship as a rookie in 1956 and was named an All-Star five times before retiring in 1966. But Gola also had many amazing achievements as a coach; his La Salle Explorer teams were a large part of the national basketball landscape. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1976.
In Mr. All-Around, avid sports fan and reporter David Grzybowski provides a definitive biography of Gola. He uses exclusive interviews he conducted with Gola in 2013 and features anecdotes by many figures of Philadelphia and basketball history, including John Cheney, Fran Dunphy, and Lionel Simmons.
After the NBA, Gola transitioned to a second career as a politician, serving as Pennsylvania State Representative and Philadelphia City Controller. His dedication to public service involved joining politician Arlen Specter on a campaign that revolutionized political marketing within Philadelphia. Mr. All-Around is an affectionate testament to the life, career, and legacy of one of Philadelphia’s most beloved sports legends.
As Drury writes in his preface, Herbert lived “a quiet life with a crisis in the middle of it.” Drury follows Herbert from his academic success as a young man, seemingly destined for a career at court, through his abandonment of those hopes, his devotion to the restoration of a church in Huntingdonshire, and his final years as a country parson. Because Herbert’s work was only published posthumously, it has always been difficult to know when or in what context Herbert wrote his poems. But Drury skillfully places readings of the poems into his narrative at biographically credible moments, allowing us to appreciate not only Herbert’s frame of mind while writing, but also the society that produced it. A sensitive critic of Herbert’s poems as well as a theologian, Drury does full justice to the spiritual dimension of Herbert’s work. In addition, he reveals the occasions of sorrow, happiness, regret, and hope that Herbert captured in his poetry and that led T. S. Eliot to write, “What we can confidently believe is that every poem . . . is true to the poet’s experience.”
Painting a picture of a man torn between worldly ambition and spiritual life, Music at Midnight is an eloquent biography that breathes new life into some of the greatest English poems ever written.
Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.
In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it.
This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms.
This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms.
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis shifted from building homes to protecting them as residents tried to maintain their standard of living against outside threats—including the growing civil rights movement—through grassroots conservative politics based on an ideal of white homeowner rights. As the citizens of South Gate struggled to defend their segregated American Dream of suburban community, they fanned the flames of racial inequality that erupted in the 1965 Watts riots.
Other stories describe her meeting in Mallorca with the Utah man who would become her husband, her journey to a faraway country, the birth of her children, and her discovery of her artistic impulses and abilities. All are woven with the threads of color and culture of her two homes. Filled with wit and insight, My Kitchen Table reveals foremost the voice of a woman determined to be true to herself and to her art.
Accompanying the narrative are some fifty color reproductions of the paintings and sculptures for which Pilar Pobil has become known. This is a volume that art lovers everywhere will treasure.
"Like her paintings, Pilar’s stories overflow their pages. They fold us into their embrace, so we feel and see her dancing in and out of our minds, a curious and mischievous child, a young woman in love coming to a foreign land with a foreign culture and tongue, the heartbreak of her losses, and the continual renewals that have ripened her art. Pilar’s book, like her house, is a magic kingdom and she is the fairy princess who presides. She paints her shoes for social engagements. The seats of her chairs beam faces. Her electrical wiring metamorphoses into fantastic snakes. The garden that leads to her studio is Salt Lake City’s Giverny. Paintings are everywhere and talk to each other with glittering non sequiturs. At the center of it all is her kitchen table, the place from which she serves the voices and visions of her life. The subtleties of her telling, like the bold clarity of her judgments, are those of an artist whose inspirations are a feast she graciously invites us to share."
— from the Foreword by Robert D. Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities, University of Utah
A finalist for the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
Boris Pasternak is best known in the West for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, whereas in Russia he is most celebrated as a poet. The two poetry collections offered here in translation are chronological and thematic bookends, and they capture Pasternak’s abiding and powerful vision of life: his sense of its beauty and terror, its precariousness for the individual, and its persistence in time—that vitality of being with which he is on familiar and familial terms.
In the early work My Sister Life, which commemorates the year 1917, Pasternak, then in his late twenties, found his poetic voice. The book would go on to become one of the most influential collections of Russian poetry of the twentieth century. “The Poems of Yury Zhivago” are a part of the poet’s famous novel, Dr. Zhivago, whose title might be rendered in English as “Doctor Life.” These later lyrics are a kind of summing up that reflect, from the perspective of age and approaching death, upon the accumulated experience of a contemplative life amid turbulent and terrifying times.
Falen’s fresh new translations of these poems capture their expression of the beauty and the joy, the terror and the pain, of what it is to be alive . . . and to die.
Myths, Muses and Mortals gives new insight into a multitude of life experiences in ancient Greece. The book introduces the lives of the ancient Greeks through extracts taken from a range of sources, including poems, plays, novels, histories, lawsuits, inscriptions, and private note tablets. The voices speak for themselves in fresh translation, but in addition, William Furley gives the narratives historical context and illuminates the literary genre in which they appear. The texts are grouped around important areas of life—love relations, travel and trade, social status, divine signs, daily events, warfare, philosophies, dress code, and private and public celebration—giving voice to the variety of lives experienced by the citizens of ancient Greece and an insight into the Greek mind.
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