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S. L. Frank
The Life And Work Of A Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950
Philip Boobbyer
Ohio University Press, 1995

“There are many reasons for writing a biography of Semyon Frank. Quite apart from his philosophy, he lived a remarkable life. Born in Moscow in 1877, he was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922 and died in London in 1950. The son of a Jewish doctor, he became a revolutionary Social Democrat in his teens and finished his life as a Neoplatonist Christian. One of the Russian revisionist Marxists, he was then involved in the Kadet Party during the 1905 revolution before breaking with active political activity and turning to philosophy. He lived in Petrograd through the First World War until September 1917, after which he went to Saratov, where he experienced the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Living in Germany after his exile, he witnessed the rise of Hitler in Berlin, left for France in a hurry in 1937, and spent part of the war hiding from the Gestapo in the Grenoble mountains. It was a life that encompassed a lot of history.

”Yet along with this, Frank was arguably Russia’s greatest twentieth-century philosopher. Indeed, V.V. Zen‘kovskii, the historian of Russian philosophy, considered Frank ’in strength of philosophic vision … the most outstanding among Russian philosophers generally — not merely among those who share his ideas.‘ For its lucidity, conciseness, systematic character, and unity, Zen’kovskii considered Frank’s system ‘ the highest achievement … of Russian philosophy.’ Doubtless, Zen‘kovskii’s assessment is disputable, but his remarks emphasize Frank’s stature in the Russian tradition. In the style of German idealism, Frank constructed a comprehensive philosophical system, which he believed offered a coherent alternative to materialism. He was deeply worried by the implications of epistemological relativism and constructed a system of metaphysics designed to link epistemology and ontology, to bridge the gulf between thought and being. In addition, he attempted to express the idea of a personal God in philosophical language. His system also embraced social philosophy, anthropology, and ethics.“

— from the Introduction by the author

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Sabino Canyon
The Life of a Southwestern Oasis
David Wentworth Lazaroff
University of Arizona Press, 1993
Nestled in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona, Sabino Canyon demonstrates the beauty and resiliency of life in what many would assume to be a most inhospitable place. For thousands of visitors each year, this oasis in the Sonoran Desert offers the opportunity to experience biodiversity in action.

David Lazaroff has called on years of studying, photographing, and educating people about Sabino Canyon to produce this clearly written and beautifully illustrated book. Focusing on the importance of Sabino Creek both to plants and animals and to human recreation, he tracks the ebb and flow of canyon life through the year and tells how people have sought to utilize the canyon through history. First-time visitors to Sabino Canyon will find their experience enriched through Lazaroff's insights into plants, animals, and geology, while those who regularly frequent Sabino's trails or pools can become better informed about its fragile desert and riparian habitats.

For anyone curious about life in a genuine Southwestern oasis, this book captures the beauty and uniqueness of a natural treasure-house located in a bustling city's back yard.
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Saint Katharine
The Life of Katharine Drexel
Cordelia Frances Biddle
Westholme Publishing, 2015
A Gilded-Age Woman Who Devoted Her Life and Fortune to the American Dispossessed, Established Her Own Religious Order, and Was Ultimately Canonized
When Katharine Drexel was born in 1858, her grandfather, financier Francis Martin Drexel, had a fortune so vast he was able to provide a loan of sixty million dollars to the Union’s cause during the Civil War. Her uncle and mentor, Anthony, established Drexel University to provide instruction to the working class regardless of race, religion, or gender. Her stepmother was Emma Bouvier whose brother, John, became the great-grandfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Katharine Drexel’s family were American royalty. As a Philadelphia socialite, “Kitty,” as she was often called, adored formal balls and teas, rowing regattas, and sailing races. She was beautiful, intelligent, and high-spirited. But when her stepmother died in 1883, and her father two years later, a sense of desolation nearly overwhelmed her. She was twenty-seven and in possession of a staggering inheritance. Approached for aid by the Catholic Indian Missions, she surprised her family by giving generously of money and time. It was during this period of acute self-examination that she journeyed to Rome for a private audience with Pope Leo XIII. With characteristic energy and fervor, she detailed the plight of the Native Americans, and begged for additional missionaries to serve them. His reply astonished her. “Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?”
In Saint Katharine: The Life of Katharine Drexel, Cordelia Frances Biddle recounts the extraordinary story of a Gilded Age luminary who became a selfless worker for the welfare and rights of America’s poorest persons. After years of supporting efforts on behalf of African Americans and American Indians, Katharine finally decided to follow her inner voice and profess vows. The act made headlines. Like her father and grandfather, she was a shrewd businessperson; she retained her financial autonomy and established her own order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Until her death in 1955, she devoted herself and her inheritance to building much-needed schools in the South and Southwest, despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan and others. Pragmatic, sometimes willful, ardent, and a charismatic leader, Katharine Drexel was an indefatigable champion of justice and parity. When illness incapacitated her in later years, divine radiance was said to emanate from her, a radiance that led to her canonization on October 1, 2000.
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Salem Is My Dwelling Place
Life Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Edwin Haviland Miller
University of Iowa Press, 1992

 In one of his public disavowals of autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne informed his readers that external traits "hide the man, instead of displaying him," directing them instead to "look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits." In this multidimensional biography of America's first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne's challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller's account as "the best biography of this most elusive of American authors."

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The Salvager
The Life of Captain Tom Reid on the Great Lakes
Mary Frances Doner
University of Minnesota Press, 2017

First published in 1958, The Salvager is both a narrative history of Great Lakes shipping disasters of 1880–1950 and the life story of Captain Thomas Reid, who operated one of the region’s largest salvaging companies during that era. 

The treacherous shoals, unpredictable storms, and sub-zero temperatures of the Great Lakes have always posed special hazards to mariners—particularly before the advent of modern navigational technologies—and offered ample opportunity for an enterprising sailor to build a salvage business up from nothing. Designing much of his equipment himself and honing a keen eye for the risks and rewards of various catastrophes, Captain Reid rose from humble beginnings and developed salvaging into a science. Using the actual records of the Reid Wrecking and Towing Company as well as Reid’s personal logs and letters, Mary Frances Doner deftly tells the stories not only of the maritime disasters and the wrecking adventures that followed, but also of those waiting back on shore for their loved ones to return.

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Samuel Bronfman
The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam
Michael R. Marrus
Brandeis University Press, 1991
As the creator of the Seagram whiskey empire Sam Bronfman became a mythic figure in the business world, and in the years after his death the legend has developed further and further away from the life. Now for the first time the complete story of the man and the business he built is available. Sam Bronfman was according to Business Week "a volatile, shrewd, and highly individualistic leader [whose] technical knowledge and financial acumen remain unchallenged." For over twenty years, Forbes noted, Sam judged the U.S. market correctly -- as virtually no one else did. The story includes the passing on of the vast Seagram enterprise to the leadership of his sons, Edgar and Charles. Samuel Bronfman's father failed as a wheat farmer and then found success selling frozen fish, firewood and horses. At this point young Sam observed to his father, "The bar makes more profits than we do. Instead of selling horses, we should be selling the drinks." And thus began what was to become the Seagram whiskey empire. Sam's insight and timing were right as Canada, and especially the United States, were coming under the influence of the temperance movement. While legend often places Sam in the thick of Prohibition era bootlegging and rum running, in fact he built for the long term and kept his operations within both the law and its loopholes as he supplied American bootleggers. Sam demonstrated his marketing genius by insisting on quality in a business notorious for cutting corners and thereby set the standard for the industry in the decades to follow. Sam's success in penetrating the American market was such that after Prohibition his competitors lobbied the federal government for his protection. While Samuel Bronfman is a classic rags to riches tale, it is also the story of a Jew who remained in many ways outside business and social establishments even after becoming internationally famous. Commuting every week between his Montreal and New York office, his was a private life centered on his family and their home in Montreal and summer places such as Tarrytown, New York. In the 1950s Sam, under instructions from his daughter Phyllis Lambert, commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design a new corporate headquarters, the Seagram building at 375 Park Avenue, a landmark on the New York City skyline. As a leader of the Jewish community Sam was elected president of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1939, and went on to organize financial aid to the fledgling state of Israel, beginning decades long involvement in Jewish affairs and support for the Jewish state. Sam was an intuitive leader and manager who knew his industry inside out and set the highest standards for his products and himself. His life makes a fascinating tale of business, power, wealth, and ethnic politics.
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Samuel Johnson
The Life of an Author
Lawrence Lipking
Harvard University Press, 1998

He was a servant to the public, a writer for hire. He was a hero, an author adding to the glory of his nation. But can a writer be both hack and hero? The career of Samuel Johnson, recounted here by Lawrence Lipking, proves that the two can be one. And it further proves, in its enduring interest for readers, that academic fashions today may be a bit hasty in pronouncing the "death of the author."

A book about the life of an author, about how an author is made, not born, Lipking's Samuel Johnson is the story of the man as he lived--and lives--in his work. Tracing Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, the book shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship.

Beginning with the defiant letter to Chesterfield that made Johnson a celebrity, Samuel Johnson offers fresh readings of all the writer's major works, viewed through the lens of two ongoing preoccupations: the urge to do great deeds--and the sense that bold expectations are doomed to disappointment. Johnson steers between the twin perils of ambition and despondency. Mounting a challenge to the emerging industry that glorified and capitalized on Shakespeare, he stresses instead the playwright's power to cure the illusions of everyday life. All Johnson's works reveal his extraordinary sympathy with ordinary people. In his groundbreaking Dictionary, in his poems and essays, and in The Lives of the English Poets, we see Johnson becoming the key figure in the culture of literacy that reaches from his day to our own.

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Samuel Ullman and "Youth"
The Life, the Legacy
Margaret E. Armbrester
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Examines a poem that has not only withstood the vicissitudes of time, but has spread around the world like the waves lapping at a beach
 
Thousands of wonderful and sometimes strange fads have captured the public fancy in the almost five decades since the end of World War II. Most have been short-lived and soon faded away. There is, however, a poem that has not only withstood the vicissitudes of time, but has spread around the world like the waves lapping at a beach. This is the poem "Youth," by Samuel Ullman.
 
In December 1945, the Reader’s Digest published the poem and reported that General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of the Allied Forces, Far East, kept a copy of the poem near his desk.
 
Around that time, Yoshio Okada, a Japanese businessman, bought a copy of that December 1945 edition of the Reader's Digest, read the poem and was deeply affected by it. He translated it into Japanese and displayed it in his office as a guiding inspiration. Many of Okada's friends read the poem and were fascinated by its beauty. It began to receive national publicity through newspapers and magazines and became popular throughout Japan, especially among the intellectual community. Part of the reason for this widespread popularity is the excellence of the translation. Yoshio Okada, a man of noble character, gifted with a profound philosophy of life and literary talent, translated the poem into a beautiful, soul­stirring Japanese version.
 
Samuel Ullman's “Youth” reflects the truth of life, and his outcry of spirituality touches the intrinsic nature of man.
 
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San Antonio Rose
The Life and Music of Bob Wills
Charles R. Townsend; Discography and filmusicography by Bob Pinson
University of Illinois Press, 1976

"Until Hank Williams came along, it was just Bob Willis," says Willie Nelson. "He was it." And indeed he was, especially for the thousands in the Southwest who knew and loved the King of Western Swing. The colorful band leader-composer-fiddler from Turkey, Texas, lassoed the emotions of country-and-western fans nationwide. In the early 1940s, his records outsold those of any other recording artist. He was voted not only into the Country Music Hall of Fame but also into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the only performer other than Gene Autry to be so honored. 

Affectionately written by a Texan who responded to the legendary fiddler's style, San Antonio Rose captures Wills's magnetism and the musical excitement he created. Charles R. Townsend traces Wills's dynamic life from his birth into a family of frontier fiddlers through his career and stardom and on to the poignant last recording session in 1973 and his death two years later. Townsend shows how Wills brought black and white music together and examines the tremendous impact he had on both popular and country music through the more than 550 selections he recorded and the forty years he and his Texas Playboys performed in dance halls and on radio.

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The Sarpedon Krater
The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase
Nigel Spivey
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Perhaps the most spectacular of all Greek vases, the Sarpedon krater depicts the body of Sarpedon, a hero of the Trojan War, being carried away to his homeland for burial. It was decorated some 2,500 years ago by Athenian artist Euphronios, and its subsequent history involves tomb raiding, intrigue, duplicity, litigation, international outrage, and possibly even homicide. How this came about is told by Nigel Spivey in a concise, stylish book that braids together the creation and adventures of this extraordinary object with an exploration of its abiding influence.
           
Spivey takes the reader on a dramatic journey, beginning with the krater’s looting from an Etruscan tomb in 1971 and its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, followed by a high-profile lawsuit over its status and its eventual return to Italy. He explains where, how, and why the vase was produced, retrieving what we know about the life and legend of Sarpedon. Spivey also pursues the figural motif of the slain Sarpedon portrayed on the vase and traces how this motif became a standard way of representing the dead and dying in Western art, especially during the Renaissance.

Fascinating and informative, The Sarpedon Krater is a multifaceted introduction to the enduring influence of Greek art on the world.
 
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Satyr Square
A Year, a Life in Rome
Leonard Barkan
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue, this loving reflection is a poignant, funny narrative about an American professor spending a year in Rome. A scarred veteran of academic culture wars retreating to a cradle of culture, Barkan is at first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission. But soon he is appointed unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becomes virtually bilingual, and falls in love. As the year progresses, he finds his voice as a writer, loses his lover, and definitively returns to America with heart, mind, and body. His memoir is the celebration of a life lived in the uncanny spaces where art and real people intersect.

Barkan’s reminiscence is not just about the Renaissance and ancient statuary, or Shakespeare and Mozart, Charles Bukowski and Paul de Man, eggplant antipasto and Brunello di Montalcino, foot fetishism and sulfur baths. At the heart of the narrative—beneath that beguiling surface of irony, humor, and misdirection—is a man of genuine ardor, struggling with what it means to be a homosexual and a Jew, trying to rediscover or reinvent his own intellectual passions. Hilarious, erudite, and lusciously rendered, Satyr Square gives us the whole of a life made up from fragments of Italy, art, food, and longing.

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Savage West
The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage
O. Alan Weltzien
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Thomas Savage (1915—2003) was one of the intermountain West's best novelists. His thirteen novels received high critical praise, yet he remained largely unknown by readers. Although Savage spent much of his later life in the Northeast, his formative years were spent in southwestern Montana, where the mountain West and his ranching family formed the setting for much of his work.

O. Alan Weltzien's insightful and detailed literary biography chronicles the life and work of this neglected but deeply talented novelist. Savage, a closeted gay family man, was both an outsider and an insider, navigating an intense conflict between his sexual identity and the claustrophobic social restraints of the rural West. Unlike many other Western writers, Savage avoided the formula westerns— so popular in his time— and offered instead a realistic, often subversive version of the region. His novels tell a hard, harsh story about dysfunctional families, loneliness, and stifling provincialism in the small towns and ranches of the northern Rockies, and his minority interpretation of the West provides a unique vision and caustic counternarrative contrary to the triumphant settler-colonialism themes that have shaped most Western literature. Savage West seeks to claim Thomas Savage's well-deserved position in American literature and to reintroduce twenty-first-century readers to a major Montana writer.
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Say No to the Devil
The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis
Ian Zack
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Who was the greatest of all American guitarists? You probably didn’t name Gary Davis, but many of his musical contemporaries considered him without peer. Bob Dylan called Davis “one of the wizards of modern music.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead—who took lessons with Davis—claimed his musical ability “transcended any common notion of a bluesman.” And the folklorist Alan Lomax called him “one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music.” But you won’t find Davis alongside blues legends Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Despite almost universal renown among his contemporaries, Davis lives today not so much in his own work but through covers of his songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne, and many others, as well as in the untold number of students whose lives he influenced.

The first biography of Davis, Say No to the Devil restores “the Rev’s” remarkable story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with many of Davis’s former students, Ian Zack takes readers through Davis’s difficult beginning as the blind son of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South to his decision to become an ordained Baptist minister and his move to New York in the early 1940s, where he scraped out a living singing and preaching on street corners and in storefront churches in Harlem. There, he gained entry into a circle of musicians that included, among many others, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Dave Van Ronk. But in spite of his tremendous musical achievements, Davis never gained broad recognition from an American public that wasn’t sure what to make of his trademark blend of gospel, ragtime, street preaching, and the blues. His personal life was also fraught, troubled by struggles with alcohol, women, and deteriorating health.

Zack chronicles this remarkable figure in American music, helping us to understand how he taught and influenced a generation of musicians.
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Schoolcraft's Ojibwa Lodge Stories
Life on the Lake Superior Frontier
Philip P. Mason
Michigan State University Press, 1997

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Scottish Mandarin
The Life and Times of Sir Reginald Johnston
Shiona Airlie
Hong Kong University Press, 2012
Colonial administrator, writer, explorer, Buddhist, and friend to China's last emperor, Sir Reginald Johnston (1874–1938) was a distinguished sinologist with a tangled love and family life that he kept secret even from his closest friends. Born and educated in Edinburgh, he began his career in the colony of Hong Kong and eventually became Commissioner of the remote British leased territory of Weihai in northern China. He travelled widely and, during a break from colonial service, served as tutor and advisor to Puyi, the deposed emperor. As the only foreigner allowed to work in the Forbidden City, he wrote the classic account of the last days of the Qing Dynasty—Twilight in the Forbidden City. Granted unique access to Johnston's extensive personal papers, once thought to be lost, Shiona Airlie tells the life of a complex and sensitive character whose career made a deep impression on 20th-century China.
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Scottish Shepherd
The Life and Times of John Murray Murdoch, Utah Pioneer
Merrell, Kenneth W
University of Utah Press, 2007
Now in paperback, this award-winning history tells the story of the author’s great-great grandfather, John Murray Murdoch, who came to America from Scotland to gather with other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the nineteenth century.
Murdoch embraced Mormonism and set out for the Utah Territory in 1852 with his wife, Ann, and their family. En route they suffered the deaths of their two young children. Two years later, John’s mother, Wee Granny, and Ann’s brother, James Steele, both perished, along with many others of the ill-fated Martin handcart company, as they attempted to immigrate to Salt Lake City.

Murdoch was a respected member of the community and participated in the military preparations and maneuvers against the U.S. Army in the 1857 Utah War. Eventually the family moved to the Heber valley as early settlers there. Murdoch later became one of Wasatch county’s first elected officials and helped establish the sheep-ranching industry in Utah. The 'everyman' aspect of John Murdoch’s life makes his a compelling story. It will fascinate anyone interested in the individuals who helped create Utah's history. 

Winner of the Evans Handcart Award. 
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The Script of Life in Modern Society
Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World
Marlis Buchmann
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Social scientists generally agree that relations between the different life stages in advanced industrial societies are changing. Far less agreement exists over how to interpret these changes. Using an innovative approach to the study of life course, Marlis Buchmann explores the changes in educational, occupational, and family careers that threaten an end to familiar life patterns characteristic of the mid-twentieth century.
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Sculpting a Life
Chana Orloff between Paris and Tel Aviv
Paula J. Birnbaum
Brandeis University Press, 2022
The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff.
 
In Sculpting a Life, the first book-length biography of sculptor Chana Orloff (1888-1968), author Paula Birnbaum tells the story of a fiercely determined and ambitious woman who fled antisemitism in Ukraine, emigrated to Palestine with her family, then travelled to Paris to work in haute couture before becoming an internationally recognized artist. Against the backdrop of revolution, world wars, a global pandemic and forced migrations, her sculptures embody themes of gender, displacement, exile, and belonging. A major figure in the School of Paris, Orloff contributed to the canon of modern art alongside Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall.
 
Stories from her unpublished memoir enrich this life story of courage, perseverance, and extraordinary artistic accomplishments that take us through the aftermath of the Holocaust when Orloff lived between Paris and Tel Aviv. This biography brings new perspectives and understandings to Orloff’s multiple identities as a cosmopolitan émigré, woman, and Jew, and is a much-needed intervention into the narrative of modern art.
 
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Seasick
Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth
Alanna Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2009

We have long lorded over the ocean. But only recently have we become aware of the myriad life-forms beneath its waves. We now know that this delicate ecosystem is our life-support system; it regulates the earth’s temperatures and climate and comprises 99 percent of living space on earth. So when we change the chemistry of the whole ocean system, as we are now, life as we know it is threatened.

In Seasick, veteran science journalist Alanna Mitchell dives beneath the surface of the world’s oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm can be managed and preserved, and with it life on earth. Each chapter features a different group of researchers who introduce readers to the importance of ocean currents, the building of coral structures, or the effects of acidification. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lamp–like dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama.

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden realm of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

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The Secret Trust of Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault
The Life and Trials of a Free Woman of Color in Antebellum Georgia
Janice L. Sumler-Edmond
University of Arkansas Press, 2008
In this fascinating biography set in nineteenth-century Savannah, Georgia, Janice L. Sumler-Edmond resurrects the life and times of Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault, a free woman of color whose story was until now lost to historical memory. It’s a story that informs our understanding of the antebellum South as we watch this widowed matriarch navigate the social, economic, and political complexities to create a legacy for her family.
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Secrets of Life with Brachial Plexus Palsy
Written by Denise Justice; Illustrated by Susan Eatmon; Edited by Holly Wagner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2020
In this book, Marie is just a normal little girl except that one of her arms is different!
 
Secrets of Life with Brachial Plexus Palsy is the story of a baby girl who grows up with dreams and ambitions like everybody else. Some of her dreams are to play like other children, to show others that there is nothing that she cannot do, and to pursue any career that she chooses when she grows up. Life with this condition can be challenging, and as the years pass, Marie uncovers secrets that allow her to overcome the stigma of her Brachial Plexus Palsy – secrets she would like to share with you…
 
Let Marie show you that living life with Brachial Plexus Palsy is an exciting journey!
 
 
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Senator Leahy
A Life in Scenes
Philip Baruth
University Press of New England, 2017
Having vaulted to a position in the United States Senate at the tender age of thirty-four, Patrick Leahy now claims the longest tenure of any member of that institution still serving—and he was third in line for the presidency when the Democrats held control. Few recent American lawmakers have watched history unfold so at such close range; fewer still have influenced it so powerfully. Philip Baruth brings a thriller-like intensity to the most spectacular of those scenes: the 9/11 attack on the US capital, the contentious drafting of the Patriot Act, the ensuing anthrax attacks, and the dramatic 2014 opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba. Throughout, the biography focuses in on Leahy’s meticulous image making, his cultivation of a “Top Cop” persona both in the media and at the ballot box. It is an approach that culminates in simultaneous roles for the lawmaker as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and as the tough-talking “distinguished gentleman” in Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films. Leahy’s improbable success, Philip Baruth argues, in the end lies in his ability both to be and to play the top cop not only in post-Watergate Vermont, but in a post-9/11 America viciously divided between the red states and the blue.
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A Sense of Place
The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve
Janice Emily Bowers
University of Arizona Press, 1988
Forrest Shreve (1878-1950) was an internationally known plant ecologist who spent most of his career at the Carnegie Institution's Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. Shreve's contributions to the study of plant ecology laid the groundwork for modern studies and several of his works came to be regarded as classics by ecologists worldwide. This first full-length study of Shreve's life and work demonstrates that he was more than a desert ecologist. His early work in Maryland and Jamaica gave him a breadth of expertise matched by few of his ecological contemporaries, and his studies of desert plant demography, the physiological ecology of rain-forest plants, and vegetational gradients on southwestern mountain ranges anticipated by decades recent trends in ecology.

Tracing Shreve's development from student to scientist, Bowers evokes the rigors and delights of fieldwork in the first half of this century and shows how Shreve's sense of place informed his scientific thought—making him, in his own words, "not an exile from some better place, but a man at home in an environment to which his life can be adjusted without physical or intellectual loss."
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Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World
The Stoke Newington Edition
Daniel Defoe
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.
 
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Shakespeare Dwelling
Designs for the Theater of Life
Julia Reinhard Lupton
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters—these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds. Julia Reinhard Lupton enters Shakespeare’s dwelling places in search of insights into the most fundamental human problems.
 
Focusing on five works (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale), Lupton remakes the concept of dwelling by drawing on a variety of sources, including modern design theory, Renaissance treatises on husbandry and housekeeping, and the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The resulting synthesis not only offers a new entry point into the contemporary study of environments; it also shows how Shakespeare’s works help us continue to make sense of our primal creaturely need for shelter.
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Shaking the Tree
Readings from Nature in the History of Life
Edited by Henry Gee
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Nature has published news about the history of life ever since its first issue in 1869, in which T. H. Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") wrote about Triassic dinosaurs. In recent years, the field has enjoyed a tremendous flowering due to new investigative techniques drawn from cladistics (a revolutionary method for charting evolutionary relationships) and molecular biology.

Shaking the Tree brings together nineteen review articles written for Nature over the past decade by many of the major figures in paleontology and evolution, from Stephen Jay Gould to Simon Conway Morris. Each article is brief, accessible, and opinionated, providing "shoot from the hip" accounts of the latest news and debates. Topics covered include major extinction events, homeotic genes and body plans, the origin and evolution of the primates, and reconstructions of phylogenetic trees for a wide variety of groups. The editor, Henry Gee, gives new commentary and updated references.

Shaking the Tree is a one-stop resource for engaging overviews of the latest research in the history of life on Earth.
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The Shape of Life
Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form
Rudolf A. Raff
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Rudolf Raff is recognized as a pioneer in evolutionary developmental biology. In their 1983 book, Embryos, Genes, and Evolution, Raff and co-author Thomas Kaufman proposed a synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology. In The Shape of Life, Raff analyzes the rise of this new experimental discipline and lays out new research questions, hypotheses, and approaches to guide its development.

Raff uses the evolution of animal body plans to exemplify the interplay between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary patterns. Animal body plans emerged half a billion years ago. Evolution within these body plans during this span of time has resulted in the tremendous diversity of living animal forms.

Raff argues for an integrated approach to the study of the intertwined roles of development and evolution involving phylogenetic, comparative, and functional biology. This new synthesis will interest not only scientists working in these areas, but also paleontologists, zoologists, morphologists, molecular biologists, and geneticists.
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Siberian Village
Land and Life in the Sakha Republic
Bella Bychkova Jordan
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
The village of Djarkhan is in the heart of Russia’s Sakha Republic, on the Central Yakut Plain. The world around Djarkhan, with its extreme subarctic climate and intractable permafrost, seems an unlikely place to look for a rich, historic, and exotic efflorescence of human life, and yet this is precisely what the authors found. Their book is a remarkable account of how the people of Djarkhan have created their own distinctive place through their unique relationship with a severe and demanding land.

This book traces the way of life of the village’s Turkic inhabitants, the Yakuts, from their arrival in the 1600s through czarist times and the Soviet era to the present day. As a native of the village, geographer Bella Bychkova Jordan enjoyed unparalleled access to its people and their stories, myths, humor, problems, and folklore. Viewed through the prism of cultural geography, this material forms the basis of a remarkable portrait of a people wresting a living from the land in one of the coldest and most isolated spots on Earth.

Published in collaboration with the Center for American Places.
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A Significant Life
Human Meaning in a Silent Universe
Todd May
University of Chicago Press, 2015

What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful one? Throughout history most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about these questions, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life and memories alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. 

May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from—but also interact with—the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures—from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler—May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be.  

Clearly and eloquently written, A Significant Life is a recognition and a comfort, a celebration of the deeply human narrative impulse by which we make—even if we don’t realize it—meaning for ourselves. It offers a refreshing way to think of an age-old question, of quite simply, what makes a life worth living. 


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The Silver Man
The Life and Times of Indian Agent John Kinzie
Peter Shrake
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

In The Silver Man: The Life and Times of John Kinzie, readers witness the dramatic changes that swept the Wisconsin frontier in the early and mid-1800s, through the life of Indian agent John Harris Kinzie. From the War of 1812 and the monopoly of the American Fur Company, to the Black Hawk War and the forced removal of thousands of Ho-Chunk people from their native lands—John Kinzie’s experience gives us a front-row seat to a pivotal time in the history of the American Midwest.

As an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago—in what is now Portage, Wisconsin—John Kinzie served the Ho-Chunk people during a time of turbulent change, as the tribe faced increasing attacks on its cultural existence and very sovereignty, and struggled to come to terms with American advancement into the upper Midwest. The story of the Ho-Chunk Nation continues today, as the tribe continues to rebuild its cultural presence in its native homeland.

Through John Kinzie’s story, we gain a broader view of the world in which he lived—a world that, in no small part, forms a foundation for the world in which we live today.

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Simple Pleasures
Thoughts on Food, Friendship, and Life
Stephanie Mills
Island Press, 2012
In Simple Pleasures: Thoughts on Food, Friendship, and Life we have highlighted two chapters from Stephanie Mill’s reflection the pleasures, as well as the virtues and difficulties, of a perhaps simpler than average North American life. It is a thoughtful paean to living, like Thoreau, a deliberate life.  Mill’s writing is beautifully crafted, fluid, inspiring, and enlightening, and these chapters encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your own life. It celebrates the pleasures, beauty, and fulfillment of a simple life, a goal well worth striving for.
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Simple Story Of A Soldier
Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry
Samuel W. Hankins
University of Alabama Press, 2004
The camp, battle, and prison experiences of a common soldier

This fast-paced memoir was written in 1905 by 61-year-old Samuel W. Hankins while he was living in the Soldiers Home in Gulfport, Mississippi. It vividly details his years as a Confederate rifleman from the spring of 1861, when at a mere sixteen years of age he volunteered for the 2d Mississippi Infantry, through the end of the war in 1865, when he was just twenty years old and maimed for life.
 
The 2d Mississippi was part of the Army of Northern Virginia and as such saw action at Bull Run/Manassas, Seven Pines and the Peninsular Campaign, and Gettysburg. Besides being hospitalized with measles, suffering severely frostbitten feet, and being wounded by a minié ball at Railroad Cut, Hankins was captured by Federal forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp on David’s Island, New York. Later, he was transferred to a South Carolina hospital, returned home on furlough, joined a cavalry unit that fought at Atlanta. He was stationed in Selma, Alabama, when the war ended.
 
The strength of Hankins’s text lies in his straightforward narrative style virtually free of Lost Cause sentiment. Both Union and Confederate veterans could relate to his stories because so many of them had faced similar challenges during the war. Full of valuable information on a common soldier’s experience, the memoir still conjures the sights, sounds, and smells of warfare.
 
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Sing a Sad Song
The Life of Hank Williams
Roger M. Williams
University of Illinois Press, 1981
Few American entertainers have had the explosive impact, wide-ranging appeal, and continuing popularity of country music superstar Hank Williams. Such Williams standards as "Your Cheatin' Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Jambalaya," and "I Saw the Light" have entered the pantheon of great American song while Williams's very name remains synonymous with the genre he helped define.

Sing a Sad Songs tells the story of Hank Williams's rise from impoverished Alabama roots, his coming of age during and after World War II, his meteoric climb to national acclaim and star status on the Grand Ole Opry, his star-crossed marriages and recurring health problems, the chronic bouts with alcoholism and the alienation it caused in those he loved and sang for, and finally his tragic death at twenty-nine and subsequent emergence as a folk hero.

In addition, the book includes an essential discography compiled by Bob Pinson of the Country Music Foundation.

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Singing in Zion
Music and Song in the Life of One Arkansas Family
Robert Cochran
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
This book is a lyrical, scholarly exploration of the connection between one family's musical traditions and its rural community of Zion, Arkansas. In 1959, three Gilbert sisters—Alma, Helen, and Phydella—began compiling songs they remembered as their own and sending them to one another in letters. Their tendency to center memory in sound rather than sight reveals an unusual musical birthright. Robert Cochran has constructed a composite portrait of this family for whom music is the center of life. He examines their lived experience as they anchor their history through song, singing, and the playing of musical instruments. The Gilberts are wonderful exemplars of the "mediation of oral tradition," and when approached through their music, they reveal themselves as remarkable individuals with an elaborate and firmly held sense of their unique identities. A decade in the making, Singing in Zion is written with a memoirist's sense of family history and an ethnographer's sense of the rich encounter of worlds. This narrative has a seductive simplicity that conveys much of the Gilbert family's charm while at the same time establishing a broader framework that is firmly academic. It will be enjoyed by all readers.
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Sisters in the Life
A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making
Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
From experimental shorts and web series to Hollywood blockbusters and feminist porn, the work of African American lesbian filmmakers has made a powerful contribution to film history. But despite its importance, this work has gone largely unacknowledged by cinema historians and cultural critics. Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life tells a full story of African American lesbian media-making spanning three decades. In essays on filmmakers including Angela Robinson, Tina Mabry and Dee Rees; on the making of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996); and in interviews with Coquie Hughes, Pamela Jennings, and others, the contributors center the voices of black lesbian media makers while underscoring their artistic influence and reach as well as the communities that support them. Sisters in the Life marks a crucial first step in narrating the history and importance of these compelling yet unsung artists.

Contributors. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Jennifer DeClue, Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Thomas Allen Harris, Devorah Heitner, Pamela L. Jennings, Alexandra Juhasz, Kara Keeling, Candace Moore, Marlon Moore, Michelle Parkerson, Roya Rastegar, L. H. Stallings, Yvonne Welbon, Patricia White, Karin D. Wimbley
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A Sister's Memories
The Life and Work of Grace Abbott from the Writings of Her Sister, Edith Abbott
Edited by John Sorensen
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Among the great figures of Progressive Era reform, Edith and Grace Abbott are perhaps the least sung. Peers, companions, and coworkers of legendary figures such as Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Abbott sisters were nearly omnipresent in turn-of-the-century struggles to improve the lives of the poor and the working-class people who fed the industrial engines and crowded into diverse city neighborhoods. Grace’s innovative role as a leading champion for the rights of children, immigrants, and women earned her a key place in the history of the social justice movement. As her friend and colleague Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, Grace was “one of the great women of our day . . . a definite strength which we could count on for use in battle.”

A Sister’s Memories is the inspiring story of Grace Abbott (1878–1939), as told by her sister and social justice comrade, Edith Abbott (1876–1957). Edith recalls in vivid detail the Nebraska childhood, impressive achievements, and struggles of her sister who, as head of the Immigrants’ Protective League and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, championed children’s rights from the slums of Chicago to the villages of Appalachia. Grace’s crusade can perhaps be best summed up in her well-known credo: “Justice for all children is the high ideal in a democracy.” Her efforts saved the lives of thousands of children and immigrants and improved those of millions more. These trailblazing social service works led the way to the creation of the Social Security Act and UNICEF and caused the press to nickname her “The Mother of America’s 43 Million Children.” She was the first woman in American history to be nominated to the presidential cabinet and the first person to represent the United States at a committee of the League of Nations.

Edited by Abbott scholar John Sorensen, A Sister’s Memories is destined to become a classic. It shapes the diverse writings of Edith Abbott into a cohesive narrative for the first time and fills in the gaps of our understanding of Progressive Era reforms. Readers of all backgrounds will find themselves engrossed by this history of the unstoppable, pioneer feminist Abbott sisters.
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The Six-Minute Memoir
Fifty-Five Short Essays on Life
Mary Helen Stefaniak
University of Iowa Press, 2022
This collection of short essays delivers more joy than many books twice its size. Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin.

What’s more, writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.
 
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Slingin' Sam
The Life and Times of the Greatest Quarterback Ever to Play the Game
By Joe Holley
University of Texas Press, 2012

Dan Jenkins calls him “the greatest quarterback who ever lived, college or pro.” Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who played for TCU and the Washington Redskins, single-handedly revolutionized the game of football. While the pros still wore leather helmets and played the game more like rugby, Baugh’s ability to throw the ball with rifle-like accuracy made the forward pass a strategic weapon, not a desperation heave. Like Babe Ruth, who changed the very perception of how baseball is played, Slingin’ Sam transformed the notion of offense in football and how much yardage can be gained through the air. As the first modern quarterback, Baugh led the Redskins to five title games and two NFL championships, while leading the league in passing six times—a record that endures to this day—and in punting four times. In 1943, the triple-threat Baugh also scored a triple crown when he led the league in passing, punting, and interceptions.

Slingin’ Sam is the first major biography of this legendary quarterback, one of the first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Joe Holley traces the whole arc of Baugh’s life (1914–2008), from his small-town Texas roots to his college ball success as an All-American at TCU, his brief flirtation with professional baseball, and his stellar career with the Washington Redskins (1937–1952), as well as his later career coaching the New York Titans and Houston Oilers and ranching in West Texas. Through Holley’s vivid descriptions of close-fought games, Baugh comes alive both as the consummate all-around athlete who could play every minute of every game, on both offense and defense, and as an all-around good guy.

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Small
Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery
Catherine Musemeche
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
As a pediatric surgeon, Catherine Musemeche operates on the smallest of human beings, manipulates organs the size of walnuts, and uses sutures as thin as hairs to resolve matters of life or death. Working in the small space of a premature infant’s chest or abdomen allows no margin for error. It is a world rife with emotion and risk. Small takes readers inside this rarefied world of pediatric medicine, where children and newborns undergo surgery to resolve congenital defects or correct the damages caused by accidents and disease. It is an incredibly high-stakes endeavor, nerve-wracking and fascinating. Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery is a gripping story about a still little-known frontier. In writing about patients and their families, Musemeche recounts the history of the developing field of pediatric surgery—so like adult medicine in many ways, but at the same time utterly different. This is a field guide to the state of the art and science of operating on the smallest human beings, the hurts and maladies that afflict them, and the changing nature of medicine in America today, told by an exceptionally gifted surgeon and writer.
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Snapshot Versions of Life
Richard Chalfen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
Snapshot Versions of Life is an important foray into the culture of photography and home life from an anthropologist’s perspective. Examining what he calls “Home Mode” photography, Richard Chalfen explores snapshots, slide shows, family albums, home movies, and home videos, uncovering what people do with their photos as well as what their personal photos do for them.
    Chalfen’s “Polaroid People” are recognizable—if ironically viewed—relatives, uncles, aunts, and All-American kids. As members of “Kodak Culture” they watch home movies, take pictures of newborn babies, and even, in their darker moments, scratch out the faces of disliked relatives in group photographs. He examines who shoots these photos and why, as well as how they think (or don’t) of planning, editing, and exhibiting their shots. Chalfen’s analysis reveals the culturally structured behavior underlying seemingly spontaneous photographic activities. 
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The Socratic Way of Life
Xenophon’s “Memorabilia”
Thomas L. Pangle
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The Socratic Way of Life is the first English-language book-length study of the philosopher Xenophon’s masterwork. In it, Thomas L. Pangle shows that Xenophon depicts more authentically than does Plato the true teachings and way of life of the citizen philosopher Socrates, founder of political philosophy.
In the first part of the book, Pangle analyzes Xenophon’s defense of Socrates against the two charges of injustice upon which he was convicted by democratic Athens: impiety and corruption of the youth. In the second part, Pangle analyzes Xenophon’s account of how Socrates’s life as a whole was just, in the sense of helping through his teaching a wide range of people. Socrates taught by never ceasing to raise, and to progress in answering, the fundamental and enduring civic questions: what is pious and impious, noble and ignoble, just and unjust, genuine statesmanship and genuine citizenship. Inspired by Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s assessments of Xenophon as the true voice of Socrates, The Socratic Way of Life establishes the Memorabilia as the groundwork of all subsequent political philosophy.
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The Soldier's Friend
A Life of Ernie Pyle
Ray E. Boomhower
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006

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Some Seed Fell on Good Ground
The Life of Edwin V. O'Hara
Timothy Michael Dolan
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
A man far ahead of his time, Archbishop Edwin V. O'Hara of Kansas City (1881-1956) orchestrated numerous initiatives that profoundly affected American Catholic life.
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Someone to Watch Over Me
The Life and Music of Ben Webster
Frank Büchmann-Møller
University of Michigan Press, 2010
For a half century, Ben Webster, one of the "big three" of swing tenors-along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young-was one of the best-known and most popular saxophonists.

Early in his career, Webster worked with many of the greatest orchestras of the time, including those led by Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, Bennie Moten, and Teddy Wilson. In 1940 Webster became Duke Ellington's first major tenor soloist, and during the next three years he played on many famous recordings, including "Cotton Tail."

Someone to Watch Over Me tells, for the first time, the complete story of Ben Webster's brilliant and troubled career. For this comprehensive study of Webster, author Frank Büchmann-Møller interviewed more than fifty people in the United States and Europe, and he includes numerous translated excerpts from European periodicals and newspapers, none previously available in English. In addition, the author studies every known Webster recording and film, including many private recordings from Webster's home collection not available to the public.

Exhaustively researched, this is a much needed and long overdue study of the life and music of one of jazz's most important artists.
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The Song of the Hawk
The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins
John Chilton
University of Michigan Press, 1993
The first full-length biography of Coleman Hawkins
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Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza
Rubén Darío
Duke University Press, 2004
Renowned for its depth of feeling and musicality, the poetry of Rubén Darío (1867–1916) has been revered by writers including Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. A leading figure in the movement known as modernismo, Darío created the modern Spanish lyric and permanently altered the course of Spanish poetry. Yet while his output has inspired a great deal of critical analysis and a scattering of translations, there has been, until now, no complete English translation of any of his books of poetry. This bilingual edition of Darío’s 1905 masterpiece, Cantos de vida y esperanza, fills a crucial gap in Hispanic and world literature studies. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda have provided not only an elegant English translation of Darío’s work but also an authoritative version of the original Spanish text.

Written over the course of seven years and in many locales in Latin America and Europe, the poems in Cantos de vida y esperanza reflect both Darío’s anguished sense of modern life and his ecstatic visions of transcendence, freedom, and the transformative power of art. They reveal Darío’s familiarity with Spanish, French, and English literature and the wide range of his concerns—existential, religious, erotic, and socio-political. Derusha and Acereda’s translation renders Darío’s themes with meticulous clarity and captures the structural and acoustic dimensions of the poet’s language in all its rhythmic sonority. Their introduction places this singular poet—arguably the greatest to emerge from Latin America in modern literature—and his best and most widely known work in historical and literary context. An extensive glossary offers additional information, explaining terms related to modernismo, Hispanic history, mythological allusions, and artists and writers prominent at the turn of the last century.

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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
University of Missouri Press, 2015
As is often the case with spouses of celebrities, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was overshadowed by her husband. While Nathaniel Hawthorne is renowned for numerous publications, including The Scarlet Letter, that staple in high school English curricula, Sophia’s remarkable life and career did not receive the recognition they deserve. She was, however, a source for many of Nathaniel’s stories and responsible for much that he accomplished. Sophia was an artist, one of the first in America to earn income from her painting and decorative arts; she was also a writer and traveler to foreign countries at a time when women typically confined their activities to the home. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti began to tell this story in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809-1847 (2004). This biography concludes now in a second volume, which details the less examined and more surprising second half of Sophia’s life.
Valenti’s thorough research culminates in a compelling, revealing account of Sophia’s travels to Britain and Europe and her intense personal relationships outside her marriage with men and women, among them notable figures in American history and literature. As an impoverished widow, Sophia dealt resourcefully with the consequences of her husband’s financial carelessness; as a mother, her liberal practices resulted in unintended, sometimes unfortunate consequences. Throughout every vicissitude, her relentless optimism prevailed.
With the publication of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871, Sophia emerges forever from the shadow cast by her husband. Historians and general readers alike will be drawn to this riveting account of an interesting, important woman and what her life reveals about American history and culture at a moment of national conflict, emerging class divisions, and evolving gender roles.
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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is known almost exclusively in her role as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who portrayed her as the fragile, ethereal, infirm “Dove.” That image, invented by Nathaniel to serve his needs and affirm his manhood, was passed on by his biographers, who accepted their subject’s perception without question. In fact, the real Sophia was very different from Nathaniel’s construction of her.
 
An independent, sensuous, daring woman, Sophia was an accomplished artist before her marriage to Nathaniel. Moreover, what she brought to their union inspired Nathaniel’s imagination beyond the limits of his previously confined existence. In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti situates the story of Sophia’s life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural background, as well as within the context of her marriage. Valenti begins with parallel biographies that present Sophia, and then Nathaniel, at comparable periods in their lives.

Sophia was born into an expansive, somewhat chaotic home in which women provided financial as well as emotional sustenance. She was a precocious, eager student whose rigorous education, in her mother’s and her sisters’ schools, began her association with the children of New England’s elite. Sophia aspired to become a professional, self-supporting painter, exhibiting her art and seeking criticism from established mentors. She relished an eighteen-month sojourn in Cuba. Nathaniel’s reclusive family, his reluctant early education, his anonymous pursuit of a career, and his relatively circumscribed life contrast markedly with the experience of the woman who became his wife and the mother of his children. Those differences resulted in a creative abrasion that ignited his fiction during the first years of their marriage.
 
Volume 1 of this biography concludes with Sophia’s negotiation of the Hawthornes’ departure from the Old Manse and the birth of their second child. This period also coincides with the conclusion of Nathaniel’s major phase of short story writing.
 
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is an engrossing story of a nineteenth-century American life. It analyzes influences upon authorship and questions the boundaries of intellectual property in the domestic sphere. The book also offers fresh interpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, examining it through the lens of Sophia’s vibrant personality and diverse interests. Students and scholars of American literature, literary theory, feminism, and cultural history will find much to enrich their understanding of this woman and this era.
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Soul on Soul
The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams
Tammy L. Kernodle
University of Illinois Press, 2020
First time in paperback and e-book!

The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls.

Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages.

In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.

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The Source of Life and Other Stories
Beth Bosworth
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
From “The Eight Rhetorical Mode”
Later he asked, “Would you like to go for a hike sometime?” and two trains of thought left the station: He means to get to know me and we might leave the city together and it’s been a long time since I climbed a mountain. That train chugged into a wider brighter country all the time. The other train went by another route through the panicked interior. He’s a lunatic, it whistled. He’s been in and out of hospitals. He will take you to a mountaintop and throw you right off into the bright air: choo choo!

Post-divorce dating is one more cause for celebration (or a quick call in to the police) in Beth Bosworth’s revelatory new book, The Source of Life and Other Stories. The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father’s abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. In other stories Bosworth’s narrators—a mother left to care for her son’s suicidal dog, an editor haunted by a dog-eared manuscript—seem to grab hold of the reins and run off with their fates. Meanwhile Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion. Reality is just another stumbling block for Bosworth’s characters, who might help themselves but don’t always choose to. There are leaps of faith here, nonetheless, as the collection dispenses a kind of narrative psychotropic for survival and redemption, with a chaser of humor mixed in.
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Sparks of Life
Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation
James E. Strick
Harvard University Press, 2000

How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiology and sped the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease.

The Victorian debates, Strick shows, were entwined with the public controversy over Darwin's theory of evolution. While other histories of the debates between 1860 and 1880 have focused largely on the experiments of John Tyndall, Henry Charlton Bastian, and others, Sparks of Life emphasizes previously understudied changes in the theories that underlay the debates. Strick argues that the disputes cannot be understood without full knowledge of the factional infighting among Darwinians themselves, as they struggled to create a socially and scientifically viable form of "Darwinian" science. He shows that even the terms of the debate, such as "biogenesis," usually but incorrectly attributed to Huxley, were intensely contested.

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Special Care
Medical Decisions at the Beginning of Life
Fred M. Frohock
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Intensive care medicine today is as close to the miraculous as most of us are likely to see in our lifetime. Nowhere is this magic more effectively practiced than in neonatal nurseries. Infants who are born prematurely at twenty-four weeks gestation and who weigh less than a pound can now be treated successfully. No other type of medicine has a more dramatic payoff, for the infants who survive can look forward to seventy or more years of life.

But there is a dark underside to the exercise of these skills. A growing number of babies live only to be tethered to life-support systems, unconscious or suffering incessant pain for years and sometimes for the duration of their lives. The ethical issues raised by these children are among the most difficult in our society. Should life be maintained no matter what its quality? Or is there a point at which treatment should be stopped on humane grounds? Who is to make decisions on continuing or ending therapy for damaged children? Is the law a suitable instrument for regulating medical decisions in intensive care nurseries? Should the growing cost of intensive care influence therapy decisions?

Special Care explores the moral and legal issues in neonatal intensive care. Fred M. Frohock spent four months in a special care nursery, observing the daily actions of doctors and nurses and interviewing staff and parents of patients. This engaging, human drama is told through the author's own journal entries interspersed with generous excerpts from taped interviews that display the practical reasoning of staff and parents as they address the moral problems raised by intensive care medicine. Several case studies of infants highlight the often contradictory directions in which medical staffs are pulled and the painful decisions that doctors and parents together are often called upon to make. The result is a book that reconstructs the ordinary life of a neonatal nursery and presents the moral views of those who are most intimately involved in therapy decisions.

This book is an urgently needed entry in the current discussions of treatment for badly damaged babies. Frohock argues that our tradition of rights language, which rests on the premise that we know what a human being is, is inappropriate when dealing with the paradoxes of decision making in neonatal nurseries. Calling for a new moral vocabulary better adapted to the world of medicine, he introduces the notion of harm in place of rights, a concept drawn from medicine's Hippocratic oath that pledges to "do no harm," as a way to begin framing questions and making decisions. Special Care will interest anyone who wants to understand medical decisions at the margins of human life.
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The SPHAS
The Life and Times of Basketball's Greatest Jewish Team
Authored by Doug Stark
Temple University Press, 2011

Founded in 1918, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association's basketball team, known as the SPHAS, was a top squad in the American Basketball League-capturing seven championships in thirteen seasons-until it disbanded in 1959. In The SPHAS, the first book to chronicle the history of this team and its numerous achievements, Douglas Stark uses rare and noteworthy images of players and memorabilia as well as interviews and anecdotes to recall how players like Inky Lautman, Cy Kaselman, and Shikey Gotthoffer fought racial stereotypes of weakness and inferiority while spreading the game's popularity. Team owner Eddie Gottlieb and Temple University coach Harry Litwack, among others profiled here, began their remarkable careers with the SPHAS.

Stark explores the significance of basketball to the Jewish community during the game's early years, when Jewish players dominated the sport and a distinct American Jewish identity was on the rise. At a time when basketball teams were split along ethnic lines, the SPHAS represented the Philadelphia Jewish community. The SPHAS is an inspiring and heartfelt tale of the team on and off the court.

 

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The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect
The Life and Diary of Confederate Artillerist William Ellis Jones
Constance Hall Jones
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
This remarkable biography and edited diary tell the story of William Ellis Jones (1838–1910), an artillerist in Crenshaw’s Battery, Pegram’s Battalion, the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the few extant diaries by a Confederate artillerist, Jones’s articulate writings cover camp life as well as many of the key military events of 1862, including the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, the Maryland Campaign, and the Battle of Fredericksburg.

In 1865 Jones returned to his prewar printing trade in Richmond, and his lasting reputation stems from his namesake publishing company’s role in the creation and dissemination of much of the Lost Cause ideology. Unlike the pro-Confederate books and pamphlets Jones published—primary among them the Southern Historical Society Papers—his diary shows the mindset of an unenthusiastic soldier. In a model of contextualization, Constance Hall Jones shows how her ancestor came to embrace an uncritical veneration of the army’s leadership and to promulgate a mythology created by veterans and their descendants who refused to face the amorality of their cause.

Jones brackets the soldier’s diary with rich, biographical detail, profiling his friends and relatives and providing insight into his childhood and post-war years. In doing so, she offers one of the first serious investigations into the experience of a Welsh immigrant family loyal to the Confederacy and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Civil War–era Richmond and the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Invitingly written, The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect is an engaging life-and-times story that will appeal to historians and general readers alike.
 
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Stages of Life
Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater
Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez
University of Arizona Press, 2001
Latina theater and solo performance emerged in the 1990s as vibrant, energetic new genres found on stages from New York to Los Angeles. Many women now work in all aspects of Latina theater—often as playwrights or solo performers—with practitioners ranging from teenagers to grandmothers. Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach have previously published a groundbreaking anthology of Latina theater, Puro Teatro. They now offer a critical analysis of theatrical works, presenting a theoretical perspective from which to examine, understand, and contextualize Latina theater as a genre in its own right.

This is the first in-depth study of the entire corpus of Latina theater, based on close readings of works both published and in manuscript. It considers a large body of productions and performances, including works by such internationally known authors as Dolores Prida, Cherríe Moraga, and Janis Astor del Valle.

Applying feminist and postcolonial theory as well as theories of transculturation, Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach show how, despite cultural differences among Latinas, their works share a common poetics by building upon the politics of representation, identity, and location. In addition to covering theater, this study also shows that solo performance has its own history, properties, structure, and poetics. It examines performances of Carmelita Tropicana, Monica Palacios, and Marga Gomez—artists whose hybrid identities as Latina lesbians constitute living examples of transculturation in the making—to show how solo performance has roots in and digresses from more traditional modes of theater. With their Latina heritage as a unifying link, these women reflect common traits, patterns, dramatic structures, and properties that overcome regional differences. Stages of Life reads these eclectic cultural productions as a unified body of work that contributes to the formation of Latina identity in America today.
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Staking Her Claim
Life Of Belinda Mulrooney
Melanie J. Mayer
Ohio University Press, 1999
If Horatio Alger had imagined a female heroine in the same mold as one of the young male heroes in his rags-to-riches stories, she would have looked like Belinda Mulrooney. Smart, ambitious, competitive, and courageous, Belinda Mulrooney was destined through her legendary pioneering in the wilds of the Yukon basin to found towns and many businesses. She built two fortunes, supported her family, was an ally to other working women, and triumphed in what was considered a man's world.

In Staking Her Claim, Melanie Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond provide a faithful and comprehensive portrait of this unique character in North American frontier history. Their exhaustive research has resulted in a sweeping saga of determination and will, tempered by disaster and opportunity.

Like any good Horatio Alger hero, Belinda overcame the challenges that confronted her, including poverty, prejudice, a lack of schooling, and the early loss of parents. Her travels took her from her native Ireland as a young girl to a coal town in Pennsylvania to Chicago, San Francisco, and finally, in 1897, to the Yukon.

Staking Her Claim is a testament to the human spirit and to the idea of the frontier. It is a biography of a woman who made her own way in the world and in doing so left an indelible mark.
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Staking Her Claim
Life Of Belinda Mulrooney
Melanie J. Mayer
Ohio University Press, 1999
If Horatio Alger had imagined a female heroine in the same mold as one of the young male heroes in his rags-to-riches stories, she would have looked like Belinda Mulrooney. Smart, ambitious, competitive, and courageous, Belinda Mulrooney was destined through her legendary pioneering in the wilds of the Yukon basin to found towns and many businesses. She built two fortunes, supported her family, was an ally to other working women, and triumphed in what was considered a man's world.

In Staking Her Claim, Melanie Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond provide a faithful and comprehensive portrait of this unique character in North American frontier history. Their exhaustive research has resulted in a sweeping saga of determination and will, tempered by disaster and opportunity.

Like any good Horatio Alger hero, Belinda overcame the challenges that confronted her, including poverty, prejudice, a lack of schooling, and the early loss of parents. Her travels took her from her native Ireland as a young girl to a coal town in Pennsylvania to Chicago, San Francisco, and finally, in 1897, to the Yukon.

Staking Her Claim is a testament to the human spirit and to the idea of the frontier. It is a biography of a woman who made her own way in the world and in doing so left an indelible mark.
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Stanton in Her Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates
Noelle A. Baker
University of Iowa Press, 2016

Among nineteenth-century women’s rights reformers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) stands out for the maternal and secular advocacy that shaped her activism and public reception. A wife and mother of seven, she was also a prolific writer, transatlantic women’s rights leader, popular lecturer, congressional candidate, canny historian, and freethought champion. Her lifelong interest in women’s sexual and reproductive rights and late efforts to reform institutional religion are as relevant to our time as they were to her own.

Stanton’s professional life lasted a half-century, ranging from antebellum women’s rights organization and oratory, to a post–Civil War career as a lyceum lecturer, to a late-century role as an incisive religious and cultural critic. Acutely aware of the medical, religious, legal, and educational barriers to women’s independence, she advocated for married women’s right to vote, obtain a divorce, gain custody of their children, and own property. As she grew more radical over the years, she also demanded judicial reform, the separation of church and state, free love, progressive coeducational opportunities, and women’s right to limit their fertility.  

In this richly contextualized collection of primary sources, Noelle A. Baker brings together accounts of Stanton’s life and ideas from both well-known and recently recovered figures. From the teacher chiding an assertive young woman to erstwhile allies worrying about her growing radicalism, their voices paint a vivid portrait of a woman of vaunting ambition, powerhouse intellect, and her share of human failings. 

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Stars at Noon
Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
Enid Shomer
University of Arkansas Press, 2001

These poems give voice to the life of the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound. While Jacqueline Cochran was alive, no man or woman in the world could match her records for speed, distance, and altitude flying. Founder and director of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, Cochran continued to fly competitively until she was sixty, owned and operated her own line of designer cosmetics for three decades, ran for Congress, and generally placed herself on the path of history. Having begun life as a foundling in the crushing poverty of a lumber company town of the Florida panhandle, she described her life as “a passage from sawdust to stardust.” Yet after her death she has barely been remembered.

Poet Enid Shomer brings back this mercurial, dazzling, powerful woman. These poems speak in her voice and in the voices of her mother, teachers, husband, confidants, and political opponents, shaped by Shomer’s consummate formal control and stunning lyricism.

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Stay by Me, Roses
The Life of American Artist Alice Archer Sewall James, 1870-1955
ALICE B. SKINNER
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2011

Alice Archer Sewall James—known affectionately as “Archie”—lived a life that most women of her time could only dream about. Educated from a young age and encouraged by her family to express herself in all forms of art, she grew into an irrepressible woman who never stopped looking for ways to pass her experience on to others.

This biography traces her life from her childhood in Urbana, Ohio, to teenage years spent traveling in Europe, to her challenging marriage to John H. James, heir to a family fortune built by his entrepreneurial grandfather of the same name. Her father, Swedenborgian minister and educator Frank Sewall, was her greatest fan, supporting her in good times, as she started to build a reputation as a painter and illustrator, and in bad, as poor health forced her to abandon her art and put a strain on her personal relationships. In later years, however—like the roses in the title poem—she reemerged as an artist and as a teacher, inspiring a new generation of painters at Urbana University.

While Archie’s Swedenborgian heritage gave structure and meaning to her life, it was her inner creative drive that truly touched others. Stay by Me, Roses opens a window on the life and times of a unique nineteenth-century woman.

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Steadfast in the Faith
The Life of Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle
Morris J. MacGregor
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
Cardinal Patrick O'Boyle (1896-1987) is largely remembered as the controversial leader of the Archdiocese of Washington during its first, formative quarter century. Combining considerable foresight about the Church's social concerns with a stubborn resistance to innovation, he countered opposition from those who reviled his progressive stand, especially his steadfast demand for racial equality and support of organized labor.
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Steel Titan
The Life of Charles M. Schwab
Robert Hessen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990

Business genius and hedonist, Charles Schwab entered the steel industry as an unskilled laborer and within twenty years advanced to the presidency of Carnegie Steel. He later became the first president of U.S. Steel and then founder of Bethlehem Steel. His was one of the most spectacular and curious success stories in an era of great industrial giants.

How did Schwab progress from day laborer to titan of industry? Why did Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan select him to manage their multmillion-dollar enterprises? And how did he forfeit their confidence and lose the preseidency of U.S. Steel? Drawing upon previously undiscovered sources, Robert Hessen answers these questions in the first biography of Schwab.

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Stephen Crane
A Life of Fire
Paul Sorrentino
Harvard University Press, 2014

With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date.

Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino’s layered narrative of the various phases of Crane’s life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns taciturn and garrulous, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence.

Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane’s work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.

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The Stories They Told Me
The Life of My Deaf Parents
Maria Wallisfurth
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
In this heartfelt memoir, Maria Wallisfurth recounts the lives of her deaf parents in Germany from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II. Her mother, Maria Giefer, was born in 1897 and her father, Wilhelm Sistermann, was born in 1896. The author captures the seasonal rhythms and family life of her mother’s youth in rural Germany, a time filled as much with hardship as it is with love. When she is old enough, she moves to the nearby city of Aachen to attend a school for deaf children, where she learns to lipread and speak. After her schooling is complete, she returns home to work on the family farm and experiences the privations and fear that accompany World War I. She later goes back to Aachen, where she joins a deaf club and falls in love with Wilhelm, a painter and photographer who was raised in the city. Amidst high unemployment, food shortages, and rapid inflation, the two are married in 1925 and two years later the author is born. Under the Nazi regime, Maria and Wilhelm are ordered to undergo forced sterilization. Although their deafness is not hereditary and they submit applications of protest, they are compelled to comply with the law.
       Despite their dissimilar backgrounds and the political circumstances that roiled their lives, the author’s parents showed great love for each other and their only daughter. The Stories They Told Me is a richly detailed document of time and place and a rare account of deaf lives during this era.
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Stowe in Her Own Time
A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F
Susan Belasco
University of Iowa Press, 2009

One of the first celebrity authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) became famous almost overnight when Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication—appeared in 1852. Known by virtually all famous writers in the United States and many in England and regarded by many women writers as a role model because of her influence in the literary marketplace, Stowe herself was the subject of many books, articles, essays, and poems during her lifetime.

This volume brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe’s private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes a detailed introduction and a chronology of Stowe’s life. 

The thirty-eight recollections gathered in Stowe in Her Own Time form a biographical narrative designed to provide several perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in agreement but always perceptive. The figure who emerges from this insightful, analytical collection is far more complex than the image she helped construct in her lifetime.
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The Strategy of Life
Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology
Timothy Lenoir
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In the early nineteenth century, a group of German biologists led by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer initiated a search for laws of biological organization that would explain the phenomena of form and function and establish foundations for a unified theory of life. The tradition spawned by these efforts found its most important spokesman in Karl Ernst von Baer. Timothy Lenoir chronicles the hitherto unexplored achievements of the practitioners of this research tradition as they aimed to place functional morphology at the heart of a new science, which they called "biology."

Strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant, the biologists' approach combined a sophisticated teleology with mechanistic theories and sparked bitter controversies with the rival programs, mechanistic reductionism and Darwinism. Although temporarily eclipsed by these two approaches, the morphological tradition, Lenoir argues, was not vanquished in the field of scientific debate. It contributed to pathbreaking research in areas such as comparative anatomy, embryology, paleontology, and biogeography.
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Stream Of Life
Clarice Lispector
University of Minnesota Press, 1989

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Stringbean
The Life and Murder of a Country Legend
Taylor Hagood
University of Illinois Press, 2023
The artist’s impact on country music and how his death changed the genre

A beloved member of the country music community, David “Stringbean” Akeman found nationwide fame as a cast member of Hee Haw. The 1973 murder of Stringbean and his wife forever changed Nashville’s sense of itself. Millions of others mourned not only the slain couple but the passing of the way of life that country music had long represented.

Taylor Hagood merges the story of Stringbean’s life with an account of murder and courtroom drama. Mentored by Uncle Dave Macon and Bill Monroe, Stringbean was a bridge to country’s early days. His instrumental savvy and old-time singing style drew upon a deep love for traditional country music that, along with his humor and humanity, won him the reverence of younger artists and made his violent death all the more shocking. Hagood delves into the unexpected questions and uneasy resolutions raised by the atmosphere of retribution surrounding the murder trial and recounts the redemption story that followed decades later.

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Strong Advocate
The Life of a Trial Lawyer
Thomas Strong
University of Missouri Press, 2012

In Strong Advocate, Thomas Strong, one of the most successful trial lawyers in Missouri’s history, chronicles his adventures as a contemporary personal injury attorney. Though the profession is held in low esteem by the general public, Strong entered the field with the right motives: to help victims who have been injured by defective products or through the negligence of others.

            As a twelve-year-old in rural southwest Missouri during the Great Depression, Strong bought a cow, then purchased others as he could afford them, and eventually financed his education with the milk he sold. After graduating law school and serving in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, he rejected offers to practice in New York and San Francisco and returned to his hometown of Springfield.
Strong exhibited his lifelong passion to represent the underdog early in his practice, the “trial by ambush” days when neither side was required to disclose witnesses or exhibits. He quickly became known for his audacious approach to trying cases. Tactics included asking a friend to ride on top of a moving car and hiring a local character called “Crazy Max” to recreate an automobile accident. One fraud case ended with Strong owning a bank and his opponent going to prison. When he sued a labor union for the wrongful death of his client’s spouse, he found his own life threatened.
With changes in the law that allowed discovery of information from an opponent’s files as well as the exhibits and witnesses to be used at trial, Strong and fellow personal injury attorneys forced a wide array of manufacturers to produce safer products. When witnesses of a terrible collision claimed both roadways had green lights simultaneously, Strong purchased the traffic light controller. After three months of continuous testing at a university, the controller failed, showing four green lights, and Strong learned that fail-safe devices were available but had not been implemented. These fail-safe devices are now standard on traffic lights throughout the country.
In his last venture, Strong represented the state of Missouri in its case against the tobacco industry, culminating in a settlement totaling billions of dollars.
He reflects on the changes—not always for the better—in his oft-maligned profession since he entered the field in the 1950s. Thomas Strong’s story of tenacity, quick wits, and humor demonstrates what made him such a creative and effective attorney. Lawyers and law students can learn much from this giant of the bar, and all readers will be entertained and heartened by his victories for the everyman.
 
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The Structures of the Life World
Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann
Northwestern University Press, 1989
The Structures of the Life-World is the final focus of twenty-seven years of Alfred Schutz's labor, encompassing the fruits of his work between 1932 and his death in 1959. This book represents Schutz's seminal attempt to achieve a comprehensive grasp of the nature of social reality. Here he integrates his theory of relevance with his analysis of social structures. Thomas Luckmann, a former student of Schutz's, completed the manuscript for publication after Schutz's untimely death.
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The Structures of the Life World
Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann
Northwestern University Press, 1973
The Structures of the Life-World is the final focus of twenty-seven years of Alfred Schutz's labor, encompassing the fruits of his work between 1932 and his death in 1959. This book represents Schutz's seminal attempt to achieve a comprehensive grasp of the nature of social reality. Here he integrates his theory of relevance with his analysis of social structures. Thomas Luckmann, a former student of Schutz's, completed the manuscript for publication after Schutz's untimely death.
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Stuart Symington
A Life
James C. Olson
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Stuart Symington is the first full-length biography of one of Missouri’s most influential and effective twentieth-century political leaders. It tells the story of a remarkable man whose adult life was spent at or near the center of power in America, a man who was talented and ambitious, yet maintained a realistic touch that enabled him to connect with ordinary people.
Symington was the first secretary of the air force and a four-term senator from Missouri. Prior to his long governmental career, he was a successful businessman in New York and St. Louis, developing a national reputation as a genius who could convert failing businesses to profitability. His most notable success was with Emerson Electric Company of St. Louis, which during World War II he turned into a large manufacturer of movable gun turrets for bombers.
Known as “Harry Truman’s Trouble Shooter,” Symington was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for six major presidential appointments—a record. As assistant secretary of war for air, he represented the War Department in negotiations leading to the National Security Act of 1947, which unified the armed services into a single national military establishment under the secretary of defense. During his tenure as secretary of the air force, he steered that organization through a series of crises, including racial integration, as it developed into an independent entity within the Defense Department. Among his other administrative positions, he served as surplus property administrator, breaking up the aluminum monopoly; director of the National Security Resources Board, where he helped develop mobilization strategy for the Korean War; and director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, where he reformed a badly managed operation.
Highlights of his long Senate career include his confrontation with Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954; his conflict with President Eisenhower over the defense budget; his long, agonizing struggle over Vietnam as he changed from a leading hawk to a leading dove; and his role in uncovering information leading to congressional articles of impeachment against President Nixon. He was a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, and for a time appeared to be Kennedy’s choice for vice president.
Well written and exhaustively researched, Stuart Symington: A Life provides a comprehensive portrait of Symington and his exceptional career, shedding new light on presidential administrations from Truman to Nixon, the Department of Defense, the Korean War, and Vietnam. The book also contributes to an understanding of the U. S. Senate, the political history of Missouri, and the relationship between business and government during and immediately after World War II.
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Stubborn Twig
Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family
Lauren Kessler
Oregon State University Press, 2005

To celebrate Oregon's 150th birthday, the Oregon Library Association has chosen one book for all Oregonians to read: Stubborn Twig. Lauren Kessler's award-winning book, the selection for the statewide Oregon Reads program, is a classic story of immigrants making their way in a new land. It is a living work of social history that rings with the power of truth and the drama of fiction, a moving saga about the challenges of becoming an American.

Masuo Yasui traveled from Japan across the other Oregon Trail — the one that spanned the Pacific Ocean — in 1903. Like most immigrants, he came with big dreams and empty pockets. Working on the railroads, in a cannery, and as a houseboy before settling in Hood River, Oregon, he opened a store, raised a large family, and became one of the area's most successful orchardists.

As Masuo broke the race barrier in the local business community, his American-born children broke it in school, scouts and sports, excelling in most everything they tried. For the Yasuis' first-born son, the constraints and contradictions of being both Japanese and American led to tragedy. But his seven brothers and sisters prevailed, becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers, and farmers. It was a classic tale of the American dream come true — until December 7, 1941, changed their lives forever.

The Yasuis were among the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast who were forced from their homes and interned in vast inland "relocation camps." Masuo was arrested as a spy and imprisoned for the rest of the war; his family was shamed and broken. Yet the Yasuis endured, as succeeding generations took up the challenge of finding their identity as Americans. Stubborn Twig is their story — a story at once tragic and triumphant, one that bears eloquent witness to both the promise and the peril of America.

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Studying Wisconsin
The Life of Increase Lapham, early chronicler of plants, rocks, rivers, mounds and all things Wisconsin
Martha Bergland
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014


With masterful storytelling, Bergland and Hayes demonstrate how Lapham blended his ravenous curiosity with an equable temperament and a passion for detail to create a legacy that is still relevant today.
—John Gurda

In this long overdue tribute to Wisconsin’s first scientist, authors Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes explore the remarkable life and achievements of Increase Lapham (1811–1875). Lapham’s ability to observe, understand, and meticulously catalog the natural world marked all of his work, from his days as a teenage surveyor on the Erie Canal to his last great contribution as state geologist.

Self-taught, Lapham mastered botany, geology, archaeology, limnology, mineralogy, engineering, meteorology, and cartography. A prolific writer, his 1844 guide to the territory was the first book published in Wisconsin. Asked late in life which field of science was his specialty, he replied simply, “I am studying Wisconsin.”

Lapham identified and preserved thousands of botanical specimens. He surveyed and mapped Wisconsin’s effigy mounds. He was a force behind the creation of the National Weather Service, lobbying for a storm warning system to protect Great Lakes sailors. Told in compelling detail through Lapham’s letters, journals, books, and articles, Studying Wisconsin chronicles the life and times of Wisconsin’s pioneer citizen-scientist.

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Subject to Death
Life and Loss in a Buddhist World
Robert Desjarlais
University of Chicago Press, 2016
If any anthropologist living today can illuminate our dim understanding of death’s enigma, it is Robert Desjarlais. With Subject to Death, Desjarlais provides an intimate, philosophical account of death and mourning practices among Hyolmo Buddhists, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people from Nepal. He studies the death preparations of the Hyolmo, their specific rituals of grieving, and the practices they use to heal the psychological trauma of loss. Desjarlais’s research marks a major advance in the ethnographic study of death, dying, and grief, one with broad implications. Ethnologically nuanced, beautifully written, and twenty-five years in the making, Subject to Death is an insightful study of how fundamental aspects of human existence—identity, memory, agency, longing, bodiliness—are enacted and eventually dissolved through social and communicative practices.
 
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Subjective Lives and Economic Transformations in Mongolia
Life in the Gap
Rebecca M. Empson
University College London, 2020
Almost 10 years ago the mineral-rich country of Mongolia experienced rapid economic growth, fueled by China’s need for coal and copper. Hopes were raised that the economy would avoid ‘over-heating’ and Mongolia could emerge independently wealthy and powerful. This period of growth is now over. The country is facing increasing public and private debt, conflicts around sovereignty and land, multiple forms of political protest that seem to go unnoticed, and a turn toward a more conservative politics that critiques ideas about democracy and protects its own but ignores the masses. This book details this story through the intimate lives of five women. It explores how they carve out a life for themselves in a landscape that is constantly shifting, while reflecting on past hopes and aspirations. Building on long-term friendships and familiarity with the region, Rebecca attends to the ways these women have come to theorize their experiences of living a ‘life in the gap’, between desired outcomes and actual materializations. In doing so, and through attention to their different strategies, she offers a re-viewing and re-configuring – to build on the analytical vocabulary developed in the book – of official accounts to describe what is going on in this extractivist-based economy.
 
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Suburban Urbanities
Suburbs and the Life of the High Street
Edited by Laura Vaughan
University College London, 2015
Suburban space has traditionally been understood as a formless remnant of physical city expansion, without a dynamic or logic of its own. Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the suburb as a temporally evolving feature of urban growth. Anchored in the architectural research discipline of space syntax, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Studies of the high street as a centre for social, economic and cultural exchange provide evidence for its critical role in sustaining local centres over time. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean. By linking large-scale city mapping, urban design scale expositions of high street activity and local-scale ethnographies, the book underscores the need to consider suburban space on its own terms as a specific and complex field of social practice
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The Subversive Simone Weil
A Life in Five Ideas
Robert Zaretsky
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance.

Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.
 
 
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Sugata Saurabha
An Epic Poem from Nepal on the Life of the Buddha
Todd T. Lewis
Harvard University Press

This poem belongs of the little-known Newari (Nepal Bhasha) language and literature, specifically to its even less known Buddhist version. It is one of the very rare cases that works in Newari language appear outside Nepal.

In nineteen long cantos, the Sugata Saurabha tells of the life of the Buddha, following the traditional accounts, but situates it in the strongly local context of Newar and Nepali Buddhism. It emulates the classical (Kavya) style of the long-standing Indian tradition, and has been inspired by the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit poem, the Buddhacarita. Consequently, the poet inserts stanzas composed in traditional classical Sanskrit meter, though written in polished Newari.

The poem was composed by the greatest modern writer in Newari language, Chittadhar Hrdaya (1906– 1982), while he was imprisoned by the autocratic strongly pro-Hindu Rana regime that governed Nepal from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

The poem is the best-known work of the flowering of modern Newari literature that emerged after the restrictions of the Rana regime were lifted in 1950.

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Supercontinent
Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet
Ted Nield
Harvard University Press, 2007

To understand continental drift and plate tectonics, the shifting and collisions that make and unmake continents, requires a long view. The Earth, after all, is 4.6 billion years old. This book extends our vision to take in the greatest geological cycle of all—one so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends in about 250 million years. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason our species—or any complex life at all—exists.

This book explores the Supercontinent Cycle from scientists' earliest inkling of the phenomenon to the geological discoveries of today—and from the most recent fusing of all of Earth's landmasses, Pangaea, on which dinosaurs evolved, to the next. Chronicling a 500-million-year cycle, Ted Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time. He describes how, long before plate tectonics were understood, geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents.

He also uses the story of the supercontinents to consider how scientific ideas develop, and how they sometimes escape the confines of science. Nield takes the example of the recent Indian Ocean tsunami to explain how the whole endeavor of science is itself a supercontinent, whose usefulness in saving human lives, and life on Earth, depends crucially on a freedom to explore the unknown.

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Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark
A Life of Service
By Mimi Clark Gronlund
University of Texas Press, 2010

An associate justice on the renowned Warren Court whose landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned racial segregation in schools and other public facilities, Tom C. Clark was a crusader for justice throughout his long legal career. Among many tributes Clark received, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger opined that "no man in the past thirty years has contributed more to the improvement of justice than Tom Clark."

Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark is the first biography of this important American jurist. Written by his daughter, Mimi Clark Gronlund, and based on interviews with many of Clark's judicial associates, friends, and family, as well as archival research, it offers a well-rounded portrait of a lawyer and judge who dealt with issues that remain in contention today—civil rights, the rights of the accused, school prayer, and censorship/pornography, among them. Gronlund explores the factors in her father's upbringing and education that helped form his judicial philosophy, then describes how that philosophy shaped his decisions on key issues and cases, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the investigation of war fraud, the Truman administration's loyalty program (an anti-communist effort), the Brown decision, Mapp v. Ohio (protections against unreasonable search and seizure), and Abington v. Schempp (which overturned a state law that required reading from the Bible each day in public schools).

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Survived by One
The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer
Robert E. Hanlon, PhD with Thomas V. Odle
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation.  The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life.  However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life.

The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle.  Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality.  A future.  As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family.  He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book.

Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption.

As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur.  However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

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Sustaining Air
The Life of Larry Eigner
Jennifer Bartlett
University of Alabama Press, 2023
The biography of a poet seminal to postwar American poetry
 
The poet Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp.

Bartlett’s biography covers every significant phase of Eigner’s life: his childhood and young adulthood when he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.
 
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Sweet Science
Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
Amanda Jo Goldstein
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry.

Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.
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The Sweet Smell of Home
The Life and Art of Leonard F. Chana
Leonard F. Chana, Susan Lobo, and Barbara Chana
University of Arizona Press, 2009
A self-taught artist in several mediums who became known for stippling, Leonard Chana captured the essence of the Tohono O’odham people. He incorporated subtle details of O’odham life into his art, and his images evoke the smells, sounds, textures, and tastes of the Sonoran desert—all the while depicting the values of his people.

He began his career by creating cards and soon was lending his art to posters and logos for many community-based Native organizations. Winning recognition from these groups, his work was soon actively sought by them. Chana’s work also appears on the covers and as interior art in a number of books on southwestern and American Indian topics.

The Sweet Smell of Home is an autobiographical work, written in Chana’s own voice that unfolds through oral history interviews with anthropologist Susan Lobo. Chana imparts the story of his upbringing and starting down the path toward a career as an artist. Balancing humor with a keen eye for cultural detail, he tells us about life both on and off the reservation.

Eighty pieces of art—26 in color—grace the text, and Chana explains both the impetus for and the evolution of each piece. Leonard Chana was a people’s artist who celebrated the extraordinary heroism of common people’s lives. The Sweet Smell of Home now celebrates this unique artist whose words and art illuminate not only his own remarkable life, but also the land and lives of the Tohono O’odham people
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Sweet William
The Life of Billy Conn
Andrew O'Toole
University of Illinois Press, 2009

An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, Billy Conn captured hearts through his ebullient personality, stellar boxing record, and good looks. A light heavyweight boxing champion best remembered for his sensational near-defeat of heavyweight champion Joe Louis in 1941, Conn is still regarded as one of the greatest fighters of all time. Andrew O'Toole chronicles the boxing, Hollywood, and army careers of "the Pittsburgh Kid" by drawing from newspaper accounts, Billy's personal scrapbooks, and fascinating interviews with family. Presenting an intimate look at the champion's relationships with his girlfriend, manager, and rivals, O'Toole compellingly captures the personal life of a public icon and the pageantry of sports during the 1930s and '40s.

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The Sword & the Pen
A Life of Lew Wallace
Ray E. Boomhower
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2005

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Sybil Thorndike
A Star Of Life
Jonathan Croall
Haus Publishing, 2009
Outside the theatrical profession Sybil Thorndike is no longer the household name she once was; she has become a historical figure. Yet her combative, inspiring life, her passionate concern for the state of the world as well as for her art, resonates with any age. As the actor Michael Macli­ammói­r put it: 'Essentially English, she is yet nationless; essentially of her period, she is yet timeless.'
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Sylvia Pankhurst
A Life in Radical Politics
Mary Davis
Pluto Press, 1999

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The Syrian Revolution
Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death
Yasser Munif
Pluto Press, 2020
Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles.

By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.
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