A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY19 start with Z start with Z
Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western.
Thomas H. Pauly's work is the first full-length biography of Grey to appear in over thirty years. Using a hitherto unknown trove of letters and journals, including never-before-seen photographs of his adventures--both natural and amorous--Zane Grey has greatly enlarged and radically altered the current understanding of the superstar author, whose fifty-seven novels and one hundred and thirty movies heavily influenced the world's perception of the Old West.
Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, 2012
As the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches, the traumatic aspects of the tragedy continue to haunt our perceptions of the 1960s. One reason for this lies in the home movie of the incident filmed by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander who became one of the twentieth century's most important accidental documentarians.
The first book devoted exclusively to the topic, Zaprudered traces the journey of the film and its effect on the world's collective imagination. Providing insightful perspective as an observer of American culture, Norwegian media studies scholar Øyvind Vågnes begins by analyzing three narratives that are projections of Zapruder's images: performance group Ant Farm's video The Eternal Frame, Don DeLillo's novel Underworld, and an episode from Seinfeld. Subsequent topics he investigates include Dealey Plaza's Sixth Floor Museum, Zoran Naskovski's installation Death in Dallas, assassin video games, and other artifacts of the ways in which the footage has made a lasting impact on popular culture and the historical imagination. Vågnes also explores the role of other accidental documentarians, such as those who captured scenes of 9/11.
Zapruder's footage has never yielded a conclusive account of what happened in Dealey Plaza. Zaprudered thoroughly examines both this historical enigma and its indelible afterimages in our collective imagination.
As National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928–2017) guided U.S. foreign policy at a critical juncture of the Cold War. But his impact on America’s role in the world extends far beyond his years in the White House, and reverberates to this day. His geopolitical vision, scholarly writings, frequent media appearances, and policy advice to decades of presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama made him America’s grand strategist, a mantle only Henry Kissinger could also claim.
Both men emigrated from turbulent Europe in 1938 and got their Ph.D.s in the 1950s from Harvard, then the epitome of the Cold War university. With its rise to global responsibilities, the United States needed professionals. Ambitious academics like Brzezinski soon replaced the old establishment figures who had mired the country in Vietnam, and they transformed the way America conducted foreign policy.
Justin Vaïsse offers the first biography of the successful immigrant who completed a remarkable journey from his native Poland to the White House, interacting with influential world leaders from Gloria Steinem to Deng Xiaoping to John Paul II. This complex intellectual portrait reveals a man who weighed in on all major foreign policy debates since the 1950s, from his hawkish stance on the USSR to his advocacy for the Middle East peace process and his support for a U.S.-China global partnership. Through its examination of Brzezinski’s statesmanship and comprehensive vision, Zbigniew Brzezinski raises important questions about the respective roles of ideas and identity in foreign policy.
In 1952 Senator Joseph McCarthy included Zechariah Chafee’s name on a list of seven persons he called “dangerous to America.” How could this happen to a man whose life was filled with the quiet grace of achievement as a scholar of the law? In the first biography of this distinguished American, Donald Smith portrays Chafee as temperamentally conservative, only accidentally a defender of radicals and a civil rights advocate.
Chafee is most remembered for his contributions to First Amendment scholarship, including the classic Freedom of Speech, published in 1920 [and revised and republished in 1941 as Free Speech in the United States]. He publicly criticized the Justice Department prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts; appeared in court on behalf of Communists fighting deportation; and was president of a commission for the abolition of the death penalty. He served as vice chairman of the Commission on Freedom of the Press (the Hutchins Commission) and continued his public service when appointed to the United Nations Subcommission on Freedom of Information and of the Press.
Yet Chafee, who put his Harvard professorship in jeopardy more than once, never chose to be or perceived himself to be a controversial public figure. Preeminently a man of ideas, he spent most of his life teaching—at times applying both mathematical formulations and Greek philosophical theories to questions of law. This perceptive intellectual biography brings to life the story of a scholar caught up in the dramatic political events of his time.
Duluth may be the city of “untold delights” as lampooned in a Kentucky congressman’s speech in 1871. Or it may be portrayed by a joke in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Or then again, it may be the “Zenith City of the unsalted seas” celebrated by Dr. Thomas Preston Foster, founder of the city’s first newspaper. But whatever else it may be, this city of granite hills, foghorns, and gritty history, the last stop on the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes, is undeniably a city with character—and characters. Duluth native Michael Fedo captures these characters through the happy-go-melancholy lens nurtured by the people and landscape of his youth. In Zenith City Fedo brings it back home. Framed by his reflections on Duluth’s colorful—and occasionally very dark—history and its famous visitors, such as Sinclair Lewis, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Dylan, his memories make the city as real as the boy next door but with a better story.
Here, among the graceful, poignant, and often hilarious remembered moments—pranks played on a severe teacher, the family’s unlikely mob connections, a rare childhood affliction—are the coordinates of Duluth’s larger landscape: the diners and supper clubs, the baseball teams, radio days, and the smelt-fishing rites of spring. Woven through these tales of Duluth are Fedo’s curious, instructive, and ultimately deeply moving stories about becoming a writer, from the guidance of an English teacher to the fourteen-year-old reporter’s interview with Louis Armstrong to his absorption in the events that would culminate in his provocative and influential book The Lynchings in Duluth. These are the sorts of essays—personal, cultural, and historical, at once regional and far-reaching—that together create a picture of people in a place as rich in history and anecdote as Duluth and of the forces that forever bind them together.
Mizejewski traces the Ziegfeld Girl’s connections to turn-of-the-century celebrity culture, black Broadway, the fashion industry, and the changing sexual and gender identities evident in mainstream entertainment during the Ziegfeld years. In addition, she emphasizes how crises of immigration and integration made the identity and whiteness of the American Girl an urgent issue on Broadway’s revue stages during that era. Although her focus is on the showgirl as a “type,” the analysis is intermingled with discussions of figures like Anna Held, Fanny Brice, and Bessie McCoy, the Yama Yama girl, as well as Ziegfeld himself. Finally, Mizejewski discusses the classic American films that have most vividly kept this showgirl alive in both popular and camp culture, including The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, and the Busby Berkeley musicals that cloned Ziegfeld’s showgirls for decades.
Ziegfeld Girl will appeal to scholars and students in American studies, popular culture, theater and performance studies, film history, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and social history.
Zion National Park is one of the country’s most-visited and best-loved national parks. For the first time, lovers of the park have in one volume the best that has been written about the canyon. A Zion Canyon Reader is a collection of historical and literary accounts that presents diverse perspectives on Zion Canyon—and the surrounding southern Utah region—through the eyes of native inhabitants, pioneer settlers, boosters, explorers, artists, park rangers, developers, and spiritual seekers. Through the pages of this book, both the newest visitors to Zion and those who return to the park again and again will come to understand what this place has meant to different people over the centuries.
Among the works included are well-known historical accounts of exploration by John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and Everett Ruess. Writings by Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and others enlighten and excite in numerous memorable chapters. Here and there the book bears witness to conflicting viewpoints on controversies associated with the national park, especially development vs. preservation and locals vs. outsiders.
Lyman Hafen, author and executive director of the Zion Natural History Association, calls the book “the most comprehensive, insightful, and inspiring compilation of Zion writing ever assembled.” As readers learn about the plants, animals, geology, history, and people of Zion Canyon, they will discover unfamiliar corners of the park and see favorite hikes in a new light.
This first paperback edition includes two new introductory pieces in which the authors discuss the Mormon emphasis on settling disputes outside the court, a practice that foreshadows current trends toward arbitration and mediation.
Zionism and the Melting Pot pivots away from commonplace accounts of the origins of Jewish politics and focuses on the ongoing activities of actors instrumental in the theological, political, diplomatic, and philanthropic networks that enabled the establishment of new Jewish communities in Palestine and the United States. M. M. Silver’s innovative new study highlights the grassroots nature of these actors and their efforts—preaching, fundraising, emigration campaigns, and mutual aid organizations—and argues that these activities were not fundamentally ideological in nature but instead grew organically from traditional Judaic customs, values, and community mores.
Silver examines events in three key locales—Ottoman Palestine, czarist Russia and the United States—during a period from the early 1870s to a few years before World War I. This era which was defined by the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism and by mass Jewish migration, ended with institutional and artistic expressions of new perspectives on Zionism and American Jewish communal life. Within this timeframe, Silver demonstrates, Jewish ideologies arose somewhat amorphously, without clear agendas; they then evolved as attempts to influence the character, pace, and geographical coordinates of the modernization of East European Jews, particularly in, or from, Russia’s czarist empire.
Unique in his multidisciplinary approach, Silver combines political and diplomatic history, literary analysis, biography, and organizational history. Chapters switch successively from the Zionist context, both in the czarist and Ottoman empires, to the United States’ melting-pot milieu. More than half of the figures discussed are sermonizers, emissaries, pioneers, or writers unknown to most readers. And for well-known figures like Theodor Herzl or Emma Lazarus, Silver’s analysis typically relates to texts and episodes that are not covered in extant scholarship. By uncovering the foundations of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist ideology that became organized formally as a political movement—and of melting-pot theories of Jewish integration in the United States, Zionism and the Melting Pot breaks ample new ground.
The life and work of the iconic author and intellectual
Zora Neale Hurston transformed each hour of her life into something bubbling, exuberant, and brimming with joy. Robert Hemenway’s biography is a towering portrait of the novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with people who knew her, Hemenway explores Hurston’s art and work, from her extraordinary novels and autobiography to a popular treatment of black folkways that revealed her deep commitment to the black folk tradition. He also provides a sensitive look at her two marriages; her relationships with Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, Franz Boas, and Langston Hughes; her time as a member of the black literati of the 1920s and 1930s; and the penniless final years leading to her death.
Sophisticated and original, Zora Neale Hurston tells the compelling story of a woman who reveled in a fully lived life dedicated to a lasting art and the preservation of a vital cultural heritage.
"His achievements rank him with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell," states Albert Abramson in this discerning, often dramatic biography of Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, the Russian-born scientist who "did more to create our present system of cathode-ray television than any other person."
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