A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In College Choices, Caroline Hoxby and a distinguished group of economists show how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and whether to continue on to college, to high aptitude students who are offered "free rides" at elite schools. College Choices utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.
Growing up in 1990s Russia in a family marked by poverty, substance abuse, and neglect, Kola and his sister are eventually admitted into the orphanage system. Here, Kola comes face to face with a different but equally daunting challenge: navigating an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world haunted by the absence of his mother. The ensuing journey, which eventually culminates in the adoption by an Italian family, alternates moments of both trauma and deliverance, while asking fundamental questions about our ability to reconcile ourselves with unfathomable loss.
Harrowing yet lyrical, Nikolai Prestia’s prize-winning 2021 novel is a testament to the duality of memory in its ability to both hurt and heal, and to the transformative power of those figures, adults and peers alike, who contribute to a child’s development. Translated into English as part of a collaboration between the author and a mother-daughter translator duo, the novel serves up a wrenching glimpse into the back stories that often precede the adoption of an older child.
The book addresses every step in navigating the perilous territory of love, from instructions on writing love letters to the rules of public displays of affection to gracefully dealing with rejection. Also included are the most important characteristics to keep in mind when choosing The One, such as age, health, fortune, morals, and social position. On marriage, Collingridge wisely advises: “Both men and women vary greatly as to the age at which they arrive at maturity; marriage should never be undertaken before that age, and generally never after.” Even so, Collingridge lauds marriage as an institution of virtues, noting how young men’s “intellects become sharpened, their morals improved, and their energy, by certain necessity, enlarged.” (He does not, interestingly enough, note what marriage does for women.) Passages of verse by such famed literary figures as Shakespeare, Boswell, Dr. Johnson, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompany the sensible advice, providing an array of poetic passages that capture the tumultuous and timeless emotions of love and rejection.
Even though today’s social scene is more analogous to Sex and the City than Emma, much of the counsel in How to Woo is surprisingly applicable to contemporary daters. An invaluable resource for both lovers and the lovelorn, How to Woo is a delightful handbook on the age-old art of courting.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular diagnosis for America’s problems was that society was becoming a madhouse. In this intellectual and cultural history, Michael E. Staub examines a time when many believed insanity was a sane reaction to obscene social conditions, psychiatrists were agents of repression, asylums were gulags for society’s undesirables, and mental illness was a concept with no medical basis.
The first study to describe how social diagnostic thinking emerged, Madness Is Civilization casts new light on the politics of the postwar era.
Villatoro is a writer with a keen political sensibility and a sense of humor besides. After confronting the reader with weighty issues, he pauses to have an encounter with a curandera in a cornfield; to speculate on a visit from extraterrestrials; and to pay tribute to his free-spirited, loose-living Uncle Jack, who "chewed forest mushrooms like a rabbit, / Then howled at a California night / While whispering querida above open thighs." Combining Borgean logic, the grit of Neruda, and a heady dose of Zen, Villatoro offers a primer on how to integrate a history of brutality and injustice with the privilege and comfort of life in America. A final section of poems is presented in Spanish only—a statement of ascendance, a strategy for identity preservation, a gift to the cognoscenti.
Reading On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared may make you shift in your seat—perhaps even toss in your sleep—as you encounter a poignant human voice that is unafraid to speak from the heart.
A Wisconsin story that serves as a national warning
UW Struggle provides an on-the-ground view of the smoldering attack on public higher education in Wisconsin. Chuck Rybak, who works in the University of Wisconsin System, provides important glimpses into the personal lives of those affected, the dismantling of tenure protections, the diminishment of shared governance, and how faculty remain the scapegoat for all of the university’s problems. This is a chronicle of failed leadership and what actions, if any, can protect this vital American institution.
A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque—a woman, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat—often felt like an outsider within the male-dominated, leftist Mapuche movement. This sense of herself as both participant and observer allows for Reuque’s trenchant, yet empathetic, critique of the Mapuche ethnic movement and of the policies regarding indigenous people implemented by Chile’s post-authoritarian government. After the 1990 transition to democratic rule, Reuque collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993. At the same time, her deepening critiques of sexism in Chilean society in general, and the Mapuche movement in particular, inspired her to found the first Mapuche feminist organization and participate in the 1996 International Women’s Conference in Beijing. Critical of the democratic government’s inability to effectively address indigenous demands, Reuque reflects on the history of Mapuche activism, including its disarray in the early 1990s and resurgence toward the end of the decade, and relates her hopes for the future.
An important reinvention of the testimonial genre for Latin America’s post-authoritarian, post-revolutionary era, When a Flower Is Reborn will appeal to those interested in Latin America, race and ethnicity, indigenous people’s movements, women and gender, and oral history and ethnography.
With a scholarly introduction by translator Bradley J. Nelson that introduces García González's oeuvre to contemporary readers and scholars of Spanish-language literature, this science fiction collection introduces Anglophones to this unique author.
García González turns a black mirror on contemporary society and its relation both to history and to the future. His insightfulness and relevance draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and China Miéville, though his verbal economy and elegance are more akin to Cormac McCarthy, producing both disturbingly uncanny violence and unexpected comedy.
The Sixth Volume in the Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies Series
George M. Teegarden (1852-1936) taught at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for 48 years, established the printing department, and also served as the first editor of the school’s magazine. Despite these significant contributions, his greatest gift to deaf people was his skill as a writer and poet who was deaf, as readers will discover in When I Am Dead: The Writings of George M. Teegarden.
Editor Raymond Luczak selected Teegarden’s prose in When I Am Dead from several books, including Raindrop, and Stories, Old and New. Noting that these stories were never written for hearing readers, Luczak marvels at Teegarden’s ability to write English prose that the ASL-familiar reader would find incredibly easy to transliterate. By employing a rich blend of original stories and revisions of fables and myths, Teegarden taught his students the importance of improving their reading and writing skills to outfit them “for the battle of life.” He produced a body of work that Luczak characterizes as “a breath of fresh air: quick, painless, and usually told with a sense of wonder.”
Luczak’s choice of poems came from Teegarden’s self-published volume Vagrant Verses, a summation of his affection for Gallaudet College, the Deaf community, and all deaf people. The eponymous poem “When I Am Dead” articulates concisely the beliefs that directed Teegarden’s life of service:
“When I am dead, I hope to be
Remembered—this is true—
Not for my wit or vanities
But what I did for you.”
When I Came to Die suggests that throughout his writings, Thoreau communicated that knowing how to die properly is an art and a lifelong study, a perspective that informed his ideas about politics, nature, and individualism. With this insight, Raden opens a dialogue that will engage both Thoreauvians and those interested in American literature and thought.
In the early 1980s, in the midst of Central America’s decades of dirty wars, Nora Miselem of Honduras and Maria Suárez Toro of Costa Rica were kidnapped and subjected to rape and other tortures. Of the nearly two hundred disappeared persons in Honduras in those years, they are, remarkably, two of only five survivors. Fourteen years after their ordeal, Suárez and Miselem’s chance meeting at a conference on human rights was witnessed by and is now retold in Margaret Randall’s When I Look into the Mirror andSee You.
Through direct testimony, vivid prose, and evocative photographs, Randall recounts the terror, resistance, and survival of Suárez and Miselem. The book details the abuses suffered by them, the ruses they used to foil their captors, the support that they gave each other while imprisoned, the means they used to escape, and their attempts to reconstruct their lives. For the first time, Suárez and Miselem explore the pain and trauma of their past and Randall has done the service of adding these remarkable voices to the global campaign to bring the world’s attention to women’s human rights.
In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. “When my father finally / died,” Vyas writes, “we [...] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body.” Grief returns us to elemental silence, where “the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches” across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. “[T]he wail outlasts / the dream,” but time falls like water and so “the stream survives its source.”
When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women’s roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When “I” Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women’s studies, and autobiography in a global context.
Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
In this lively and provocative book, two feminist public sociologists turn to classical social thinkers—W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim—to understand a series of twenty-first century social traumas, including the massacre at Columbine High School, the 9/11 attacks, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and Hurricane Katrina. Each event was overwhelming in its own right, while the relentless pace at which they occurred made it nearly impossible to absorb and interpret them in any but the most superficial ways. Yet, each uncovered social problems that cry out for our understanding and remediation.
In When the Center Is on Fire, Becky Thompson and Diane Harriford assert that classical social theorists grappled with the human condition in ways that remain profoundly relevant. They show, for example, that the loss of "double consciousness" that Du Bois identified in African Americans enabled political elites to turn a blind eye to the poverty and vulnerability of many of New Orleans's citizens. The authors' compelling, sometimes irreverent, often searing interpretations make this book essential reading for students, activists, generations X, Y, and Z, and everybody bored by the 6 o'clock news.
Ward traces the company’s turbulent evolution from its roots as an American distributor for Pathé Frères, its French parent studio, through its many subsequent changes in ownership, to its final years under the controversial leadership of Joseph P. Kennedy and the eventual merger of the company’s production department with RKO. Included are the stories of the unlikely survival of Pathé’s nonproduction assets, such as Pathé Industries, Inc., Pathé-America Distributing Co., Inc., and Pathé Communications Corporation, which continued to operate as part of the industry long after the Exchange had ceased to exist. Ward also provides a fascinating glimpse into the silent movie era and the business and creative decisions that led the Exchange to fail.
Film historians have largely ignored the Pathé Exchange, despite its having produced some of the most famous early serials (including the series that began with The Perils of Pauline) and distributed the first films of comedy legends Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang. When the Cock Crows reveals the promise and peril of early Hollywood and establishes the company’s vital place in film history, creating a more vivid picture of this era.
When the Devil Knocks analyzes the Congo tradition as a dynamic cultural, ritual, and identity performance that tells an important story about a Black cultural past while continuing to create itself in a Black cultural present. This book examines “Congo” within the history of twentieth century Panamanian etnia negra culture, politics, and representation, including its circulation within the political economy of contemporary tourism.
In When the Earth Was New, Alex K. Ruuska explores riveting multigenerational memories of Numic-speaking communities that extend back, potentially, to the late Pleistocene. These diverse oral traditions describe geological, climatic, and ecological events that occurred over thousands of years and were passed down across many generations. Through the examination of place-based memories and the architecture of Numic knowledge, Ruuska demonstrates convergences of oral traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and geology.
When the Earth Was New critically compares and considers multiple forms of knowledge that contribute to overlapping as well as disparate understandings of both recent and distant pasts in the regions of California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. It works at balancing key themes in these regions’ histories within a more holistic framework, exploring ancient and modern strands of knowledge with the assistance of twenty-four Tribes and Consolidated Organizations.
A study of the evolution of American women's clothing, When the Girls Came Out to Play traces the history of modern sportswear as a universal style that broke down traditional gender roles. Patricia Warner shows how this profound cultural shift, which did not reach fruition until World War II, originated during the previous century with the gradual expansion of socially acceptable physical activity for women. Behind this development was a growing interest in sports and exercise that was further nurtured by the establishment of schools of higher education for women. The participation of women in athletic pursuits previously reserved for men began with the relatively genteel sports of croquet and tennis. With the founding of women's colleges, these “ladylike” games were supplemented by more vigorous activities and competitive team sports, from gymnastics to swimming to basketball. At first, Warner points out, women literally had nothing to wear for these activities. Whereas such fashionable attire as corsets, petticoats, hats, and gloves could be worn while playing outdoor lawn games, more strenuous athletic endeavors required less physically restrictive clothing. Even so, change came only gradually, as women's colleges, shielded from public scrutiny and prying male eyes, permitted the adoption of looser, more comfortable apparel for physical education. Many of these new outfits featured trousers, garments considered taboo for women, though they often remained hidden beneath voluminous skirts.
Over time, however, the practicality and versatility of such clothing led to social acceptance, laying the foundation for the emergence of the now ubiquitous yet distinctly American style known as sportswear. Although we take it for granted, Warner observes, this is the first time in the history of the world that such universality has existed in clothing, and it has lasted now for well over half a century—in itself a marvel, considering the speed of fashion change in an era of instant messages and images.
Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas examines how the Seven Deadly Sins have shaped the moral strivings and sociopolitical condition of American society and culture in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a multidimensional approach, Floyd-Thomas uses race, gender, class, and other lenses to break down the moral crises that define the American Dream. Her critique exposes the harm done by individual and collective practices of sexual objectification, capitalist materialism, wealth inequality, and technological hubris before pivoting to the rise of right-wing populism, white Christian nationalism, and the politics of cruelty. But Floyd-Thomas also proposes an ethic that emphasizes truth-telling, community engagement, and values rooted in humility, justice, and mercy—a new path for the US to overcome systemic oppression and create a more just society.
Evocative and ambitious, When the Good Life Goes Bad takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through US life and culture to explain what corrupted the American dream.
Fracking is one of the most controversial methods of fossil fuel extraction in the United States, but a great deal about it remains out of the public eye. In Wisconsin it has ignited an unprecedented explosion in the state’s sand mining operations, an essential ingredient in hydraulic fracturing that has shaken local communities to the core.
In When the Hills Are Gone, Thomas W. Pearson reveals the jolting impact of sand mining on Wisconsin’s environment and politics. A source of extraordinary wealth for a lucky few, and the cause of despoiled land for many others, sand mining has raised alarm over air quality, water purity, noise, blasting, depressed tourism, and damage to the local way of life. It has also spurred a backlash in a grassroots effort that has grown into a mature political movement battling a powerful mining industry.
When the Hills Are Gone tells the story of Wisconsin’s sand mining wars. Providing on-the-ground accounts from both the mining industry and the concerned citizens who fought back, Pearson blends social theory, ethnography, stirring journalism, and his own passionate point of view to offer an essential chapter of Wisconsin’s history and an important episode in the national environmental movement. Digging deep into the struggles over place, community, and local democracy that are occurring across the United States, When the Hills Are Gone gives vital insight into America’s environmental battles along the unexpected frontlines of energy development.
“Which house is burning?” asks Giorgio Agamben. “The country where you live, or Europe, or the whole world? Perhaps the houses, the cities have already burnt down—who knows how long ago?—in a single immense blaze that we pretended not to see.” In this collection of four luminous, lyrical essays, Agamben brings his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity and poetic intensity to bear on a world in crisis. Whether surveying the burning house of our culture in the title essay, the architecture of pure exteriority in “Door and Threshold,” the language of prophecy in “Lessons in the Darkness,” or the word of the witness in “Testimony and Truth,” Agamben’s insights throw a revealing light on questions both timeless and topical. Written in dark times over the past year, and rich with the urgency of our moment, the essays in this volume also seek to show how what appears to be an impasse can, with care and attention, become the door leading to a way out.
The poetry of the Late Roman Republican poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, a rich document of the human heart, is the earliest-known reasonably complete body of erotic verse in the West.
Though approximately 116 poems survive, uncertainties about the condition of the fragmented manuscript and the narrative order of the poems make the Catullan text unusually problematic for the modern critic. Indeed, the poems can be arranged in a number of ways, making a multitude of different plots possible and frustrating the reader’s desire for narrative closure.
Micaela Janan contends that since unsatisfied desire structures both the experience of reading Catullus and its subject matter, critical interpretation of the text demands a "poetics of desire." Furthermore, postmodern critical theory, narratology, and psychoanalysis suggest a flexible concept of the "subject" as a site through which a multitude of social, cultural, and unconscious forces move. Human consciousness, Janan contends, is inherently incomplete and in a continuous process of transformation. She therefore proposes an original and provocative feminist reading of Catullus, a reading informed by theories of consciousness and desire as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Freud and Lacan.
The Late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, Janan reminds us, was a time of profound social upheaval when political and cultural institutions that had persisted for centuries were rapidly breaking down—a time not unlike our own. Catullus’ poetry provides an unusually honest look at his culture and its contradictory representations of class, gender, and power. By bringing to the study of this major work of classical literature the themes of consciousness and desire dealt with in postmodern scholarship, Janan’s book invites a new conversation among literary disciplines.
The plane carrying Rogers and aviator Wiley Post crashed in a lagoon just outside Barrow, Alaska on August 15, 1935. Walsh retells the tragic tale from various angles, primarily alternating between Rogers and Post’s journey and the actions of the two men’s families on that fateful day. In particular, Walsh reveals moving details about the families and their struggle with grief, such as the fact that Post’s daughter was in a stage play about plane crashes at the time of the crash, or how Will Rogers’s daughter Mary never fully recovered from her father’s death and subsequently abandoned her promising acting career.
When the Laughing Stopped is a gripping and poignant retelling of the death of a beloved American legend, and it shines a humanizing light upon a pivotal moment in American history and culture.
Heather D. Switzer's interviews with over one hundred Kenyan Maasai schoolgirls challenge the widespread view of education as a silver bullet solution to global poverty. In their own voices, the girls offer incisive insights into their commitments, aspirations, and desires. Switzer weaves this ethnographic material into an astute analysis of historical literature, education and development documents, and theoretical literature. Maasai schoolgirls express a particular knowledge about themselves and provocative hopes for their futures. Yet, as Switzer shows, new opportunities force them to face, and navigate, new vulnerabilities and insecurities within a society that is itself in flux.
A beloved, smart, and bold story collection surges back to life in a new print edition
Hailed as “revolutionary fiction,” When the Messenger Is Hot gleefully upends the short-story form, rendering the absurdities and possibilities of modern urban life with disarming humor and keen perception as Crane weaves through grief and womanhood. The women in Elizabeth Crane’s world are fierce and kind, damaged and optimistic. They are jilted lovers, absent daughters, twelve-steppers, and smart-asses, recovering from loss, addiction, or betrayal. From a woman who decides to live on the rooftop of her friend’s apartment (why not?), to a writer whose identity is compromised by the actress who portrays her, to a daughter who believes her deceased mother is still alive and living at the bus depot, these characters experience love and loss in a way that is both profoundly universal and uniquely theirs.
“The whole world is watching!” cried protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention as Chicago police beat them in the streets. When some of that violence was then aired on network television, another kind of hell broke loose. Some viewers were stunned and outraged; others thought the protestors deserved what they got. No one—least of all Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley—was happy with how the networks handled it.
In When the News Broke, Heather Hendershot revisits TV coverage of those four chaotic days in 1968—not only the violence in the streets but also the tumultuous convention itself, where Black citizens and others forcefully challenged southern delegations that had excluded them, anti-Vietnam delegates sought to change the party’s policy on the war, and journalists and delegates alike were bullied by both Daley’s security forces and party leaders. Ultimately, Hendershot reveals the convention as a pivotal moment in American political history, when a distorted notion of “liberal media bias” became mainstreamed and nationalized.
At the same time, she celebrates the values of the network news professionals who strived for fairness and accuracy. Despite their efforts, however, Chicago proved to be a turning point in the public’s trust in national news sources. Since those critical days, the political Right in the United States has amplified distrust of TV news, to the point where even the truest and most clearly documented stories can be deemed “fake.” As Hendershot demonstrates, it doesn’t matter whether the “whole world is watching” if people don’t believe what they see.
When the Ocean Holds the Stage is a work in which Moby-Dick and Melville’s ocean dramaturgy is the deep thru-current and archipelagic structure, forming his brilliant watery excavation of the forces of containment and continentalization, capitalization, racialization, enslavement, species destruction, and white Christian supremacism. As such, it is an original and challenging political and aesthetic engagement with Melville and Moby-Dick. Melville’s Benito Cereno, Homer’s The Odyssey, and Dereck Walcott’s Omeros are also central studies. Wickstrom argues that the ocean and the ship emerge in these texts as new kinds of performance stages on which there is a unique freedom to bring critical thought to bear on many harmful systems, and to offer visions of ways to live differently. Introducing new practices in academic writing, Wickstrom works against the constraints of linear argumentation and toward archipelagic and poetic openness. Gatherings replace chapters and, in addition to the main texts, bring many artists, historical situations, contemporary crises, and political proposals into loose, archipelagic correspondences. Finally, the book is an important contribution from Theatre and Performance Studies to the vital and broad coalition of scholars, artists, and activists whose focus is on water.
Born almost totally deaf, Philip Zazove has spent his entire life beating the odds first by excelling in public schools during an era when most deaf children went to special schools, then by aspiring to become a medical doctor. When the Phone Rings, My Bed Shakes is the remarkable story of his determination and achievement in realizing his dreams.
Despite his stellar record at Northwestern University, Zazove was rejected by a host of medical schools. This only caused him to press harder, which won him acceptance at Rutgers University. He transferred to Washington University in St. Louis where, again against all advice, he decided to specialize in family practice. In vignettes of his patients, some amusing, others moving, he reveals the dedication and humanity that have made him a respected and well-loved doctor. His story will inspire all who read it.
Translated by formidable comparative literature scholar Haun Saussy, When the Pipirite Sings expresses an acute historical consciousness and engages recurrent Haitian themes—the wrenching impact of colonialism and underdevelopment, the purposes of education, and the merging of spiritual and temporal power. And, as always with Métellus’s poetry, the range of voices and points of view evokes other genres, including fiction and cinema. This eminently readable book has formal and thematic ties to Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, central to the canon of French-language postcolonial writings.
In addition to many books of poetry, Métellus published novels, chiefly about the remembered Haiti of his youth, and plays about the conquest of the Caribbean. His nonfiction included reflections on Haitian history and politics, on the iconography of slave emancipation, and studies of aphasia and dyslexia.
“The hand-in-glove relationship of the U.S. media with the White House is mercilessly exposed in this determined and disheartening study that repeatedly reveals how the press has toed the official line at those moments when its independence was most needed.”—George Pendle, Financial Times
“Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston are indisputably right about the news media’s dereliction in covering the administration’s campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq.”—Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune
John Alcock knows the Sonoran Desert better than just about anyone else, and in this book he tracks the changes he observes in plant and animal life over the course of a drought year. Combining scientific knowledge with years of exploring the desert, he describes the variety of ways in which the wait for rain takes place—and what happens when it finally comes.
The desert is a land of five seasons, featuring two summers—hot, dry months followed by monsoon—and Alcock looks at the changes that take place in an entire desert community over the course of all five. He describes what he finds on hikes in the Usery Mountains near Phoenix, where he has studied desert life over three decades and where frequent visits have enabled him to notice effects of seasonal variation that might escape a casual glance.
Blending a personal perspective with field observation, Alcock shows how desert ecology depends entirely on rainfall. He touches on a wide range of topics concerning the desert’s natural history, noting the response of saguaro flowers to heat and the habits of predators, whether soaring red-tailed hawk or tiny horned lizard. He also describes unusual aspects of insects that few desert hikers will have noticed, such as the disruptive color pattern of certain grasshoppers that is more effective than most camouflage.
When the Rains Come is brimming with new insights into the desert, from the mating behaviors of insects to urban sprawl, and features photographs that document changes in the landscape as drought years come and go. It brings us the desert in the harshest of times—and shows that it is still teeming with life.
On September 16, 1990, the tanker ship Jupiter exploded while unloading gasoline at a Bay City pier on the Saginaw River. The blast killed one worker, injured eleven others, and triggered what the U.S. Coast Guard later described as an unprecedented crisis on the Great Lakes. For weeks, the disaster commanded national attention as officials worked to contain the damage and investigate the cause. Then, like so many industrial accidents, the story faded from public memory.
When the River Burned tells the story of this overlooked chapter in Great Lakes maritime history. Drawing on newspaper archives, Coast Guard investigations, and eyewitness accounts, Joey Oliver reconstructs how a series of small oversights—in equipment, procedure, and human judgment—aligned to produce catastrophe.
The book places the Jupiter explosion within a broader history of the Saginaw River, tracing its evolution into a vital artery of Michigan industry. Oliver examines the fragile interdependence of ships, piers, and river traffic, revealing how disasters emerge not from single causes but from the breakdown of complex systems. When the River Burned is not only the account of a deadly tanker explosion; it is a reflection on what caused it, on the safety changes that followed, and on changes that never came.
What has remained untold is the major behind-the-scenes contribution of entrepreneurial Congressional staff, who planted the seeds of public interest bills in their bosses' minds and maneuvered to counteract the influence of lobbyists to pass laws in consumer protection, public health, and other policy arenas crying out for effective government regulation. They infuriated Nixon's advisor, John Ehrlichman, who called them "bumblebees," a name they wore as a badge of honor.
For his insider account, Pertschuk draws on many interviews, as well as his fifteen years serving on the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee that Senator Warren Magnuson chaired and as the committee's Democratic Staff Director. That committee became, in Ralph Nader's words, "the Grand Central Station for consumer protection advocates."
What has remained untold is the major behind-the-scenes contribution of entrepreneurial Congressional staff, who planted the seeds of public interest bills in their bosses' minds and maneuvered to counteract the influence of lobbyists to pass laws in consumer protection, public health, and other policy arenas crying out for effective government regulation. They infuriated Nixon's advisor, John Ehrlichman, who called them "bumblebees," a name they wore as a badge of honor.
For his insider account, Pertschuk draws on many interviews, as well as his fifteen years serving on the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee that Senator Warren Magnuson chaired and as the committee's Democratic Staff Director. That committee became, in Ralph Nader's words, "the Grand Central Station for consumer protection advocates."
Compared with Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, the recent western intervention in Sierra Leone has been largely forgotten. When the State Fails rectifies this, providing a comprehensive and critical analysis of the intervention.
The civil war in Sierra Leone began in 1991 and was declared officially over in 2002 after UK, UN and regional African military intervention. Some claimed it as a case of successful humanitarian intervention. The authors in this collection provide an informed analysis of the impact of the intervention on democracy, development and society in Sierra Leone. The authors take a particularly critical view of the imposition of neoliberalism after the conflict.
As NATO intervention in Libya shows the continued use of external force in internal conflicts, When the State Fails is a timely book for all students and scholars interested in Africa and the question of ‘humanitarian intervention’.
When the White House Calls tells the life story of John Price, one of Utah’s most prominent citizens, beginning with his birth in Germany through his years as a successful builder and real estate developer—with business interests in broadcasting, manufacturing, distribution, and banking—to his life as a diplomat. Born in Berlin on August 18, 1933, Hans Joachim Praiss was five years old when he and his family fled Nazi Germany in April 1939. The family found temporary refuge in Panama, finally arriving at Ellis Island in September 1940 and settling in New York City. Following the advice of a professor at CCNY, Price traveled west to fulfill a geology fieldwork course requirement, but upon seeing the snow-capped mountains surrounding Salt Lake City, knew he would stay. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Geological Engineering from the University of Utah in 1956. He practiced in that field before tiring of the often rigorous travel requirements and the desolate nature of the work. He soon turned to new opportunities.
Years later, after operating successful business enterprises throughout the Intermountain region and nationally, and serving on numerous local, state, and national boards, Price had become the consummate entrepreneur, businessman, and community leader. He was ready to serve his country when the White House called. In February 2002 he was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Mauritius, the Republic of Seychelles, and the Union of the Comoros, three Indian Ocean island nations off the east coast of Africa, where he served until 2005.
In this telling autobiography, John Price focuses on his years as an ambassador and includes his thoughts on the future of sub-Saharan Africa. The account of his service as a diplomat offers readers a view of the daily life of an ambassador—the protocol for official meetings with heads of state, the routine of the office, the process of handling official communications, and the intricacies of diplomacy. More than that, in a world concerned with the global war on terror, he reflects on the three island nations where he served and on the region’s increasing strategic importance to the national security of the United States.
In the years since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the al-Qaeda movement has grown and its members have dispersed throughout the world, including the region known as the Horn of Africa and East Africa. Price calls attention to the vulnerability of sub-Saharan Africa as a haven for terrorists, and the critical need for our engagement of this desperate continent with economic development, health care, and education to counter this threat. His concern for this region of Africa is carefully articulated in the text, as well as in interviews (included as appendixes) with notable country leaders. When the White House Calls is a compelling story of the American Dream realized, and the importance of service to country. This is a book that will both educate and inspire young people, their mentors, and others, as they work to make a difference in the world.
For more than half a century, logging, lumber production, and affiliated enterprises in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and wealth for many individuals. The industry cut through the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen, from an immigrant lumberjack or camp cook in the Chippewa Valley to a Suamico sawmill operator, an Oshkosh factory worker to a Milwaukee banker.
When the White Pine Was King tells the stories of the heyday of logging: of lumberjacks and camp cooks, of river drives and deadly log jams, of sawmills and lumber towns and the echo of the ax ringing through the Northwoods as yet another white pine crashed to the ground. He explores the aftermath of the logging era, including efforts to farm the cutover (most of them doomed to fail), successful reforestation work, and the legacy of the lumber and wood products industries, which continue to fuel the state’s economy.
Enhanced with dozens of historic photos, When the White Pine Was King transports readers to the lumber boom era and reveals how the lessons learned in the vast northern forestlands continue to shape the region today.
Winner of the 2014 Pate Award from the Fort Worth Civil War Round Table.
When the peoples of the Indian Territory found themselves in the midst of the American Civil War, squeezed between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas and Arkansas, they had no way to escape a conflict not of their choosing--and no alternative but to suffer its consequences. When the Wolf Came explores how the war in the Indian Territory involved almost every resident, killed many civilians as well as soldiers, left the country stripped and devastated, and cost Indian nations millions of acres of land. Using a solid foundation of both published and unpublished sources, including the records of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek nations, Mary Jane Warde details how the coming of the war set off a wave of migration into neighboring Kansas, the Red River Valley, and Texas. She describes how Indian Territory troops in Unionist regiments or as Confederate allies battled enemies--some from their own nations--in the territory and in neighboring Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. And she shows how post-war land cessions forced by the federal government on Indian nations formerly allied with the Confederacy allowed the removal of still more tribes to the Indian Territory, leaving millions of acres open for homesteads, railroads, and development in at least ten states. Enhanced by maps and photographs from the Oklahoma Historical Society's photographic archives, When the Wolf Came will be welcomed by both general readers and scholars interested in the signal public events that marked that tumultuous era and the consequences for the territory's tens of thousands of native peoples.
Recounts the hardships and joys the Kilgore family and their neighbors experienced in a close-knit southern rural community during the Great Depression
As the Great Depression tightened its grip on the world, six members of the Kilgore family were living in a cramped farmhouse in Brookwood, Alabama. Crops didn’t grow well, food was scarce, shoes were in short supply, and the few clothes they had were all hand-me-downs. The Kilgores struggled to make ends meet, cobbling together odd jobs and working the land by hand.
Despite all of this, young Aileen thought life was full of hope. She longed to hold on to it and scribbled down daily events on whatever odds and ends of paper she could find. In her new memoir, When the Wolf Camped at Our Door, Aileen Kilgore Henderson creates a vivid portrait of what life was like for so many living in the rural South during the Depression. The book begins when Aileen is ten years old and follows her into her teenage years over the course of twenty-seven episodic chapters. Drawing on her girlhood diaries and told through the charismatic voice of her younger self, Henderson’s nuanced storytelling sheds light on the common struggle for survival during a time when people were at their most vulnerable.
Against the backdrop of a world where hard work and harsh conditions like hunger, privation, sickness, and early death were everyday realities, Henderson’s stories are nevertheless tinged with young Aileen’s lively sense of humor and optimistic faith in people and in the promise of life despite trying circumstances. We follow her rambles in the woods, her visits with friends, a trip to a fortune teller, and a search for the Howton Horror, a mysterious monster rumored to live deep in the Alabama backwoods.
When the Yellow River Floods explores the relationship between environmental degradation, hydraulic engineering, and nation-building in the context of Liu E’s The Travels of Lao Can. This book provides a unique perspective on modern Chinese literary history that goes beyond conventional narratives that focus solely on political and cultural factors. The main areas covered include the role of water management in literary nation-building and the connections between the novel’s various themes, such as river engineering, medical and political discourses, national sentiment, and landscape description.
By offering a comprehensive analysis of The Travels of Lao Can, this book broadens the understanding of nation-building in early twentieth-century China, highlighting the impact of environmental crises and hydraulics on the formation of national literature and consciousness. When the Yellow River Floods provides a new perspective on the environmental roots of modern Chinese literature, making it an essential read for those seeking to understand the complex interplay between literature, the environment, and national identity in China. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese literature, history, and environmental studies.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2026
The University of Chicago Press