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Architecture, You, and Me
The Diary of a Development
Sigfried Giedion
Harvard University Press

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Bring Your Legs with You
Darrell Spencer
University of Pittsburgh Press
A boxer who brings his legs with him comes to the ring with the strength and stamina to make it through every round of a tough fight. In this new collection, winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Darrell Spencer delivers fiction with just that kind of power.

Bring Your Legs with You contains nine interconnected stories set in Las Vegas. Featuring various perspectives and narrators, they are filled with unforgettable characters, including Carl T. Plugg, a sharp-dressed, smooth-talking, non-hustling pool shark; Spinoza, the philosophical day laborer with “Department of Big Thoughts” lettered on the door of his pickup; Jacob, an arrogant lawyer who learns too late the dangers of swimming with the sharks; Gus, a man who has never seen his son fight despite his insatiable fascination with the sweet science; and Jane, a woman wary of her ex-husband, but still in love enough to share her bed with him.

Above them all looms Tommy Rooke, retired prizefighter and self-employed roofer. Undefeated in the ring, Rooke walked away from boxing at the top of his game, to the confusion and consternation of his friends and family. As his father, former manager, and various other hangers-on encourage him to stage a comeback, Tommy moves through the gated communities and sun-blasted strip malls of Las Vegas, wrestling with personal choice, the caprices of fate, and the price the gods demand for our sins.

More than a book about boxing, gambling, luck, and broken dreams, <I>Bring Your Legs with You</I> delves deeply into the life of its flawed but intelligent hero, a man deeply devoted to his friends but lost in a violent world. A writer unafraid to show the connections between people, Spencer delivers a hard-hitting collection filled with rich dialogue and spare prose.
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Extinctions
From Dinosaurs to You
Charles Frankel
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A compelling answer to an important question: Can past mass extinctions teach us how to avoid future planetary disaster?

On its face, the story of mass extinction on Earth is one of unavoidable disaster. Asteroid smashes into planet; goodbye dinosaurs. Planetwide crises seem to be beyond our ability to affect or evade. Extinctions argues that geological history tells an instructive story, one that offers important signs for us to consider. When the asteroid struck, Charles Frankel explains, it set off a wave of cataclysms that wore away at the global ecosystem until it all fell apart. What if there had been a way to slow or even turn back these tides? Frankel believes that the answer to this question holds the key to human survival.

Human history, from the massacre of Ice Age megafauna to today’s industrial climate change, has brought the planet through another series of cataclysmic events. But the history of mass extinction together with the latest climate research, Frankel maintains, shows us a way out. If we curb our destructive habits, particularly our drive to kill and consume other species, and work instead to conserve what biodiversity remains, the Earth might yet recover. Rather than await decisive disaster, Frankel argues that we must instead take action to reimagine what it means to be human. As he eloquently explains, geological history reminds us that life is not eternal; we can disappear, or we can become something new and continue our evolutionary adventure.
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Global Flu and You
A History of Influenza
George Dehner
Reaktion Books, 2012
Winter brings snow, ice, and freezing temperatures, but these climatic conditions are also the harbingers of another time of year: flu season. We all know the signs—chills, fever, sore throat, muscle pains, coughing—and hope that this common illness will make us sick for only a few days. But though the flu may seem harmless, influenza results in between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths every year and can spread virulently around the world. In pandemic years, the flu can kill millions.
 
The recurrence of the Spanish Flu virus, the appearance and spread of Bird Flu, and the 2009 Swine Flu have heightened concerns about the dangers posed by flu pandemics. Drawing on his extensive research into influenza pandemics, George Dehner refutes the idea that these are a new phenomenon. In Global Flu and You, he traces the origins of the disease and outlines the societal and cultural changes that enabled the virus to become an epidemic threat. He reveals that while medical and scientific breakthroughs in studying and protecting against the virus have made rapid progress, demographic, economic, and technical changes have served to speed up and amplify the potential impacts of an influenza pandemic.
 
Accessibly written for any reader, Global Flu and You exposes the facts and fictions of an illness we could all succumb to and is a must-read for anyone concerned with their own—and the world’s—health.
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I Say to You
Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya
Gabrielle Lynch
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In 2007 a disputed election in Kenya erupted into a two-month political crisis that led to the deaths of more than a thousand people and the displacement of almost seven hundred thousand. Much of the violence fell along ethnic lines, the principal perpetrators of which were the Kalenjin, who lashed out at other communities in the Rift Valley. What makes this episode remarkable compared to many other instances of ethnic violence is that the Kalenjin community is a recent construct: the group has only existed since the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on rich archival research and vivid oral testimony, I Say to You is a timely analysis of the creation, development, political relevance, and popular appeal of the Kalenjin identity as well as its violent potential.
 
Uncovering the Kalenjin’s roots, Gabrielle Lynch examines the ways in which ethnic groups are socially constructed and renegotiated over time. She demonstrates how historical narratives of collective achievement, migration, injustice, and persecution constantly evolve. As a consequence, ethnic identities help politicians mobilize support and help ordinary people lay claim to space, power, and wealth. This kind of ethnic politics, Lynch reveals, encourages a sense of ethnic difference and competition, which can spiral into violent confrontation and retribution.
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I Spoke to You with Silence
Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders
Edited by Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith
University of Utah Press, 2022
Nobody knows what to do about queer Mormons. The institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers to pretend they don’t exist, that they can choose their way out of who they are, leave, or at least stay quiet in a community that has no place for them. Even queer Mormons don’t know what to do about queer Mormons. Their lived experience is shrouded by a doctrine in which heteronormative marriage is non-negotiable and gender is unchangeable. For women, trans Mormons, and Mormons of other marginalized genders, this invisibility is compounded by social norms which elevate (implicitly white) cisgender male voices above those of everyone else. 

This collection of essays gives voice to queer Mormons. The authors who share their stories—many speaking for the first time from the closet—do so here in simple narrative prose. They talk about their identities, their experiences, their relationships, their heartbreaks, their beliefs, and the challenges they face. Some stay in the church, some do not, some are in constant battles with themselves and the people around them as they make agonizing decisions about love and faith and community. Their stories bravely convey what it means to be queer, Mormon, and marginalized—what it means to have no voice and yet to speak anyway.
 
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I Write This to You
Sonnets
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979 when his first book of poetry went to press he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.
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Love Poems by Pedro Salinas
My Voice Because of You and Letter Poems to Katherine
Pedro Salinas
University of Chicago Press, 2010

When Pedro Salinas’s 1933 collection of love poems, La voz a ti debida, was introduced to American audiences in Willis Barnstone’s 1975 English translation, it was widely regarded as the greatest sequence of love poems written by a man or a woman, in any language, in the twentieth century. Now, seventy-five years after its publication, the reputation of the poems and its multifaceted writer remains untarnished. A portrait of their era, the poems, from a writer in exile from his native civil war–torn Spain, now reemerge in our time.

            In this new, facing-page bilingual edition, Barnstone has added thirty-six poems written in the form of letters from Salinas to his great love, Katherine Whitmore. Discovered years later, these poems were written during and after the composition of La voz and, though disguised as prose, have all the rhythms and sounds of lineated lyric poetry. Taken together, the poems and letters are a history, a dramatic monologue, and a crushing and inevitable ending to the story of a man consumed by his love and his art.

Bolstered by an elegant foreword by Salinas’s contemporary, the poet Jorge Guillén, and a masterly afterword by the Salinas scholar, Enric Bou, that considers the poet and his legacy for twenty-first century world poetry, Love Poems by Pedro Salinas will be cause for celebration throughout the world of verse and beyond.

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My Body To You
Elizabeth Searle
University of Iowa Press, 1993
In the thirteen stories of My Body to You, thirteen women or girls pilot their own bodies through a shifting universe of lovers old and young, parents devoted and destructive, sisters of different sexes, children and adults living in the mysterious world of autism. All these characters share keen powers of observations and a heightened sensuality. In a wild variety of settings, they struggle to control—or dare to abandon themselves to—their intensely private passions.

A woman in love with a gay man she calls Sister Kin attempts to escape the bonds of her own body. An eighteen-year-old virgin enters into a passionate affair with an older man who turns out to be a virgin of a different sort. A special education teacher in a school for aggressive teenagers finds herself attracted to another teacher, also female. An intelligent outcast girl bonds with her mindlessly seductive mother to form “one person.”

Searle reveals other characters through inventive and often comic feats of narrative daring. A girl grows into womanhood during a single family dinner that spans twenty years. A middle-aged wife, once dubbed “The First Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” watches her former selves parade before her family in a lively evening of home movies. Two women—one recently divorced, the other a group home resident in love with The Who—join forces as they figure out “What to Do in an Emergency.” An old woman experiences both physical breakdown and spiritual breakdown in a supermarket's vegetable department. A young woman is drawn into the emotional and sexual life of an autistic boy obsessed with the number 8.

Each of these stories is written in a language that strives to match the intensity of Searle's characters; each gives the reader an exceptionally intimate portrait of a unique female and the central, sensual mystery of her body.
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The Origins of You
How Childhood Shapes Later Life
Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton
Harvard University Press, 2020

A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year

After tracking the lives of thousands of people from birth to midlife, four of the world’s preeminent psychologists reveal what they have learned about how humans develop.

Does temperament in childhood predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is health in adulthood shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these and similar questions, four leading psychologists have spent their careers studying thousands of people, observing them as they’ve grown up and grown older. The result is unprecedented insight into what makes each of us who we are.

In The Origins of You, Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Richie Poulton share what they have learned about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, about genes and parenting, and about vulnerability, resilience, and success. The evidence shows that human development is not subject to ironclad laws but instead is a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction a life will take. A child’s early years do predict who they will become later in life, but they do so imperfectly. For example, genes and troubled families both play a role in violent male behavior, and, though health and heredity sometimes go hand in hand, childhood adversity and severe bullying in adolescence can affect even physical well-being in midlife.

Painstaking and revelatory, the discoveries in The Origins of You promise to help schools, parents, and all people foster well-being and ameliorate or prevent developmental problems.

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The Origins of You
How Childhood Shapes Later Life
Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton
Harvard University Press

A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year

“Brings the groundbreaking research of the top developmental psychologists of the past quarter-century to a wider audience…A masterpiece!”—Dante Cicchetti, Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota

“Deliver[s] a flood of insights around the book’s central question: To what degree do our childhood personalities and behaviors predict our adult selves?”—Wall Street Journal

“One of the best and most important works of the last few years…Fascinating.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Does childhood temperament predict adult personality? What role do parents play in shaping how a child matures? Is day care bad—or good—for children? Does adolescent delinquency forecast a life of crime? Do genes influence success in life? Is one’s health shaped by childhood experiences? In search of answers to these questions, four leading psychologists dedicated their careers to studying thousands of people, observing them as they grew and emerging with unprecedented insight into what makes us who we are.

They found that human development is not subject to ironclad laws so much as a matter of possibilities and probabilities—multiple forces that together determine the direction of one’s life. The early years do predict who we become, but they do so imperfectly. At once actionable and revelatory, The Origins of You is an invaluable guide for parents, teachers, and anyone working with or caring for children.

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Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going
Jessica Jacobs
Four Way Books, 2019
A memoir-in-poems about coming of age in sultry Florida and navigating a complex lesbian relationship grounded in the daily world.
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Take Nothing With You
Sarah V. Schweig
University of Iowa Press, 2016
There are worlds we can imagine, but we live in this one: contingent and absurd. In her first full-length collection, Sarah V. Schweig aims to capture something essential and universal about this faulted inheritance.

​These poems operate on the notion that the lyric can be discovered in scattered headlines, office-wide emails, road signs—the detritus of the everyday. But a poem doesn’t stop at found fragments; it creates something from them. These poems question and re-question what can be truthfully said, rediscovering the lyric in the very process of thinking, revising, and re-envisioning.
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Walked Through Storm to You
Love Sonnets
Roger Armbrust
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2022
Armbrust writes sonnets on a variety of themes, primarily addressed to his muse and his lovers. Since 1979, when his first book of poetry went to press, he continues to write, as if he opens a vein to pour his own blood onto the page to do it.

In this book of 126 sonnets, the poet invites us to walk with him as his creative sense takes us through every mood of nature on earth, and to the universe beyond. Imagery’s connections turn hearing 2 a.m. rain into Hemingway’s and James Dickey’s typewriter keys, leading the poet to write. Each poem seems to meld us to relationships.
 
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Where Research Begins
Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)
Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea
University of Chicago Press, 2022

Plenty of books tell you how to do research. This book helps you figure out WHAT to research in the first place, and why it matters.

The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate—one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.

Read this book if you (or your students):

  • have difficulty choosing a research topic
  • know your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research project
  • feel intimidated by or unqualified to do research
  • worry that you’re asking the wrong questions about your research topic
  • have plenty of good ideas, but aren’t sure which one to commit to
  • feel like your research topic was imposed by someone else
  • want to learn new ways to think about how to do research.

Under the expert guidance of award-winning researchers Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, you will find yourself on the path to a compelling and meaningful research project, one that matters to you—and the world.

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You and the Law in New Jersey
A Resource Guide
Leighton A. Holness
Rutgers University Press, 1998

What are your rights if you are fired from your job? What should you do if you are a crime victim or witness? How can you fight a child custody battle? What can you do if your landlord refuses to provide you with heat in the winter?

You and the Law in New Jersey, newly updated, is the ideal guidebook to assist readers in understanding the law, their rights, and how to get legal help. In clear, straightforward language, the book describes how law is made, how to do legal research, how the state and federal court systems work, how to get help if you can't afford a lawyer, how to hire a lawyer, and what to do if you are sued. The second edition contains much new information, including a chapter on credit, debt, and banking, and others on the rights of senior citizens, veterans, and people with disabilities. The authors have also expanded their information on the rights of renters, homeowners, and consumers of public utilities, as well as their treatment of employment law. They have rewritten chapters on health and public benefits to address the recent sweeping reforms of federal and state law. Other topics include family matters such as marriage, divorce, adoption, and domestic violence; the landlord-tenant relationship and buying a home; consumer rights; the criminal justice system; and citizen involvement in environmental law.

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You and Your Deaf Child
A Self-Help Guide for Parents of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children
John Adams
Gallaudet University Press, 1997

You and Your Deaf Child is a guide for parents of deaf or hard of hearing children that explores how parents and their children interact. It examines the special impact of having a deaf child in the family.

       Eleven chapters focus on such topics as feelings about hearing loss, the importance of communication in the family, and effective behavior management. Many chapters contain practice activities and questions to help parents retain skills taught in the chapter and check their grasp of the material. Four appendices provide references, general resources, and guidelines for evaluating educational programs.

       Once parents have worked through You and Your Deaf Child, this friendly guide can be referred to for specific information and advice as different situations arise.

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You as of Today My Homeland
Stories of War, Self, and Love
Tayseer Al-Sboul
Michigan State University Press, 2016
This volume comprises a translation of the first post-modernist historical Arabic novella, You as of Today, by the renowned Jordanian writer Tayseer al-Sboul, and his two short stories “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry.” “Red Indian” and “The Rooster’s Cry” complement You as of Today by providing, with striking transparency and precision, narratives that examine man’s journey to self-discovery through events that are culturally unique, transparent, and at times shocking. This volume is rich with tales of war, love, politics, censorship, and the search for self in a complex and conflicting Arab world at a critical time in its history. In a captivating style consistent with the nature of events narrated in the text, al-Sboul unveils the inner nature of social, political, and religious patterns of life in Arab society with an honesty and skill that renders You as of Today My Homeland a testimony of human experiences that transcend the boundaries of time and place.
 
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You, Beast
Poems
Nick Lantz
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.
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You, Me, and the Violence
Catherine Taylor
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
“Things puppets can do to us: charm, deceive, captivate, fool, trick, remind, amuse, distract, bore, repulse, annoy, puzzle, transport, provoke, fascinate, stand in for, kill.” In YouMe, and the Violence, Catherine Taylor ponders the nature of personal and political autonomy, focusing on the surprising juxtaposition of puppetry and military drones. In a book at once politically significant and narratively engaging, Taylor blends genres to question the roles of individuals within society and expose the gritty and emotional underpinnings of the seemingly mechanical process of a remote soldier.
From conversations with her own brother about his military experiences to Punch and Judy, from the original tale of Pinocchio to the radio chatter of soldiers in active drone operation, Taylor writes about family, power, and the “theater” of war in a voice both sly and sobering, heartbreaking and hopeful.
 
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