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Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has struggled for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. This is the story of how he fought for the human rights of his patients and overcame the Israeli authorities' cruel indifference to their suffering.

Kanaaneh is a native of Galilee, born before the creation of Israel. He left to study medicine at Harvard, before returning to work as a public health physician with the intention of helping his own people. He discovered a shocking level of disease and malnutrition in his community and a shameful lack of support from the Israeli authorities. After doing all he could for his patients by working from inside the system, Kanaaneh set up The Galilee Society, an NGO working for equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.

This is a brilliant memoir that shows how grass roots organisations can loosen the Zionist grip upon Palestinian lives.

An unparalleled portrait of nineteenth-century social reform and the magnetic oratory that gave it force, told through the career of temperance advocate John B. Gough.

John B. Gough was perhaps nineteenth-century America’s most famous ex-drunkard—a man who had hit rock bottom but then found the determination to recover and preach sobriety with unusual scope and impact. Through an exploration of Gough’s life, Thomas Augst investigates a world in which a public speaker could achieve immense fame by delivering a remarkable 12,000 popular lectures over his lifetime across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Gough kept a voluminous archive of his comings and goings, day after day, speech after speech. Augst is among the first scholars to fully mine these materials, and he uses them to illuminate the redemptive power of storytelling in the lives of citizens. In the process, A Drunkard’s Story follows an itinerant journey through the cultural history of social reform. 

John Gough’s life was fascinating in its own right, but Augst’s exploration of it also opens a window onto a rich interplay among performance, autobiography, and celebrity. The ways that people flocked to hear Gough tell his tale, and the contagious enthusiasm with which he was greeted far and wide, might seem from another time—but also surprisingly contemporary in the age of the influencer.

Exploring Florida's cultural landscape through the life of a legendary fiddler.

This biography of 97-year-old Richard Seaman, who grew up in Kissimmee Park, Florida, relies on oral history and folklore research to define the place of musicianship and storytelling in the state's history from one artist's perspective. Gregory Hansen presents Seaman’s assessment of Florida’s changing cultural landscape through his tall tales, personal experience narratives, legends, fiddle tune repertory, and descriptions of daily life.

Seaman’s childhood memories of fiddling performances and rural dances explain the role such gatherings played in building and maintaining social order within the community. As an adult, Seaman moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he worked as a machinist and performed with his family band. The evolution of his musical repertory from the early 1920s through the 1950s provides a resource for reconstructing social life in the rural south and for understanding how changes in musical style reflect the state's increasingly urban social structure. Hansen includes a set of Seaman's fiddle tunes, transcribed for the benefit of performer and researcher alike. The thirty tall tales included in the volume constitute a representative sample of Florida’s oral tradition in the early years of the 20th century.
 

Melanie Holmes tells the story of Johnston's journey from a nature-loving Boy Scout to a committed geologist. Blending science with personal detail, Holmes follows Johnston through his encounters with Aleutian volcanoes, his work helping the Portuguese government assess the geothermal power of the Azores, and his dream job as a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Interviews and personal writings reveal what a friend called “the most unjaded person I ever met,” an imperfect but kind and intelligent young scientist passionately in love with his life and work and determined to make a difference.

Melanie Holmes tells the story of Johnston's journey from a nature-loving Boy Scout to a committed geologist. Blending science with personal detail, Holmes follows Johnston through his encounters with Aleutian volcanoes, his work helping the Portuguese government assess the geothermal power of the Azores, and his dream job as a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Interviews and personal writings reveal what a friend called “the most unjaded person I ever met,” an imperfect but kind and intelligent young scientist passionately in love with his life and work and determined to make a difference.

In A Hundred Himalayas, Sydney Lea has collected a group of essays written over 30 years, representing what he refers to as the persistence of preoccupations and the absence of theory---a group of speculations, each one a single Himalaya, together a great elevation achieved in small increments. His musings on his own "favored genius," Robert Frost, his own approach to literary criticism, imagination, the American nature essay, rural life, the process of writing a poem, and fitting writing into everyday life all combine to create a picture of the things that interest Lea. "If there is grandeur at all in this volume," he says, "then, it must come in small increments." All of his small increments of gentle and insightful writing combine to create a collection that is, indeed, grand.

The people who describe their experiences with diabetes range from teenagers to physicians, immigrants, athletes, pregnant women, accountants, a prisoner, and a dairy farmer. They speak of the variety of ways they handle monitoring, diet, insurance coverage, sports, and fashion. Some talk of how they manage to drive trucks for a living or, for recreation, fly airplanes or go spelunking. Many speak frankly of their anxieties and frustrations.

The authors acknowledge that both the patient and clinician have a story about their relationship, and describe the richness and tension in their interaction. Families, too, are sources of both support and conflict. These relationships are acknowledged in the organization of the book, which is divided into sections defined by the main elements of diabetes control: patient self-determination, the role of the family, the social situation, and the patient-clinician encounter.

The book provides a wealth of information about diabetes, including material on prevention, complications, and new technology, as well as a superb glossary, but it is not intended as a textbook on diabetes or as a self-care manual for patients. Rather the book provides a textured account of the health professional's view of diabetes control and the perspective of the patient whose life is complicated by diabetes.

The people who describe their experiences with diabetes range from teenagers to physicians, immigrants, athletes, pregnant women, accountants, a prisoner, and a dairy farmer. They speak of the variety of ways they handle monitoring, diet, insurance coverage, sports, and fashion. Some talk of how they manage to drive trucks for a living or, for recreation, fly airplanes or go spelunking. Many speak frankly of their anxieties and frustrations.

The authors acknowledge that both the patient and clinician have a story about their relationship, and describe the richness and tension in their interaction. Families, too, are sources of both support and conflict. These relationships are acknowledged in the organization of the book, which is divided into sections defined by the main elements of diabetes control: patient self-determination, the role of the family, the social situation, and the patient-clinician encounter.

The book provides a wealth of information about diabetes, including material on prevention, complications, and new technology, as well as a superb glossary, but it is not intended as a textbook on diabetes or as a self-care manual for patients. Rather the book provides a textured account of the health professional's view of diabetes control and the perspective of the patient whose life is complicated by diabetes.

Cape Cod is known for its beaches, throngs of summer visitors, and the activities that accompany seaside living, but it is also home to many kettle ponds, which offer a more tranquil setting. Formed from glaciers breaking apart and so named due to a rounded shape that appears like a kettle, these waterways are home to a diverse array of wildlife, while remaining peaceful and even a bit hidden.

Big enough for a canoeist to feel solitude and serenity, small enough to not appear on large-scale maps, Centerville’s Long Pond (one of seven on the Cape that share this name), consists of fifty-one acres of crystal clear waters, fresh air, and the fish, turtles, waterfowl, ospreys, and otters that call this special place home. In A Moving Meditation, Stephen G. Waller offers an intimate look at the pond’s intriguing natural and human history; its abundant animal life, across the seasons; and the encroaching effects of climate change.

The first in-depth look at white people’s activism in fighting racism during the past fifty years.

Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when many white college students went south to fight against Jim Crow laws, has white antiracist activity held the public’s attention. Yet there have always been white people involved in fighting racism. In this passionate work, Becky Thompson looks at white Americans who have struggled against racism, offering examples of both successes and failures, inspirations, practical philosophies, and a way ahead.

A Promise and a Way of Life weaves an account of the past half-century based on the life histories of thirty-nine people who have placed antiracist activism at the center of their lives. Through a rich and fascinating narrative that links individual experiences with social and political history, Thompson shows the ways, both public and personal, in which whites have opposed racism during several social movements: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, multiracial feminism, the Central American peace movement, the struggle for antiracist education, and activism against the prison industry. Beginning with the diverse catalysts that started these activists on their journeys, this book demonstrates the contributions and limitations of white antiracism in key social justice movements.

Through these stories, crucial questions are raised: Does antiracist work require a repudiation of one’s whiteness or can that identity be transformed through political commitment and alliances? What do white people need to do to undermine white privilege? What would it take to build a multiracial movement in which white people are responsible for creating antiracist alliances while not co-opting people of color?

Unique in its depth and thoroughness, A Promise and a Way of Life is essential for anyone currently fighting racism or wondering how to do so. Through its demonstration of the extraordinary personal and social transformations ordinary people can make, it provides a new paradigm for movement activity, one that will help to incite and guide future antiracist activism.

When Mary Livermore died in 1905 at age 84, a Boston newspaper praised her as “America's foremost woman.” A leading figure in the struggle for woman's rights as well as in the temperance movement, she was as widely recognized during her lifetime as Susan B. Anthony, and for a time the most popular and highly paid female orator in the country. Yet aside from Civil War historians familiar with her service as a wartime nurse, few today remember even her name.

In this book, Wendy Hamand Venet reconstructs Mary Livermore's remarkable story and explores how and why she became so renowned in her day. Born and raised in Boston, Livermore left home at age eighteen to become the private schoolteacher to a wealthy tobacco planter's children in Virginia, an experience that afforded her an intimate look at slave-based society in the 1840s. Returning to New England, she married and lived a conventional life as the wife of a minister and mother of three daughters. With the coming of the Civil War, however, Livermore's life changed dramatically when she became active with the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that would propel her into the public limelight and cause her to challenge society's traditional view of the role of women. 

After the war Livermore became deeply involved in the woman's rights movement, serving as editor of the newspaper Woman's Journal and later as president of three major suffrage organizations—the American, New England, and Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Associations. She was also founder and president of the Massachusetts Women's Christian Temperance Union, and became active in the Society of Christian Socialists in Boston. Her frequent speaking appearances on behalf of these causes eventually earned her the nickname “Queen of the Platform.” Although she may not have been as radical as some other early feminists, Livermore's ideas resonated with thousands of middle-class women whose experiences paralleled her own. For that reason alone, Venet shows, her life and legacy are worthy of our attention.

This true story of the Texas brush range and the first cowboys, as thrilling as any tale of fiction, has become a classic in Western literature. It is the story of the land where cattle by tens of thousands were killed on the prairie and where the "Skinning War" was fought. It is the story of the Chisholm Trail up to Abilene and the Platte and of establishing a ranch on the free grass of the Texas Panhandle, of roping elk in Colorado, of trailing Billy the Kid in New Mexico, of the grim lands of the Pecos. And it is the story of John Young, old-time vaquero who was trail driver, hog chaser, sheriff, ranger, hunter of Mexican bandits, horse thief killer, prairie fire fighter, ranch manager, and other things—a man who was also something of a dreamer, a man of imagination.

Writing in his late teens and early twenties, Sāmī ‘Amr gave his diary an apt subtitle: The Battle of Life, encapsulating both the political climate of Palestine in the waning years of the British Mandate as well as the contrasting joys and troubles of family life. Now translated from the Arabic, Sāmī's diary represents a rare artifact of turbulent change in the Middle East.

Written over four years, these ruminations of a young man from Hebron brim with revelations about daily life against a backdrop of tremendous transition. Describing the public and the private, the modern and the traditional, Sāmī muses on relationships, his station in life, and other universal experiences while sharing numerous details about a pivotal moment in Palestine's modern history. Making these never-before-published reflections available in translation, Kimberly Katz also provides illuminating context for Sāmī's words, laying out biographical details of Sāmī, who kept his diary private for close to sixty years. One of a limited number of Palestinian diaries available to English-language readers, the diary of Sāmī ‘Amr bridges significant chasms in our understanding of Middle Eastern, and particularly Palestinian, history.