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A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

A powerful family memoir about inheritance, identity, and the pull of the sea

Surrendered as an infant in America, Maria “Mia” was taken in by Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts—a gritty working-class town steeped in salt and tradition. She inherits a name that traces back to 19th-century Sicily, where her great-grandfather was abandoned as a newborn on la ruota dei proietti, the “wheel of the castoffs.” Christened Millefoglie, “a thousand leaves, a thousand pages,” he crossed the bold Atlantic to America’s shores, carrying with him a legacy of endurance and exile.

For generations, the Millefoglie men went to sea: dorymen who rose before dawn to cast their nets along jagged coastlines, captains of eastern-rig draggers navigating storms that could split a vessel in half, stowaways chasing the promise of a life they could scarcely imagine. They lived by tides, currents, and the unspoken rules of the ocean; their courage and skill tested daily by wind and water. The women, left on shore, learned a different kind of survival, keeping households, raising children, and enduring the constant absence of fathers, brothers, and husbands. 

Into this world of fishermen and keepers of the shore, Mia was adopted, learning early that bloodlines dictate identity and tradition shapes fate. College is forbidden; marriages are arranged, and no one abandons the family. By nineteen, trapped in a fish-packing job and lost in a haze of drugs, Mia does the unthinkable: she leaves. Decades later, drawn back to Gloucester’s weathered harbor to care for her aging parents, Mia begins to unearth her family’s buried stories, tracing the lineage from a Sicilian orphanage to a New England fishing port and the invisible inheritance that shaped them all. 

Both intimate and historical, Daughters of Stone and Tide is a meditation on identity, abandonment, and belonging—a fisherman’s daughter’s search to understand the forces that bind and break a family across generations and seas.

A paean to traveling by train, to the variety of Europe’s landscape, and to an immersive way of approaching and seeing the world.

For Millay Hyatt, it is the charm of “uncushioned encounters with the world” that makes her, whenever possible, choose to travel by train. 

Days on the Night Train is a story of serendipities and missed connections, of sluggish border crossings, of embracing unpredictability and shunning the stifling regimentation of contemporary travel. In her accounts of her journeys across Europe and beyond, ranging from Edinburgh to Tunis, from Valencia to Tbilisi, Hyatt shows us that it is in movement that our perspective changes, and that this is never truer than when traveling by train, at half speed, with wide carriage windows framing a slowly shifting world. Inside, surrounded by strangers, she becomes intrigued by the intimate habits of her fellow passengers, listens in on arguing couples and bantering teenagers, and gives her imagination free rein to speculate about their lives. Later, in a couchette, even sleep takes on an unfamiliar quality, echoing Proust’s comment that people on trains sleep like fish in the sea, gently rocked by the waves and currents. 

Traveling by rail brings Hyatt into contact with the world in a way that disturbs and upends her certainties. Perception slows and widens. Experiencing the excitement of departure and arrival—and in between the bittersweet joy of being in limbo, of looking inward—she notices how long train journeys, like books, can still alter us in a way jet travel has all but extinguished. Days on the Night Train is itself a journey, abundant with reflection, poetic observation, revealing encounter, and literary excursions. 

Randomized experiments—often referred to as the gold standard of research design—are generally accepted as the type of studies that provide the strongest evidence about cause and effect. There has been a wide adoption of experimental methods in agriculture, medicine, industrial design, and laboratory social sciences, such as experimental psychology, where conditions can be controlled. Since then, there has been an increase in the use of field experiments to provide evidence of cause and effect beyond the laboratory. However, the social settings in which these studies take place complicate the design and evaluation of experiments because their social contexts must be taken into account in order for the experiment to provide useful and unambiguous results. In Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, statistician Larry V. Hedges details how to design educational and social science field experiments that are sensitive enough to provide clear-cut evidence on the effects of social interventions.

Hedges draws on one hundred years of statistical theory and classic experimental design in Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences. Highlighting the social-structural information embedded in field experiments, he links this history with contemporary statistical methods in the social sciences to explain how to design social experiments that are adequately sensitive to determine the influence of an intervention. He covers the four basic research designs—and 39 elaborations of those designs—that are used most often in social experiments while also introducing additional, more complex, designs. He brings together, in the same notation, work on experimental design, design sensitivity, and optimal design of experiments for the most frequently used research designs in education and the social sciences, emphasizing their conceptual consistency. Hedges also discusses the practical problems of how to recruit and maintain a sample throughout the duration of an experiment.

Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences is an essential resource for researchers planning educational and social field experiments and graduate students.

With high-profile Academy Award nominations and an increasing number of big-name actors eager to sign on to promising projects, independent films have been at the forefront in recent years like never before. But the roots of such critical and commercial successes as The Hurt Locker and Precious can be traced to the first boom of independent cinema in the 1960s, when a raft of talented filmmakers emergedto capture the attention of a rapidly growing audience of young viewers.

A thorough overview of a thriving area of cultural life, Directory of World Cinema: American Independent chronicles the rise of the independent sector as an outlet for directors who challenge the status quo, yet still produce accessible feature films that not only find wide audiences but enjoy considerable box office appeal—without sacrificing critical legitimacy. Key directors are interviewed and profiled, and a sizeable selection of films are referenced and reviewed. More than a dozen sub-genres—including African American cinema, queer cinema, documentary, familial dysfunction, and exploitation—are individually considered, with an emphasis on their ability to engage with tensions inherent in American society. Copious illustrations and a range of research resources round out the volume, making this a truly comprehensive guide.

At a time when independent films are enjoying considerable cultural cachet, this easy-to-use yet authoritative guide will find an eager audience in media historians, film studies scholars, and movie buffs alike.

This addition to Intellect's Directory of World Cinema series turns the spotlight on Australia and New Zealand and offers an in-depth and exciting look at the cinema produced in these two countries since the turn of the twentieth century.  Though the two nations share considerable cultural and economic connections, their film industries remain distinct, marked by differences of scale, level of government involvement and funding, and relations with other countries and national cinemas. Through essays about prominent genres and themes, profiles of directors, and comprehensive reviews of significant titles, this user-friendly guide explores the diversity and distinctiveness of films from Australia and New Zealand from Whale Rider to The Piano to Wolf Creek.