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Diaries from the House of Atonement offers a rare glimpse into the intellectual world of Yang Zengxin (1864–1928), the pragmatic ruler who maintained relative stability in Xinjiang from the fall of the Qing dynasty until his assassination in 1928.

Rather than recounting his administration, Yang's diaries explore Confucian and Daoist thought, personal cultivation, political philosophy, and China's uncertain future. They reveal the intellectual principles that may have shaped his approach to governance, including his reflections on moral order, cultural tradition, and religion.

The diaries also show Yang's understanding of the Bagua (八卦) and the I Ching, showing how classical Chinese philosophy could inform practical life and political thought. This translation introduces English-language readers to Yang not merely as a regional ruler, but as a reflective thinker whose writings illuminate the encounter between Chinese tradition, political crisis, religious thought, and the search for social order. 

Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmand’s diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistance—as a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the "spiritual father" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Poland—to maintain his freedom of thought.

Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

In addition, the editors include a wealth of important supplementary material. Barbara Klaw provides a detailed consideration of the Diary’s role in the development of Beauvoir’s writing style by exploring her use of metanarrative and other literary techniques, part of a process of literary creation that saw Beauvoir use the notebooks to cultivate her talent. Margaret A. Simons’s essay places the assault by Sartre within an appraisal of Beauvoir’s complicated legacy for #MeToo while suggesting readers engage with the diary through the lens of trauma.

Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867–68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for “the republic of [his] imagination.” From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth. 

This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.

Laurie Lee Hall’s growing-up years were defined by the conflict between her physical condition as a boy and her inherent identity as a girl. Unable to explain or resolve her gender dysphoria, she committed to living her adult life as a male. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, eventually becoming chief architect of its temples and an ecclesiastical leader. In her church and community, rigid adherence to gender roles is not only the norm, but the defining issue of a faith that doctrinally declares one’s gender as an “eternal identity.” Against this traditional backdrop, Hall finally received spiritual confirmation and personally accepted that she was transgender and always had been. In this remarkable memoir, Laurie Lee details how she risked everything to live true to her long-suppressed gender identity.

Through the power of lived experience, Laurie Lee’s story affirms the reality of gender identity and the strength and joy of self-acceptance.

Laurie Lee Hall’s growing-up years were defined by the conflict between her physical condition as a boy and her inherent identity as a girl. Unable to explain or resolve her gender dysphoria, she committed to living her adult life as a male. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, eventually becoming chief architect of its temples and an ecclesiastical leader. In her church and community, rigid adherence to gender roles is not only the norm, but the defining issue of a faith that doctrinally declares one’s gender as an “eternal identity.” Against this traditional backdrop, Hall finally received spiritual confirmation and personally accepted that she was transgender and always had been. In this remarkable memoir, Laurie Lee details how she risked everything to live true to her long-suppressed gender identity.

Through the power of lived experience, Laurie Lee’s story affirms the reality of gender identity and the strength and joy of self-acceptance.

The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and one of the most beautiful women ever to grace a throne, was the victim of her own inconstant mind. A daughter of an aristocratic Spanish family, she had a natural reverence for legitimate monarchy; yet her high-spirited temperament and chivalric outlook made her admire instinctively the boldness and aura of glory that she associated with the Napoleonic empire. The incongruous principles of Legitimism and Bonapartism battling within the Empress produced in her a double-mindedness that had tragic consequences.

The Empress has always been a controversial figure. Her enemies have blamed her the fall of the Second Empire and the defeat of France; her admirers have disclaimed for her any part in the mistakes that led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870. To determine the actual role that Eugénie played, Barker, using material from public and private European archives and a wide range of published works, examines in Distaff Diplomacy the development of the Empress' views on foreign affairs and ascertains their effect on the formation of the policies of the Second Empire.

Eugénie's influence fluctuated widely over the years. As a bride she was neither interested in nor knowledgable about foreign matters; as a middle-aged woman, in the late years of the Empire, she was discredited by her past errors, but she continued to pull strings outside of normal diplomatic channels. Her most sustained and effective work, from 1861 to 1863, was largely the inspiration for a grand design to remake the map to assure French hegemony in Europe and to establish an empire in Mexico. The success of this design rested on an Austro-French alliance; but the design itself, reflecting the Empress' incoherent thinking, contained the fatal inconsistencies that made Austrian rejection of it inevitable. Since the Mexican expedition and the diplomatic muddle of 1863 were the watershed from which the subsequent troubles of the Empire flowed, the Empress must be held responsible for seriously undermining the foreign policy of the Empire. Despite Eugénie's many fine qualities—her generosity of spirit, her splendid courage, and her moral integrity—her diplomatic efforts, affected as they were by her background, temperament, state of health, and changing moods, did not amount to statesmanship. This first systematic examination of the Empress' influence on foreign policy delves deeply and carefully into the subject.

Where rivers, railroads, and redhorse fish tell the story of Alabama’s soul.

A gateway to Alabama for the omnivorous mind, Distracted by Alabama is a collection of twelve captivating essays about Alabama and the South by Samford University writer and scholar Jim Brown, a former president of the Alabama Folklife Association.

During his decades living and teaching in Alabama, Brown followed his curiosity down myriad pathways about Alabama and the region, including the state’s majestic landscape, plants and animals found nowhere else, history, and rich folkways. In the tapestry of Alabama culture, Brown traces the threads of Native American, African slave, and European settler influences, woven over the centuries into novel patterns that surprise and fascinate.  

Writing in the voice of a learned companion, Brown reveals insights and stories about unforgettable facets of Alabama culture, such as Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and a wealth of other engrossing stories.

An instant classic, Distracted by Alabama is a keepsake that readers who love, visit, or are curious about Alabama and Southern culture will return to again and again.
 

A life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy

Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”

Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”

In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
 

Drawing on Terry’s long friendships and professional associations, Dizzy, Duke, Brother Ray, and Friends offers readers a rare opportunity to hear intimate conversations with some of the world’s greatest musical figures. Dizzy Gillespie offers his thoughts on playing with “sanctified” rhythm and the all-important personal touch in performance. Duke Ellington discourses on jazz history and concludes an interview to sing a self-written ditty in Italian. Ray Charles gives candid thoughts on race and politics while taking charge of Terry’s tape recorder. Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Horace Silver, Bill Evans—all provide Terry and her readers with unforgettable encounters. The result is a collection of profiles, some stretching over a decade or more, that reveal these performers in ways that illuminate their humanity and expand our appreciation of their art.

Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards, Inspirational Memoir (Female) 

“An arresting new memoir….”
– Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys, says “Dizzy is a testament to the power of hope. Weaver’s courage and strength are so inspiring they encourage the same in the reader.  If all of that isn’t enough, the beauty and agility of the prose may make you regret reaching the last page.” 

In her early thirties, Rachel Weaver woke up dizzy and unable to function. She spent the next ten years seeing more than thirty medical practitioners before receiving a diagnosis, and then another eight years before finding relief from her condition. Dizzy is amedical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken healthcare system. It is a story about learning to live with life's uncertainty, persevering in the pursuit of answers, and striving to find joy in an imperfect yet beautiful world.

Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician

After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.” 

Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.

Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

In 1973 Jim Shames, a young doctor questioning life in a country divided by the Vietnam War, learned of a counterculture community in Southern Oregon interested in establishing its own medical clinic. A recent graduate from medical school, with limited hands-on experience as a doctor, Jim found the promise and opportunity of a community in the woods, far from the turmoil of the times, appealing. In a leap of faith, he joined the back-to-the-earth movement and became a country doctor. 

In the impoverished Illinois River Valley of Southern Oregon, Shames moved to Takilma and the Mystic Mountain commune. There Shames found a home, family, and fulfilling work at the Takilma People’s Clinic. It was a different world, offering an alternative journey and self-reflection. Surrounded by uninhibited friendliness, joy, and music, Doctor Jim cared for the patients of the community. Collectively the clinic treated rattlesnake bites, gunshot wounds, obstetrical complications, meningitis, cancer, and more for the residents of Southern Oregon.

Doctor Jim offers a window into communal life and the challenges of healthcare in rural Oregon. Shames highlights the struggles and rewards to be found in simple daily activities with like-minded souls sharing emotional and physical work. In reflecting on his unique medical career, Shames teaches that healing is about the intimate interaction between the patient and the doctor rather than medications or procedures. What started as an experiment evolved into a medical practice caring for a broader community beyond its counterculture brethren.