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Nearly one hundred years after Franz Kafka’s death, his works continue to intrigue and haunt us. Kafka is regarded as one of the most significant intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and even for those who are only barely acquainted with his novels, stories, diaries, or letters, “Kafkaesque” has become a term synonymous with the menacing, unfathomable absurdity of modern existence and bureaucracy. While the significance of his fiction is wide-reaching, Kafka’s writing remains inextricably bound up with his life and work in a particular place: Prague. It is here that the author spent every one of his forty years.

Drawing from a range of documents and historical materials, this is the first book specifically dedicated to the relationship between Kafka and Prague. Klaus Wagenbach’s account of Kafka’s life in the city is a meticulously researched insight into the author’s family background, his education and employment, his attitude toward the town of his birth, his literary influences, and his relationships with women. The result is a fascinating portrait of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic writer and the city that provided him with so much inspiration. W. G. Sebald recognized that “literary and life experience overlap” in Kafka’s works, and the same is true of this book.
 

“Kaiso,” a term of praise that is the calypso equivalent of “bravo,” is a fitting title for this definitive and celebratory collection of writings by and about Katherine Dunham, the legendary African American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. Originally produced in the 1970s, this is a newly revised and much expanded edition that includes recent scholarly articles, Dunham’s essays on dance and anthropology, press reviews, interviews, and chapters from Dunham’s unpublished volume of memoirs, “Minefields.” With nearly a hundred selections by dozens of authors, Kaiso! provides invaluable insight into the life and work of this pioneering anthropologist and performer and is certain to become an essential resource for scholars and general readers interested in social anthropology, dance history, African American studies, or Katherine Dunham herself.

Howard Pawley, former Premier of Manitoba (1981-88) led the province during one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Elected at the outset of a serious national recession, his government successfully implemented social democtatic policies that ran counter to the neo-conservative trends that dominated the period, including job creation, labour reform, and human rights legislation. But his greatest challenge was over French-language rights, an explosive two-year debate that left the province badly divided and embroiled in the complicated maneuvering between the national government and Quebec serparatists. The political and public fallout from the French-language issue echoed through Manitoba's subsequent negotiations with the federal government over a bid for a lucrative CF-18 fighter jet contract, through the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement, and again during the stormy Meech Lake Accord debates. In Keep True: A Life in Politics Pawley takes us into the inner workings of his government during this controversial period. He gives us a vivid play-by-play of the events, acknowledging what went right and what went wrong, while putting it all into a contemporary context. Along the way, he offers insight on campaign management, choosing a cabinet, appointing public servants, and leading by consensus, while describing how the principles of Canadian agrarian socialism shaped his political vision.

Inspiring memoir of Colonel Harold H. Brown, one of the 930 original Tuskegee pilots, whose dramatic wartime exploits and postwar professional successes contribute to this extraordinary account.

Keep Your Airspeed Up: The Story of a Tuskegee Airman is the memoir of an African American man who, through dedication to his goals and vision, overcame the despair of racial segregation to great heights, not only as a military aviator, but also as an educator and as an American citizen.

Unlike other historical and autobiographical portrayals of Tuskegee airmen, Harold H. Brown’s memoir is told from its beginnings: not on the first day of combat, not on the first day of training, but at the very moment Brown realized he was meant to be a pilot. He revisits his childhood in Minneapolis where his fascination with planes pushed him to save up enough of his own money to take flying lessons. Brown also details his first trip to the South, where he was met with a level of segregation he had never before experienced and had never imagined possible.

During the 1930s and 1940s, longstanding policies of racial discrimination were called into question as it became clear that America would likely be drawn into World War II. The military reluctantly allowed for the development of a flight-training program for a limited number of African Americans on a segregated base in Tuskegee, Alabama. The Tuskegee Airmen, as well as other African Americans in the armed forces, had the unique experience of fighting two wars at once: one against Hitler’s fascist regime overseas and one against racial segregation at home.

Colonel Brown fought as a combat pilot with the 332nd Fighter Group during World War II, and was captured and imprisoned in Stalag VII A in Moosburg, Germany, where he was liberated by General George S. Patton on April 29, 1945. Upon returning home, Brown noted with acute disappointment that race relations in the United States hadn’t changed. It wasn’t until 1948 that the military desegregated, which many scholars argue would not have been possible without the exemplary performance of the Tuskegee Airmen.

In Keeping Faith, originally published in 1982, President Carter provides a candid account of his time in the Oval Office, detailing the hostage crisis in Iran, his triumph at the Camp David Middle East peace summit, his relationships with world leaders, and even glimpses into his private world. “Responsible, truthful, intelligent, earnest, rational, purposeful. Thus the man: thus the book” (The Washington Post).

Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY Awards) gold medalist

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what does belonging in a new place look like in the foods carried over from the old country? These questions are integral to the author’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food.

As a poet, public-facing scholar of sports politics, and former professional soccer player, having represented the United States on the men’s U23 national soccer team, Jules Boykoff draws on his lifetime of athletic experience to reflect on the practice of kicking. With short vignettes blending the personal, the reflective, the historical, and the analytical, Kicking is uniquely positioned to reflect on the most popular sport in the world. From the act of kicking a soccer ball, Boykoff looks outward to his own family history, including his mother’s struggle with polio, which fed her insistence on his athleticism; to broader trends like greenwashing and sportwashing; and to reflections on sport’s toxic masculinity, the poetics of on-field revenge, and the power-politics of both the men’s and women’s World Cups. Kicking is a must-read for all those who love the beautiful game.

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time.

Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence.

Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.

In September 1930, the New York Times published a list of the clergy whom Rabbi Stephen Wise considered "the ten foremost religious leaders in this country." The list included nine Christians and Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas. Little-known today, Henry Cohen was a rabbi to be reckoned with, a man Woodrow Wilson called "the foremost citizen of Texas" who also impressed the likes of William Howard Taft and Clarence Darrow. Cohen's fleeting fame, however, was built not on powerful friendships but on a lifetime of service to needy Jews—as well as gentiles—in London, South Africa, Jamaica, and, for the last sixty-four years of his life, Galveston, Texas.

More than 10,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, arrived in Galveston in the early twentieth century. Rabbi Cohen greeted many of the new arrivals in Yiddish, then helped them find jobs through a network that extended throughout the Southwest and Midwest United States. The "Galveston Movement," along with Cohen's pioneering work reforming Texas prisons and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, made the rabbi a legend in his time. As this portrait shows, however, he was also a lovable mensch to his grandson. Rabbi Henry Cohen II reminisces about his grandfather's jokes while placing the legendary rabbi in historical context, creating the best picture yet of this important Texan, a man perhaps best summarized by Rabbi Wise in the New York Times as "a soul who touches and kindles souls."

    For more than sixty years, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans personified the romantic, mythic West that America cherished well into the modern age. Blazing a trail through every branch of the entertainment industry—radio, film, recordings, television, and even comic books—the couple capitalized on their attractive personas and appealed to the nation's belief in family values, an independent spirit, community.
    King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West presents these two celebrities in the most comprehensive and inclusive account to date. Part narrative, part reference, this impeccably researched, highly accessible survey spans the entire scope of Rogers's and Evans's careers, illuminating and celebrating their place in twentieth-century American popular culture. Following the pair through each stage of their professional and personal trajectories, author Raymond E. White explores the unique alchemy of the singing cowboy and his free-spirited yet feminine partner. In a dual biography, he shows how Rogers and Evans carefully husbanded their public image and—of particular note—incorporated their Christian faith into their performances. And in a series of exhaustive appendixes, he documents their contributions to each medium they worked in. Testifying to both the breadth and the longevity of their careers, the book includes radio logs, discographies, filmographies, and comicographies that will delight historians and collectors alike. With its engaging tone and meticulous research, King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West is bound to become the definitive source on the lives of these two great American icons.

What does it mean to be instantly transformed into the most hated person in your community? After meeting Fidel Castro at a Havana reception in 1994, Cuban-born Magda Montiel Davis, founder of one of the largest immigration law firms in South Florida, soon found out. The reception—attended by hundreds of other Cuban émigrés—was videotaped for historical archives. In a seconds-long clip, Fidel pecks the traditional protocol kiss on Montiel Davis’s cheek as she thanks him for the social benefits conferred upon the Cuban people. The video, however, was mysteriously sold to U.S. reporters and aired incessantly throughout South Florida. Soon the encounter was an international cause célèbre.

Life as she knew it was over for Montiel Davis and her family, including a father who worked with the CIA to topple Fidel, a nohablo-inglés mother who lived with the family, her five children, and her Jewish Brooklyn-born attorney husband. Kissing Fidel shares the sometimes dismal, sometimes comical realities of an ordinary citizen being thrown into a world of death threats, mob attacks, and terrorism.

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award

Though not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Barack Obama, and dozens of others. The selections move from speeches to letters to book excerpts, mapping the changing contours of the bond--emotional and intellectual--between Lincoln and Black Americans over the span of one hundred and fifty years.

A comprehensive and valuable reader, Knowing Him by Heart examines Lincoln’s still-evolving place in Black American thought.

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.

If you are a casual reader who wants an intriguing glimpse into Eskimo life, a novice oral historian who wants to know how it is done right, or a student of Alaska who wants an Inupiat perspective of the changes that swept the western Arctic this century, read Kusiq.
(Journal of the West)

A vivid 'inside' account of an observant Eskimo male who mastered much of the traditional subsistence technology and lore and who lived through the end of commercial whaling, the development and decline of introduced reindeer herding and the fur market, and through World War II and its aftermath. In its scope as well as in the presentation of historical, cultural, and linguistic context,Kusiq is far more extensive than [other] autobiographies.
(American Indian Culture and Research Journal)

Kusiq represents a new wave in literature, the expressions of cultural awakenings among native American cultures, the attempt to redefine the native world in written form, to recast history, a history for too long the domain of the white system.
(ARCTIC)

It would be difficult to find a better, more interesting first-person account of Eskimo life during the first half of this century. [It is] second in an ambitious series of oral histories developed by the University of Alaska Press.
(Scan-A-Book)

The collaborators for this book include William Schneider, curator of oral history at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Leona Kisautaq Okakok, manager of the Arctic Education Foundation at the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; and James Mumigana Nageak, coordinator of bilingual and multicultural instruction at the North Slope Borough School District. Schneider recorded and compiled Bodfish's stories, while Okakok and Nageak, both Inupiaq Eskimo language specialists, contributed their skills in interviewing, translating, and clarifying Inupiaq concepts. The book contains twelve chapters of Bodfish's narrative, background and commentary by the collaborators, and information on pronunciation, personal names, genealogical relations, and place names.