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This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the “Dancing Outlaw.”

Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing  in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their feelings of love, anger, and guilt.
 
Today, young Sora are rejecting the worldview of their ancestors and switching their allegiance to warring sects of fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism. Communion with ancestors is banned as sacred sites are demolished, female shamans are replaced by male priests, and debate with the dead gives way to prayer to gods. For some, this shift means liberation from jungle spirits through literacy, employment, and democratic politics; others despair for fear of being forgotten after death.
 
How can a society abandon one understanding of reality so suddenly and see the world in a totally different way? Over forty years, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has shared the lives of shamans, pastors, ancestors, gods, policemen, missionaries, and alphabet worshippers, seeking explanations from social theory, psychoanalysis, and theology. Living without the Dead lays bare today’s crisis of indigenous religions and shows how historical reform can bring new fulfillments—but also new torments and uncertainties.
 
Vitebsky explores the loss of the Sora tradition as one for greater humanity: just as we have been losing our wildernesses, so we have been losing a diverse range of cultural and spiritual possibilities, tribe by tribe. From the award-winning author of The Reindeer People, this is a heartbreaking story of cultural change and the extinction of an irreplaceable world, even while new religious forms come into being to take its place.

Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.

The son of a coal miner from a small Illinois town, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman lived the American dream until his untimely death at age twenty-nine. In his brief life, he reached the pinnacle of baseball success as the best shortstop in the American League. While many professional ballplayers struggled with meager salaries, the handsome Chapman had married heiress Kathleen Daly, one of Cleveland’s wealthiest women. With a child on the way and an executive job in the offseason, Chapman was moving toward a privileged place in society until an errant fastball fractured his skull and ended his life the next day. Late in the 1920 pennant race, the Indians were in New York for a key series against the Yankees. New York pitcher Carl Mays threw a high hard one that Chapman could not evade. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors tried in vain to save his life. The tragedy did not end there. His widow took her own life eight years later, and their daughter, Rae, subsequently died from meningitis. Today, people visit Chapman’s impressive grave in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, leaving baseballs and gloves in his memory. Though gone over a hundred years, he is well remembered as a Cleveland icon. This book goes far beyond the well-worn accounts of Chapman’s untimely death to illustrate the fullness of his short life.