448 books match the query 'Interviews' and 80 start with t

cover of Taking the Naturalistic Turn, Or How Real Philosophy of Science Is Done

Taking the Naturalistic Turn, Or How Real Philosophy of Science Is Done

Edited Organized and Moderated by Werner Callebaut

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly.

This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants.

Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt.

"Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher

"Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd
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cover of Tales Out of School: Selected Interviews

Tales Out of School

Selected Interviews

Robert Creeley

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Since the publication of Robert Creeley’s first book of poems, Le Fou, more than forty years ago, he has emerged as one of the most important and original voices in contemporary poetry. Tales Out of School selects five extended interviews that point to Creeley’s artistic influences and reveal the subjects that have preoccupied the poet’s imagination. The interviews cover a range of themes, including Creeley’s childhood and early writing, the influence of jazz on his work, the history of the Black Mountain School, the relationship of geography to the creative process, and the influences and friendship of other poets, including Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, Levertov, Duncan, and Olson. Taken together, the interviews provide an active context for and complement an understanding of this significant and prolific poet’s achievement.
 
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cover of Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets

Talk Poetry

Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets

David Baker

University of Arkansas Press, 2012

What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.
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cover of Talking All Morning

Talking All Morning

Robert Bly

University of Michigan Press, 1980

Robert Bly is the author of many books, including Jumping Out of Bed, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Iron John: A Book About Men. He has translated Neruda, Vallejo, and Lorca and received the National Book Award for his collection The Light Around the Body. His most recent book is The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, with Marion Woodman.
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cover of Talking Leadership: Conversations with Powerful Women

Talking Leadership

Conversations with Powerful Women

Hartman, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Talking Leadership presents a though-provoking look at differences and commonalities in the lives and leadership approaches of some of today's outstanding women in areas ranging from philanthropy to politics, and from business to academia. Regardless of their backgrounds and areas of expertise, these women are committed to social change--change that includes improving women's lives and options. 

Well beyond personal details and entertaining anecdotes, these conversations capture a variety of fascinating experiences and insights reflecting what it is like to be a woman and a major leader in America at the close of the twentieth century. Many of these women hold positions in which womanhood sets them apart--not infrequently in uncomfortable ways. Talking Leadership gives testimony not only to how far women have come, but also how far they still have to go to claim their places as leaders. 

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cover of Talking Leadership: Conversations with Powerful Women

Talking Leadership

Conversations with Powerful Women

Hartman, Mary

Rutgers University Press, 1999

Whether we love it, hate it, or use it just to pass the time, most adults in the United States are watching more television than ever, up to four hours a day by some estimates. Our devotion to commercial television gives it unprecedented power in our lives.

Advertisers and television executives want us to spend as much time as we can in front of our sets, for it is access to our brains that they buy and sell. Yet the most important effect of television may be one that no one intends-accelerated destruction of the natural environment.

Consuming Environments explores how, with its portrayal of a world of simulated abundance, television has nurtured a culture of consumerism and overconsumption. The average person in the US consumers more than twice the grain and ten times the oil of a citizen of Brazil or Indonesia. And people in less industrialized countries suffer while their resources while their resources are commandeered to support comfortable lifestyles in richer nations.

Using detailed examples illustrated with images from actual commercials, news broadcasts, and television shows, and authors demonstrate how ads and programs are put together in complex way s to manipulate viewers, and they offer specific ways to counteract the effects of TV and overconsumption's assault on the environment.

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cover of Talking with the Children of God: Prophecy and Transformation in a Radical Religious Group

Talking with the Children of God

Prophecy and Transformation in a Radical Religious Group

Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Grounded in direct, systematic observation by neutral observers, Talking with the Children of God is a unique study of the radical religious movement now known as The Family International. The book draws on extraordinarily candid interviews with the group's leaders and administrative staff. In revealing new information about the organization's history, beliefs, and use of prophecy, Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd offer a highly detailed case study that is both an antidote to sensationalized coverage of the group and a means for understanding the transformational practices of new religious movements in general.

One of the most controversial groups emerging from the Jesus People movement of the 1960s, the Family originally was known as The Children of God. Under leader David Berg, members proclaimed an apocalyptic "Endtime," shunned secular occupations, lived communally, and adopted unusual sexual practices that led to abuse scandals in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Berg's death in 1994, the organization began to dramatically alter its evangelization efforts and decision-making processes.

Talking with the Children of God builds a picture of a complex organization with ten thousand core members worldwide, including details on the lives, careers, and responsibilities of the second generation and their efforts to defend their faith. The authors summarize the Family's history and beliefs as well as its controversial past. In particular, they analyze the organization's use of prophecy--or channeled revelations from Jesus and other spiritual beings--for making decisions and setting policy, revealing how this essentially democratic process works and how it shapes Family life and culture.

These remarkable insights are the result of sixteen years of surveys and field observations conducted in Family member homes in sixteen countries, plus four days of face-to-face interviews with Family leaders and organizational staff. The volume also includes condensed transcripts of the interviews with analysis by Shepherd and Shepherd.

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cover of Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs

Technoscientific Imaginaries

Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs

Edited by George E. Marcus

University of Chicago Press, 1995

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the twentieth century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? Techno-Scientific Imaginaries explores these and other important questions at the approach of the new millennium.

In these penetrating essays, twenty-four distinguished contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves—through interviews, conversations, and memoirs. We hear from Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics, and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers, and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

The contributors to this volume are Mario Biagioli, Maria E. Carson, Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Hugh Gusterson, Diana L. L. Hill, James Holston, Herbert C. Hoover, Jr., Gudrun Klein, Leszek Koczanowicz, Irene Kuter, Kim Laughlin, Rita Linggood, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Livia Polanyi, Christopher Pound, Simon Powell, Paul Rabinow, Kathleen Stewart, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and Sharon Traweek.
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cover of Telling Stories, Writing Songs: An Album of Texas Songwriters

Telling Stories, Writing Songs

An Album of Texas Songwriters

By Kathleen Hudson

University of Texas Press, 2001

Willie Nelson, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, Tish Hinojosa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lyle Lovett...the list of popular songwriters from Texas just goes on and on. In this collection of thirty-four interviews with these and other songwriters, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs, letting the singers' own words describe where their songs come from and how the diverse, eclectic cultures, landscapes, and musical traditions of Texas inspire the creative process.

Conducted in dance halls, dressing rooms, parking lots, clubs-wherever the musicians could take time to tell their stories-the interviews are refreshingly spontaneous and vivid. Hudson draws out the songwriters on such topics as the sources of their songs, the influence of other musicians on their work, the progress of their careers, and the nature of Texas music. Many common threads emerge from these stories, while the uniqueness of each songwriter becomes equally apparent. To round out the collection, Hudson interviews Larry McMurtry and Darrell Royal for their perspectives as longtime friends and fans of Texas musicians. She also includes a brief biography and discography of each songwriter.

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cover of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist

Tender Comrades

A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist

Patrick McGilligan

University of Minnesota Press, 2012


More than sixty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood. In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed, whose lives and careers were ruined, finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in cinematic courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors (including two members of the Hollywood Ten), seminal directors of film noir and other genres, starring actresses and memorable supporting players, top screenwriters, and many less known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here that, beyond politics, open a rich window into moviemaking during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

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cover of Terence Davies

Terence Davies

Michael Koresky

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Called the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies made his reputation with modern classics like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, personal works exploring his fractured childhood in Liverpool. His idiosyncratic and unorthodox narrative films defy easy categorization, as their seeming existence within realism and personal memory cinema is undermined by an abstractness that makes the way he lays bare personal pain come across as distant, even alien.

Film critic Michael Koresky explores the unique emotional tenor of Davies's work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space. Through these contradictions, the films' intricate designs reveal a cumulative, deeply personal meditation on the self. Koresky also analyzes how Davies's ongoing negotiation of--and struggle with--questions of identity related to his past and his homosexuality imbue the details and jarring juxtapositions in his films with a queer sensibility, which is too often overlooked due to the complexity of Davies's work and his unfashionable ambivalence toward his own sexual orientation.

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cover of The Actor's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers

The Actor's Art

Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers

Davison, Richard A

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Biographies are so much more than lists of teachers, roles, and awards. The Actor’s Art conveys stories about numerous productions, insight about becoming and being an actor, and opinions about issues such as color-blind casting and the future of theatre. Together, these conversations form lively, thought-provoking sketches of such stars as Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Ruby Dee, Julie Harris, Cherry Jones, James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach, Nathan Lane, and Jason Robards. The Actor’s Art demonstrates the value of listening, and the pleasures of reading.
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cover of The American Idea of Home: Conversations about Architecture and Design

The American Idea of Home

Conversations about Architecture and Design

By Bernard Friedman; foreword by Meghan Daum

University of Texas Press, 2017

“Home is an idea,” Meghan Daum writes in her foreword, “a story we tell ourselves about who we are and who and what we want closest in our midst.” In The American Idea of Home, documentary filmmaker Bernard Friedman interviews more than thirty leaders in the field of architecture about a constellation of ideas relating to housing and home. The interviewees include Pritzker Prize winners Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi; Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Goldberger and Tracy Kidder; American Institute of Architects head Robert Ivy; and legendary architects such as Denise Scott Brown, Charles Gwathmey, Kenneth Frampton, and Robert A. M. Stern.

The American idea of home and the many types of housing that embody it launch lively, wide-ranging conversations about some of the most vital and important issues in architecture today. The topics that Friedman and his interviewees discuss illuminate five overarching themes: the functions and meanings of home; history, tradition, and change in residential architecture; activism, sustainability, and the environment; cities, suburbs, and regions; and technology, innovation, and materials. Friedman frames the interviews with an extended introduction that highlights these themes and helps readers appreciate the common concerns that underlie projects as disparate as Katrina cottages and Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian houses. Readers will come away from these thought-provoking interviews with an enhanced awareness of the “under the hood” kinds of design decisions that fundamentally shape our ideas of home and the dwellings in which we live.

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cover of The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn

The American Philosopher

Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, Kuhn

Giovanna Borradori

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades.

Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought.

The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach.

Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues."

Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy.
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cover of The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life

The Answers Are Inside the Mountains

Meditations on the Writing Life

William Stafford, Edited by Paul Merchant & Vincent Wixon

University of Michigan Press, 2003

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
In this fourth collection of reflections on writing and the writing life, the late William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear.
The Answers Are Inside the Mountains collects unpublished interviews, poems, articles, aphorisms, and writing exercises from this great American man of letters and hugely prolific author, who kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems -- a staggering output by any standard.
The book begins with the words "To overwhelm by rightness," a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write daily, and to live uprightly. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains lives up to those deceptively simple ethics, and confirms William Stafford's enduringly important voice for our uncertain age.
William Stafford (1914-93) authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl, You Must Revise Your Life, Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.
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cover of The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema

The Architecture of Vision

Writings and Interviews on Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni

University of Chicago Press, 2007

“A filmmaker is a man like any other; and yet his life is not the same. . . . This is, I think, a special way of being in contact with reality.” Or so says Michelangelo Antonioni, the legendary filmmaker behind the stark landscapes and social alienation of Blow-Up and L’Avventura, who here reveals his idiosyncratic relationship with reality in The Architecture of Vision.

Through autobiographical sketches, theoretical essays, interviews, and conversations with such luminaries as Jean-Luc Godard and Alberto Moravia, this compelling volume explores the director’s unique brand of narrative-defying cinema as well as the motivations and anxieties of the man behind the camera.

“The Architecture of Vision provides a filmmaker’s absorbing reflections and insights on his career. . . . Antonioni’s comments . . . deepen and humanize a sometimes cerebral book.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“[Antonioni’s] erudition is astonishing . . . few of his peers can match his verbal articulateness.”—Film Quarterly
 
“This valuable resource offers entrée to material difficult to gain access to under other circumstances.”—Library Journal
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cover of The Art of Poetry

The Art of Poetry

Kenneth Koch

University of Michigan Press, 1996

A charter member of the legendary New York School of poets that includes John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch has become one of America's best known and best loved poets. His apt parodies and zany poetic conceits have earned him the distinction of being the funniest poet in America, and his extravagant imagination and knack for high hilarity have pleased generations of readers.
Here, in The Art of Poetry, Koch offers amusing and thought-provoking essays on the nature of the
poetic moment, from its heartfelt emergence in an elementary school classroom to its raucous display in a set of satirical cartoons drawn by the author. Also included are interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Jordan Davis in which Koch discusses a range of diverse topics, including literary criticism, French poetry, and Santa Claus. The Art of Poetry provides Koch's audience with not only the musings and mischievous thoughts of the poetic mind, but also the reflections of the most respected poetry teacher in America.
Kenneth Koch's other books include On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988; Seasons on Earth, Days and Nights, The Art of Love, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, and One Train, for which he won the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
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cover of The Art of the American Musical: Conversations With the Creators

The Art of the American Musical

Conversations With the Creators

Bryer, Jackson R

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Musical theater has captivated American audiences from its early roots in burlesque stage productions and minstrel shows to the million-dollar industry it has become on Broadway today. What is it about this truly indigenous American art form that has made it so enduringly popular? How has it survived, even thrived, alongside the technology of film and the glitz and glamour of Hollywood? Will it continue to evolve and leave its mark on the twenty-first century?

Bringing together exclusive and previously unpublished interviews with nineteen leading composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and producers from the mid-1900s to the present, this book details the careers of the individuals who shaped this popular performance art during its most prolific period. The interviewees discuss their roles in productions ranging from On the Town (1944) and Finian's Rainbow (1947) to The Producers (2001) and Bounce (2003).

Readers are taken onto the stage, into the rehearsals, and behind the scenes. The nuts and bolts, the alchemy, and the occasional agonies of the collaborative process are all explored. In their discussions, the artists detail their engagements with other creative forces, including such major talents as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Zero Mostel, and Gwen Verdon. They speak candidly about their own work and that of their peers, their successes and failures, the creative process, and how a show progresses from its conception through rehearsals and tryouts to opening night.

Taken together, these interviews give fresh insight into what Oscar Hammerstein called "a nightly miracle"—the creation of the American musical.

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cover of The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends

The Astonishment Tapes

Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends

Robin Blaser

University of Alabama Press, 2015

The edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser
 
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the expertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer.

In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions.

Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twentieth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.
 
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cover of The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists

The Changing Face of Economics

Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists

David Colander, Richard P. F. Holt, and J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 2004

The Changing Face of Economics gives the reader a sense of the modern economics profession and how it is changing. The volume does so with a set of nine interviews with cutting edge economists, followed by interviews with two Nobel Prize winners, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, reflecting on the changes that are occurring. What results is a clear picture of today's economics--and it is no longer standard neoclassical economics.

The interviews and commentary together demonstrate that economics is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in method and is moving away from traditional neoclassical economics into a dynamic set of new methods and approaches. These new approaches include work in behavioral economics, experimental economics, evolutionary game theory and ecological approaches, complexity and nonlinear dynamics, methodological analysis, and agent-based modeling.

David E. Colander is Professor of Economics, Middlebury College.

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., is Professor of Economics and Kirby L. Kramer Jr. Professor of Business Administration, James Madison University.

Richard P. F. Holt is Professor of Churchill Honors and Economics, Southern Oregon University.




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cover of The Civilian Conservation Corps in Southern Illinois, 1933-1942

The Civilian Conservation Corps in Southern Illinois, 1933-1942

Kay Rippelmeyer

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

Drawing on more than thirty years of meticulous research, Kay Rippelmeyer details the Depression-era history of the simultaneous creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Through the stories of the men who worked in CCC camps devoted to soil and forest conservation projects, she offers a fascinating look into an era of utmost significance to the identity, citizens, wildlife, and natural landscape of the region.

Rippelmeyer outlines the geologic and geographic history of southern Illinois, from Native American uses of the land to the timber industry’s decimation of the forest by the 1920s. Detailing both the economic hardships and agricultural land abuse plaguing the region during the Depression, she reveals how the creation of the CCC under Franklin Delano Roosevelt coincided with the regional campaign for a national forest and how locals first became aware of and involved with the program.

Rippelmeyer mined CCC camp records from the National Archives, newspaper accounts and other correspondence and conducted dozens of oral interviews with workers and their families to re-create life in the camps. An extensive camp compendium augments the volume, featuring numerous photographs, camp locations and dates of operation, work history, and company rosters. Satisfying public curiosity and the need for factual information about the camps in southern Illinois, this is an essential contribution to regional history and a window to the national impact of the CCC.

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cover of The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be

Essays and Interviews

Harryette Mullen

University of Alabama Press, 2012

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry.

Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

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cover of The Cree Language is Our Identity: The La Ronge lectures of Sarah Whitecalf

The Cree Language is Our Identity

The La Ronge lectures of Sarah Whitecalf

Sarah Whitecalf

University of Manitoba Press, 1983

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cover of The Devil You Dance With: Film Culture in the New South Africa

The Devil You Dance With

Film Culture in the New South Africa

Edited and with an Introduction by Audrey McCluskey

University of Illinois Press, 2008

South African film culture, like so much of its public life, has undergone a tremendous transformation during its first decade of democracy. Filmmakers, once in exile, banned, or severely restricted, have returned home; subjects once outlawed by the apparatchiks of apartheid are now fair game; and a new crop of insurgent filmmakers are coming to the fore.

This extraordinary volume presents twenty-five in-depth interviews with established and emerging South African filmmakers, collected and edited by Audrey Thomas McCluskey. The interviews capture the filmmakers’ spirit, energy, and ambition as they attempt to give birth to a film culture that reflects the heart and aspirations of their diverse and emergent nation. The collection includes a biographical profile of each filmmaker, as well an introductory essay by McCluskey, pointing to the themes, as well as creative differences and similarities, among the filmmakers.

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cover of The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan

The Dylan Tapes

Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan

Anthony Scaduto

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

The raw material and interviews behind Anthony Scaduto’s iconic biography of Bob Dylan draw an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the singer-songwriter who defined his era 

When Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography was first published in 1971, the Nobel Prize–winning songwriter, at thirty, had already released some of the most iconic albums of the 1960s, including Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Scaduto’s book was one of the first to take an investigative journalist’s approach to its subject and set the standard for rock music biography. The Dylan Tapes, compiled from thirty-six hours of interviews, is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Scaduto’s landmark book—and a close-up encounter with pivotal figures in Dylan’s life. These reel-to-reel tapes, found in a box in Scaduto’s basement, are a never-bootlegged trove of archival material about Dylan, drawn from conversations with those closest to him during the early years of his career.

In the era of ten-second takes, these interviews offer uncommon depth and immediacy as we listen to friends and lovers recall the Dylan they knew as he created his professional persona and perfected his craft—from folk music, protest songs, and electric rock through the traumatic impact of a motorcycle crash to his later, more self-reflecting songwriting. Echo Helstrom, Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” is here, as are Suze Rotolo, who graced the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, and Joan Baez, remembering her relationship “to Bobby.” We hear from Mike Porco, who gave Dylan his first gig in New York City; Sid and Bob Gleason, who introduced him to his hero Woody Guthrie; folk artists from Greenwich Village, like Phil Ochs and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot; John Hammond Sr., who gave him his first record contract; plus a host of musicians, activists, folk historians, and archivists—and, of course, Dylan himself.

From these reflections and frank conversations, many published here for the first time, a complex, finely observed picture emerges of one of the best known yet most enigmatic musicians of our time.

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cover of The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

The End of the Future

Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia

Bartholomew Dean

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

In The End of the Future, author Bartholomew Dean broadens the theoretical framework for understanding memory's role in reconciliation following a violent conflict. This book explores the complicated and confusing linkages between memory and trauma for individuals caught up in civil war and post-conflict reconciliation in the Peruvian Amazon's Huallaga Valley—an epicenter for leftist rebels and a booming shadow economy based on the extraction and circulation of cocaine. The End of the Future tells the story of violent attempts by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, MRTA) to overthrow the state in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the perspective of the poorest residents of the lower Huallaga's Caynarachi Basin.

To give context to the causes and consequences of the MRTA's presence in the lower and central Huallaga, this book relies on the written works and testimony of Sístero García Torres, an MRTA rebel commander; the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; MRTA propaganda; media accounts; and critical historical texts. Besides exposing Huallaga Valley human rights abuses, the book's contribution to political anthropology is consequential for its insistence that reconciliation is by no means equivalent to local, Indigenous notions of "justice" or customary forms of dispute resolution. Without deliberately addressing the diverse socio-cultural contours defining overlapping epistemologies of justice, freedom, and communal well-being, enduring reconciliation will likely remain elusive.
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cover of The England’s Dreaming Tapes

The England’s Dreaming Tapes

Jon Savage

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Jon Savage's 1991 book, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "the definitive history of the English punk movement." Widely imitated but never equaled, it remains that rare work of music history that appeals to music fans, critics, and scholars alike. In researching England's Dreaming, Savage conducted hundreds of hours of interviews of which only a fraction made it into the finished book. Now, in The England's Dreaming Tapes, Savage makes available for the first time the full, uncut, sensational story behind the cultural moment that was punk.

Here is the story of a generation that changed the world in just a few months in 1976, as told by the scene's major figures: all four original Sex Pistols as well as Joe Strummer, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, Siouxsie Sioux, Viv Albertine, Adam Ant, Lee Black Childers, Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Syl Sylvain, Debbie Wilson, Tony Wilson, Jah Wobble, and many others. Together, they offer a sweeping history of the late 1960s and the 1970s-not just the era's music, but also its radical politics, social issues, fashion, and culture.

An invaluable source of information about a movement that has become obscured by myth, these vivid, unvarnished interviews were conducted when punk was only a decade old. In many cases, this was the first time that the subjects had talked about the period. The interviews describe the founding of the Sex Pistols; 430 King's Road, site of the legendary boutique Sex, which helped establish the punk aesthetic; punk rock New York; the cultural landscapes of London and its suburbs; the writers who covered punk; and the Manchester music scene centered around Factory Records.

With The England's Dreaming Tapes, Savage gives us the first and final word on the music, fashion, and attitude that defined this influential and incendiary era.
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The Glass Anvil

Andrew Hudgins

University of Michigan Press, 1997

In this highly accessible volume, poet Andrew Hudgins puts himself under the eye of scrutiny, spanning his career from a beginning writer seriously committed to his art to a mature author ready to reflect upon his role as a poet. The transition from one to the other comprises a rich lode of personal experiences, which Hudgins honestly and humorously details in essays ranging from his fascination with imagined worlds created by books to his appreciation of the works of nineteenth-century poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and contemporary poet Galway Kinnell.
Finally coming to rest on an examination of his own autobiography, The Glass Hammer, Hudgins reveals some of the ways he lied in that book--and some of the reasons for doing so. In a lighthearted manner, he manages to throw both light--and shadow--on the autobiography as a literary form. Amid charming anecdotes of his Southern upbringing, The Glass Anvil vividly records the depth of Hudgins's fascination with language, particularly as it mingles with the important issues of his life--religion, racism, Southern literature, and narrative poetry. This fascination is further documented in a free-wheeling interview which closes the book.
Engaging and amusing reading, The Glass Anvil will appeal to readers interested in contemporary poetry and Southern literature.
Andrew Hudgins's books include The Never Ending, After the Lost War: A Narrative, Saints and Strangers, and most recently The Glass Hammer. He is Professor of English, University of Cincinnati.
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cover of The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980

The Grain of the Voice

Interviews 1962-1980

Roland Barthes

Northwestern University Press, 2009

This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

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cover of The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany

The Guestroom Novelist

A Donald Harington Miscellany

Donald Harington

University of Arkansas Press, 2019

Donald Harington, best known for his fifteen novels, was also a prolific writer of essays, articles, and book reviews.

The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany gathers a career-spanning and eclectic selection of nonfiction by the Arkansawyer novelist Donald Harington that reveals how a life of devastating losses and disappointments inspired what the Boston Globe called the “quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters.”

This extensive collection of interviews and other works of prose—many of which are previously unpublished—offers glimpses into Harington’s life, loves, and favorite obsessions, replays his minor (and not so minor) dramas with literary critics, and reveals the complicated and sometimes contentious relationship between his work of the writers he most admired. The Guestroom Novelist, which takes its title from an essay that serves as a love letter to his fellow underappreciated writers, paints a rich portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged, and fiercely funny old man, as well as comic, sentimentalist, philosopher, and critic, paying testimony to the writer’s magnificent ability to transform the seemingly crude stuff of our material existence into enduring art.

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cover of The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians

The Historian behind the History

Conversations with Southern Historians

Megan L. Bever

University of Alabama Press, 2014

The Historian behind the History brings together a collection of valuable interviews with prominent southern historians conducted over the course of a decade by graduate students in the University of Alabama’s history program for the journal Southern History. In the interviews, ten notable southern historians and mentors illuminate the state of historiography, their experiences in the profession, and their thoughts about graduate education and southern history.
 
The historians and their main topics include:
 
Richard J. M. Blackett on antebellum and African American history
Dan T. Carter on Reconstruction, Civil Rights, and George Wallace
Pete Daniel on the New Deal and the Cold War South                                                   
Laura F. Edwards on the Early Republic, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and women’s history
William W. Freehling on the antebellum South
Gary W. Gallagher on the Civil War
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore on Jim Crow
James M. McPherson on the Civil War
Theodore Rosengarten on the Depression
J. Mills Thornton III on the antebellum South
 
In his introduction, award-winning author and historian George C. Rable draws together the multifaceted themes of these interviews, offering a compelling overview of the nature of the field. Edited by Megan L. Bever and Scott A. Suarez, The Historian behind the History offers critical insights about the craft and professional life of the historian. 
 
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cover of The Holocaust as Culture

The Holocaust as Culture

Imre Kertész

Seagull Books, 2011

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical.  
 
In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. 
 
The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.
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cover of The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy

The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy

Doris B. McLaughlin and Anita L.W. Schoomaker

University of Michigan Press, 1979

The Landrum-Griffin Act and Union Democracy is the result of a two-year study conducted by the authors that involved well over one hundred in-depth interviews with union officers, labor lawyers, dissident union members and their advocates, academicians, and U.S. Department of Labor personnel charged with enforcing the Act, as well as with a few management representatives. In addition, rank-and-file members' knowledge of the Act and their assessment of their ability to exercise the rights accorded them under the Act were studied by means of the inclusion of a set of questions in three separate surveys conducted by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center—two nationwide and one involving the greater Detroit Metropolitan area. Participation in the three surveys enabled the authors to reach an additional 677 union members who would have been difficult to contact by any other means.
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cover of The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story

The Last Earth

A Palestinian Story

Ramzy Baroud

Pluto Press, 2018

Spanning decades and encompassing war, mass exodus, epic migrations and the search for individual and collective identity, The Last Earth tells the story of modern Palestine through the memories of those who have lived it. 

Ordinary Palestinians have rarely narrated their own history. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed author Ramzy Baroud draws on dozens of interviews to produce vivid, intimate and beautifully written accounts of Palestinian lives - in villages, refugee camps, prisons and cities, in the lands of their ancestors and in exile. Baroud's empathetic and lyrical approach reveals new human dimensions of the Palestinian saga, telling it as it has never before been told. 

Against dominant narratives, the last earth reclaims Palestine's past - and present - for all its people.
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cover of The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960

The Last Generation

Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960

Mary H. Blewett

University of Massachusetts Press, 1990

Oral histories of many of the last generation of Lowell, MA, textile mill workers preceded by two introductory sections. The first presents the historic setting of economic development and subsequent decline of the textile industry in Lowell. The second is a brief explanation of the production process wherein the last generation of mill workers expended so many of their skills and so much of their energy.

[more]
cover of The Librarian’s Guide to Book Programs and Author Events

The Librarian’s Guide to Book Programs and Author Events

Brad Hooper

American Library Association, 2016

[more]
cover of The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia: The Drums of Life

The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia

The Drums of Life

Rosemary Clark Whitlock, with foreword by J. Anthony Paredes and introduction by Thomas J. Blumer

University of Alabama Press, 2008

The contemporary Monacan Nation had approximately 1,400 registered members in 2006, mostly living in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, in Amherst County, but some are scattered like any other large family. Records trace the Monacans of Virginia back to the late 1500s, with an estimated population of over 15,000 in the 1700s.
 
Like members of some other native tribes, the Monacans have a long history of struggles for equality in jobs, health care, and education and have suffered cultural, political, and social abuse at the hands of authority figures appointed to serve them. The critical difference for the Monacans was the actions of segregationist Dr. Walter A. Plecker, Director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until he retired at age 85 in 1946. A strong proponent and enforcer of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 (struck down in 1967), which prohibited marriage between races, Plecker’s interpretation of that law convinced him that there were only two races–white and colored–and anyone not bearing physically white genetic characteristics was “colored” and that included Indians. He would not let Indians get married in Virginia unless they applied as white or colored, he forced the local teachers to falsify the students’ race on the official school rolls, and he threatened court clerks and census takers with prosecution if they used the term “Indian” on any official form. He personally changed government records when his directives were not followed and even coerced postpartum Indian mothers to list their newborns as white or colored or they could not take their infants home from the hospital. Eventually the federal government intervened, directing the Virginia state officials to begin the tedious process of correcting official records. Yet the legacy of Plecker’s attempted cultural genocide remains. Through interviews with 26 Monacans, one Episcopal minister appointed to serve them, one former clerk of the court for Amherst County, and her own story, Whitlock provides first person accounts of what happened to the Monacan families and how their very existence as Indians was threatened.
 
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cover of The Old German Baptist Brethren: Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge

The Old German Baptist Brethren

Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge

Charles D. Thompson Jr.

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Since arriving nearly 250 years ago in Franklin County, Virginia, German Baptists have maintained their faith and farms by relying on their tightly knit community for spiritual and economic support. Today, with their land and livelihoods threatened by the encroachment of neighboring communities, the construction of a new highway, and competition from corporate megafarms, the German Baptists find themselves forced to adjust.
 
Charles D. Thompson Jr.'s The Old German Baptist Brethren combines oral history with ethnography and archival research--as well as his own family ties to the Franklin County community--to tell the story of the Brethren's faith on the cusp of impending change. The book traces the transformation of their operations from frontier subsistence farms to cash-based enterprises, connecting this with the wider confluence of agriculture and faith in colonial America. Using extensive interviews, Thompson looks behind the scenes at how individuals interpret their own futures in farming, their hope for their faith, and how the failure of religiously motivated agriculture figures in the larger story of the American farmer.
 
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cover of The Playwright at Work: Conversations

The Playwright at Work

Conversations

Rosemarie Tichler

Northwestern University Press, 2012

Rosemarie Tichler and Barry Jay Kaplan take us behind the scenes in conversations with thirteen of today’s most distinguished playwrights, including Tony Kushner, John Guare, Wallace Shawn, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, and Sarah Ruhl. To familiarize the reader with the world of each playwright, Tichler and Kaplan introduce us to the environments in which the work happens, conducting their interviews in the playwright’s home, a dark theater, or a coffee shop. Topics of conversation range from the playwrights’ earliest memories of the theater to finding their unique voices, and from their working relationships with directors, actors, and designers to their involvement in the purely commercial aspects of their profession. Taken together, these conversations constitute a collectively taught master class in the art and craft of writing for the stage. 
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cover of The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians: Stories of Change from the School for Peace

The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians

Stories of Change from the School for Peace

Sonnenschein, Nava

Rutgers University Press, 2019

In The Power of Dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, scholar and activist Nava Sonnenschein shares a collection of twenty-five powerful interviews she conducted with Palestinian and Jewish Israeli alumni of peacebuilding courses, a decade after their graduation. Participants with diverse personal and professional backgrounds completed a series of conflict transformation workshops using the model developed by the School for Peace at the world’s only intentional Jewish-Palestinian community, Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam (“Oasis of Peace” in Hebrew and Arabic). Critically, the interviews vividly demonstrate that peacebuilding does not end with the courses. Most of the graduates choose to work professionally in roles that contribute to peace-building. Sonnenschein shows the transformational potential of encounter between members of groups in conflict, sharing how ordinary Israelis and Palestinians coming together in an open and honest environment undergo life-changing experiences that provide concrete hope for a sustainable path to a peaceful shared existence as equals in Israel and Palestine. 

 
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cover of The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games

The Queer Games Avant-Garde

How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games

Bonnie Ruberg

Duke University Press, 2020

In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.

Interviewees:
Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang
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cover of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

The Revolution Has Come

Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

Robyn C. Spencer

Duke University Press, 2016

In The Revolution Has Come Robyn C. Spencer traces the Black Panther Party's organizational evolution in Oakland, California, where hundreds of young people came to political awareness and journeyed to adulthood as members. Challenging the belief that the Panthers were a projection of the leadership, Spencer draws on interviews with rank-and-file members, FBI files, and archival materials to examine the impact the organization's internal politics and COINTELPRO's political repression had on its evolution and dissolution. She shows how the Panthers' members interpreted, implemented, and influenced party ideology and programs; initiated dialogues about gender politics; highlighted ambiguities in the Panthers' armed stance; and criticized organizational priorities. Spencer also centers gender politics and the experiences of women and their contributions to the Panthers and the Black Power movement as a whole. Providing a panoramic view of the party's organization over its sixteen-year history, The Revolution Has Come shows how the Black Panthers embodied Black Power through the party's international activism, interracial alliances, commitment to address state violence, and desire to foster self-determination in Oakland's black communities.
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cover of The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders

The Road South

Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders

B. J. Hollars

University of Alabama Press, 2018

Revisits the inspiring and heroic stories of the Freedom Riders, through their own words.
 
In May 1961, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings, segregation remained alive and well within the system of interstate travel. All across the American South, interstate buses as well as their travel facilities were divided racially. This blatant disregard for law and morality spurred the Congress of Racial Equality to send thirteen individuals—seven black, six white—on a harrowing bus trip throughout the South as a sign of protest.
 
These original riders were met with disapproval, arrests and violence along the way, but that did not stop the movement. That summer, more than four hundred Freedom Riders continued their journey—many of them concluding their ride at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, where they endured further abuses and indignities. As a result of the riders sacrifice, by November of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally put an end to interstate commerce segregation, and in the process, elevated the riders to become a source of inspiration for other civil rights campaigns such as voter registration rights and school desegregation.
 
While much has been written on the Freedom Rides, far less has been published about the individual riders. Join award-winning author B. J. Hollars as he sets out on his own journey to meet them, retracing the historic route and learning the stories of as many surviving riders as he could. The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders offers an intimate look into the lives and legacies of the riders. Throughout the book these civil rights veterans’ poignant, personal stories offer timely insights into America’s racial past and hopeful future.
 
Weaving the past with the present, Hollars aims to demystify the legendary journey, while also confronting more modern concerns related to race in America. The Road South is part memoir and part research-based journalism. It transcends the traditional textbook version of this historical journey to highlight the fascinating stories of the many riders—both black and white—who risked their lives to move the country forward.

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cover of The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview

The Road since Structure

Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview

Thomas S. Kuhn

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Thomas Kuhn will undoubtedly be remembered primarily for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that introduced one of the most influential conceptions of scientific progress to emerge during the twentieth century. The Road Since Structure, assembled with Kuhn's input before his death in 1996, follows the development of his thought through the later years of his life: collected here are several essays extending and rethinking the perspectives of Structure as well as an extensive, fascinating autobiographical interview in which Kuhn discusses the course of his life and philosophy.
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cover of The Route as Briefed

The Route as Briefed

James Tate

University of Michigan Press, 1999

The Route as Briefed collects prose by Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Tate. It is an amazingly eclectic collection, offering essays, interviews, short-short stories, memoirs, and even a recipe for squirrel brains in black butter. The essays and interviews touch on themes ranging from poetic influences to MFA programs, and from the role of humor in poetry to the nature of regional writing. The fiction selections--none more than four pages long--are as engaging as their titles, e.g., Despair Ice Cream, Running for Your Life, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, Pie, and A Cloud of Dust. The memoirs include Tate's journal entries during a trip to Spain, and a long piece on the father he never met, killed in action during World War II.
In typical Tate style, the book continually straddles the line between fiction and autobiography, entertaining readers with amusing accounts of the poet's own experiences while drawing on these to narrate the fictional stories as well.
James Tate is Professor of Poetry, University of Massachusetts. He is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers: Poems, 1994; Selected Poems, 1991; Distance from Loved Ones, 1990. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992.
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cover of The Rural Face of White Supremacy: BEYOND JIM CROW

The Rural Face of White Supremacy

BEYOND JIM CROW

Mark Schultz

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.
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cover of The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty

The Second Half

Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty

Ellen Warner

Brandeis University Press, 2022

A frank, honest, and insightful look into the lives of women over fifty. 
 
The Second Half explores, in photographic portraits and interviews, how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world to interview women about their lives.  She asked them what they learned in the first half that was helpful in the second, and what advice they would give to younger women. Their revealing and inspiring stories are enlightening for all readers, and are illustrated by Warner’s stunning portraits which tell their own story.


 
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cover of The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border

The Shadow of the Wall

Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford; Foreword by Josiah Heyman; Photographs by Murphy Woodhouse

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels, detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power of family separation and reunification and the cost of criminalization, and they call into question assumptions about human rights and federal policies.

The authors analyze data from the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS), a mixed-methods, binational research project that offers socially relevant, rigorous social science about migration, immigration enforcement, and violence on the border. Using information gathered from more than 1,600 post-deportation surveys, this volume examines the different faces of violence and migration along the Arizona-Sonora border and shows that deportees are highly connected to the United States and will stop at nothing to return to their families. The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Contributors
 
Howard Campbell
Josiah Heyman
Alison Elizabeth Lee
Daniel E. Martínez
Ricardo Martínez-Schuldt
Emily Peiffer
Jeremy Slack
Prescott L. Vandervoet
Matthew Ward
Scott Whiteford
Murphy Woodhouse
[more]
cover of The Six-Step Guide to Library Worker Engagement

The Six-Step Guide to Library Worker Engagement

Elaina Norlin

American Library Association, 2021

Gallup’s 2019 State of the American Workplace Report found that 70 percent of employees are disengaged at work. Why is worker engagement so important? Engaged workers lead to engaged libraries — vibrant institutions that nurture their workers’ dedication, creativity, and innovation so they can serve their communities most effectively. This guide walks library managers and administrators through concrete steps to change their organization’s culture so that it fosters worker engagement, using first-hand accounts from library staff to illustrate both successes and failures. Readers will discover

  • why libraries often fall short at hiring good leadership and ways to develop better recruitment strategies moving forward;
  • how lack of trust pushes workplace culture towards incivility, hostility, and lower morale, and what library leaders can do to rebuild it;
  • methods for using recognition and praise as tools for sustaining a positive work environment;
  • the rationale for eliminating annual performance reviews in favor of less formal one-on-one conversations and “just in time” continuous feedback;
  • the secrets behind high performing teams, strategies to support dysfunctional teams, and tips on how to develop remote teamwork; and
  • why viewing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as separate from workplace culture is counterproductive, since it is actually the positive result of a strong foundation, with advice on combating the factors that contribute to low retention rates of BIPOC librarians.
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cover of The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

The Soiling of Old Glory

The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America

Louis P. Masur

Brandeis University Press, 2024

Now available as a paperback: the history of a disturbing image, now iconic, that expressed the turmoil of the 1970s and race relations in the United States, with a new preface by the author and a foreword by Ted Landsmark.
 
In 1976, Boston was bitterly divided over a court order to desegregate its public schools. Plans to bus students between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods stoked backlash and heated protests. Photojournalist Stanley Forman was covering one such demonstration at City Hall when he captured an indelible image: a white protester attacking a Black attorney with the American flag. A second white man grabs at the victim, appearing to assist the assailant.
 
The photo appeared in newspapers across the nation and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In The Soiling of Old Glory, esteemed historian Louis P. Masur reveals what happened the day of the assault and the ways these events reverberated long afterward. He interviews the men involved: Forman, who took the photo; Ted Landsmark, a Black, Yale-educated attorney and an activist; Joseph Rakes, the white protester lunging with the flag, a disaffected student; and Jim Kelly, a local politician who opposed busing, but who helped Landsmark to his feet after protesters knocked him to the ground. The photo, Masur discovers, holds more complexities than initially meet the eye. The flag never made contact with the victim, for example, and Kelly was attempting to protect Landsmark, not hurt him.
 
Masur delves into the history behind Boston’s efforts to desegregate the schools and the anti-busing protests that shook the city. He examines photography’s power to move, inform, and persuade us, as well as the assumptions we each bring to an image as viewers. And he delves into the flag, to explore how other artists and photographers have shaped, bolstered, or challenged its patriotic significance.
 
Gripping and deeply researched, The Soiling of Old Glory shows how a disturbing event, frozen on a film, impacted Boston and the nation. In an age of renewed calls for visual literacy and disagreements about the flag’s meaning, Masur’s history, now updated with a new foreword by Ted Landsmark and a new preface by the author, is as relevant as ever.
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