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998 books match the query 'Life' and 223 start with t

cover of Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will

Threads of Life

Autobiography and the Will

Richard Freadman

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Many autobiographers share profound questions about human life with their readers—questions like: To what extent was my life imposed on me? To what extent did I bring it about through particular choices and actions, through the activity of my own will? Indeed, the issue of the will is central to autobiographical writing, and some of the greatest autobiographies give extended consideration to the will—its nature; its powers; its limitations; the forms of freedom, constraint, and expression it finds in various cultures; its role in particular human lives.

In this new study, unprecedented in subject and scope, Richard Freadman offers the first sustained account of how changing theological, philosophical, and psychological accounts of the human will have been reflected in the writing of autobiography, and of how autobiography in its turn has helped shape various understandings of the will. Early chapters trace narrative representations of the will from antiquity (the Greeks and Augustine) to postmodernism (Derrida and Barthes), with particular emphasis on late modernity's culture of the will. Later chapters then present detailed and powerfully original readings of autobiographical texts by Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, B. F. Skinner, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling.

Freadman's interdisciplinary approach to autobiography and the will includes a theoretical defense of the view that autobiographers are, in varying degrees, agents in their own texts. Threads of Life argues that late modernity has inherited deeply conflicted attitudes to the will. Freadman suggests that these attitudes, now deeply embedded in contemporary cultural discourse, need reexamining. In this, he contends, 'reflective autobiography' has an important part to play.
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cover of Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day

Through an Uncommon Lens

The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day

Patricia J. Fanning

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Based in the Boston area, F. Holland Day (1864–1933) was a central figure in artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Publisher of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Crane, mentor to a young Kahlil Gibran, adviser and friend to photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edward Steichen, Day lived a life devoted to art and beauty. At the turn of the twentieth century, his reputation rivaled that of Alfred Stieglitz. A pioneer in the field of pictorial photography, Day was also an influential book publisher in the Arts and Crafts tradition. He cofounded the publishing company of Copeland and Day, which issued more than a hundred titles between 1893 and 1899. In addition, he embraced a unique sense of social responsibility and a commitment to historic preservation. Colorful and sometimes eccentric, Day was best known for his stunningly original, brilliantly executed, and sometimes controversial photographic images of blacks, children, and allegorical subjects. His determination to promote photography as a fine art led him to create photographic representations of the crucifixion of Christ, studies for which he was his own model. Although he continued to mentor young artists until his death, ill health caused Day to spend the last fourteen years of his life inside his home in Norwood, Massachusetts. By the time he died in 1933, he was virtually unknown, but in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in his art. Responding to this renewed interest, Patricia Fanning has written an impressive biography—one that draws on previously unavailable archival material and is attuned to the historical and cultural contexts in which Day lived and worked. The book is illustrated with more than a hundred photographs, including 32 duotone illustrations of the artist's work.
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cover of Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

Through the Door of Life

A Jewish Journey between Genders

Joy Ladin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.
    With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.
    Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.


2012 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir

“Wrenching—and liberating. . . .[it] opens up new ways of looking at gender and the place of LGBT Jews in community.”—Greater Phoenix Jewish News

“Given her high-profile academic position, Ladin’s transition was a major news story in Israel and even internationally. But behind the public story was a private struggle and learning experience, and Ladin pulls no punches in telling that story. She offers a peek into how daunting it was to learn, with little support from others, how to dress as a middle-aged woman, to mu on make-up, to walk and talk like a female. She provides a front-row seat for observing how one person confronted a seemingly impossible situation and how she triumphed, however shakingly, over the many adversities, both societal and psychological, that stood in the way.”—The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
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cover of Thunder Over Zion: The Life and Times of Chief Judge Willis W Ritter

Thunder Over Zion

The Life and Times of Chief Judge Willis W Ritter

Cowley & Nielson

University of Utah Press, 2006

Willis William Ritter, United States District Judge for the District of Utah from 1949 until his death on March 4, 1978, was the one judge whose name was familiar among those who had little or no idea of the difference between judicial jurisdictions. Many knew him by the broad gestures with which he challenged bureaucracies and the federal government itself. He was, legally speaking, a friend to the underdog. Yet at his death scarcely a friend was left and he had become the object of ridicule, outrage, pity, and contempt.

Ritter was clearly ahead of his time, for his opinions on criminal justice, police interrogation, and the rights to counsel have now become accepted standards in jurisprudence. They are, indeed, so universally accepted that few if any viewers of televised police court dramas would even question them. In his personal life he was a man flawed on a grand scale and he lived a life fraught with contradictions. This is his compelling story, compellingly recounted.
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cover of Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border

Tijuana Dreaming

Life and Art at the Global Border

Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo, eds.

Duke University Press, 2012

Tijuana Dreaming is an unprecedented introduction to the arts, culture, politics, and economics of contemporary Tijuana, Mexico. With many pieces translated from Spanish for the first time, the anthology features contributions by prominent scholars, journalists, bloggers, novelists, poets, curators, and photographers from Tijuana and greater Mexico. They explore urban planning in light of Tijuana's unique infrastructural, demographic, and environmental challenges. They delve into its musical countercultures, architectural ruins, cinema, and emergence as a hot spot on the international art scene. One contributor examines fictional representations of Tijuana's past as a Prohibition-era "city of sin" for U.S. pleasure seekers. Another reflects on the city's recent struggles with kidnappings and drug violence. In an interview, Néstor García Canclini revisits ideas that he advanced in Culturas híbridas (1990), his watershed book about Latin America and cultural hybridity. Taken together, the selections present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a major border city in the age of globalization.

Contributors. Tito Alegría, Humberto Félix Berumen, Roberto Castillo Udiarte, Iain Chambers, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Teddy Cruz, Ejival, Tarek Elhaik, Guillermo Fadanelli, Néstor García Canclini, Ingrid Hernández, Jennifer Insley-Pruitt, Kathryn Kopinak, Josh Kun, Jesse Lerner, Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, Rafa Saavedra, Lucía Sanromán, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Heriberto Yépez

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cover of To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton

To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice

The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton

Hosea Easton

University of Massachusetts Press, 1999

How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual. 

A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day “Address.” The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.

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cover of To Life: Jews Exploring Nature

To Life

Jews Exploring Nature

Joel Greenberg

Rutgers University Press, 2026

To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who not only made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish. 

By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.

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cover of To Life: The Story of a Chicago Lawyer

To Life

The Story of a Chicago Lawyer

Elmer Gertz

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Elmer Gertz has defended famous people—including Henry Miller, Nathan Leopold, and Jack Ruby—and he has become famous in his own right through his struggle for civil liberties and personal rights.

Gertz has taken on a lengthy list of cases and causes over the six decades of his legal career. He fought successfully against the censorship of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer,which had been banned in Chicago for obscenity. He got Nathan Leopold released from prison after Leopold had served 34 years for his part in the death of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. An ardent foe of the death penalty, Gertz labored for years as part of a national team of lawyers that was finally able to overturn Jack Ruby’s death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Gertz’s cases have helped make libel law in the nation.

For this edition, Gertz adds an afterword that covers the 15 years since the book’s first publication. Gertz talks of Henry Miller’s last days and his travels to the USSR on behalf of the Refuseniks.

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cover of To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci

To Live Is to Resist

The Life of Antonio Gramsci

Jean-Yves Frétigné

University of Chicago Press, 2021

This in-depth biography of Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci casts new light on his life and writing, emphasizing his unflagging spirit, even in the many years he spent in prison.
 
One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has left an indelible mark on philosophy and critical theory. His innovative work on history, society, power, and the state has influenced several generations of readers and political activists, and even shaped important developments in postcolonial thought. But Gramsci’s thinking is scattered across the thousands of notebook pages he wrote while he was imprisoned by Italy’s fascist government from 1926 until shortly before his death.

To guide readers through Gramsci’s life and works, historian Jean-Yves Frétigné offers To Live Is to Resist, an accessible, compelling, and deeply researched portrait of an extraordinary figure. Throughout the book, Frétigné emphasizes Gramsci’s quiet heroism and his unwavering commitment to political practice and resistance. Most powerfully, he shows how Gramsci never surrendered, even in conditions that stripped him of all power—except, of course, the power to think.
 
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cover of To Save My Race from Abuse: The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius

To Save My Race from Abuse

The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius

Edward J. Robinson

University of Alabama Press, 2009

The story of a fascinating and important figure in black American religious history
 
Samuel Robert Cassius was born to a slave mother and a white father in Virginia in 1853 and became a member of the Restorationist Movement (Disciples of Christ) while a coal miner in Indiana. For the rest of his long life (he died in 1931 at age 78), Cassius was an active evangelist, prolific publicist, dedicated leader of black Disciples, and an outspoken and uncompromising opponent of racism in religion and society.
 
An indefatigable preacher, Cassius ranged throughout the Midwest, California, and the southwestern states, founding and encouraging black Stone-Campbell Restorationist congregations. After entering the Oklahoma Territory in 1891, he worked for three decades as an educator, newspaper editor, social activist, postmaster, and Justice of the Peace. Because he consistently incorporated social and racial issues into his religious writings, Cassius often found himself at odds with whites in the Stone-Campbell Movement, the very people he relied on for monetary support. He advocated a Booker T. Washington-style self-help ethos while at the same time firmly resisting racism wherever he encountered it. Largely invisible in a world dominated by such towering figures as Washington, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois, Cassius lived a life of virtual obscurity beyond the circle of the Stone-Campbell Movement. His story is important because, as a racial militant and separatist, he presaged the schism that would engulf and fracture the Churches of Christ in the 1960s, when blacks and whites went their separate ways and formed two distinct groups in one religious fellowship.
 
By combing through a plethora of primary sources that Cassius left behind in both religious and nonreligious journals, Edward J. Robinson has successfully reconstructed and recaptured the essence of Cassius’ complex and extraordinary life. This book offers the first full-length study of a man of remarkable attainment despite daily obstacles and resistance.
 
 
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cover of Tony Oliva: The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend

Tony Oliva

The Life and Times of a Minnesota Twins Legend

Thom Henninger

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

If not for the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, Minnesota might never have known one of its most popular baseball players, Twins three-time batting champion and eight-time All-Star Tony Oliva. In April 1961, the twenty-two-year-old Cuban prospect failed to impress the Twins in a tryout, but the sudden rupture in U.S.–Cuba relations made a return visa all but impossible. The story of how Oliva’s unexpected stay led to a second chance and success with the Twins—as well as decades of personal and cultural isolation—is told for the first time in this full-scale biography of the man the fans affectionately call “Tony O.”

With unprecedented access to the very private Oliva, baseball writer Thom Henninger captures what life was like for the Cuban newcomer as he adjusted to major league play and American culture—and at the same time managed to earn Rookie of the Year honors and win the American League batting title in his first two seasons, all while playing with a knuckle injury. Packed with never-before-published photographs, the book follows Oliva through the 1965 season, all the way to the World Series, and then, with repaired knuckle and knee, into one of the most dramatic pennant races in baseball history in 1967. Through the voices of Oliva, his family, and his teammates—including the Cuban players who shared his cultural challenges and the future Hall of Famers he mentored, Rod Carew and Kirby Puckett—the personal and professional highs and lows of the years come alive: the Gold Glove Award in 1966, a third batting title in 1971, the devastating injury that curtailed his career, and, through it all, the struggle to build a family and recover the large and close-knit one he had left behind in Cuba.

Nearly forty years after Oliva’s retirement, the debate continues over whether his injury-shortened career was Hall of Fame caliber—a question that gets a measured and resounding answer here.

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cover of Too Good to Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler

Too Good to Be True

The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler

Mark Royden Winchell

University of Missouri Press, 2002

 
“Too Good to Be True” is a comprehensive account of Leslie Fiedler’s life and work. Born in 1917, Fiedler has, in a sense, had four overlapping careers. He first came to prominence as one of the premier Jewish intellectuals of the postwar era—writing on literature, culture, and politics in such magazines as Partisan Review and Commentary. Shortly thereafter, he helped lead the attack that myth criticism was mounting on the hegemony of the New Criticism. If he had stopped writing entirely at that point, Fiedler would still be remembered as an important cultural critic of the fifties.         
 
 
            With his brash, groundbreaking magnum opus, Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler next established himself as a revolutionary interpreter of our native literary tradition. Subsequent critics of American literature have been compelled to adopt or attack his positions because to ignore them has been impossible.
 
 
            Finally, Fiedler was one of the first critics to proclaim the death of modernism and to suggest some of the directions that literature might take in its aftermath. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with being the first individual to apply the term postmodernism to literature. This alone caused much enmity among those who had built their careers on the assumption that modernism would last forever.
 
 
To many academics, Fiedler’s lack of solemnity and his wild flights of imagination have made him appear amateurish. How could anyone who enjoys himself that much possibly be taken seriously? One of the favorite critics of young people and non-English majors, Fiedler has seemed to enjoy remaining disreputable—even as some of his once-controversial views have been made a part of standard or traditional scholarship. Like Huck Finn, returned to the raft from the fog, he often seems “too good to be true.”
 
 
Mark Royden Winchell has made his subject come alive in a highly intelligent and critical way. A combination of biography, critical analysis, and cultural history, “Too Good to Be True” will be of great interest to scholars and students of American literature, twentieth-century literary criticism, and popular culture.
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cover of Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Tormented Master

A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Written by Arthur E. Green

University of Alabama Press, 1979

“If Hasidism begins in the life-enhancing spirituality of the Baal Shem Tov, it concludes in the tortuous, elitist and utterly fascinating career of Nahman of Bratslav (1722–1810) whose biography and teaching Arthur Green has set forth in his comprehensive, moving, and subtle study, Tormented Master.

            “Arthur Green has managed to lead us through the thickets of the Bratslaver discourse with a grace and facility thus far unequaled in the English language literature on Hasidism. Tormented Master is a model of clarity and percipience, balancing awed respect and honor for its subject with a ruthless pursuit of documented truth. . . . Tormented Master is sufficiently open to the agonies of religion in general and the issues of modern religion in particular to make Nahman a thinker utterly relevant to our time.

            “Nahman of Bratslav is unique in the history of Judaism, Green emphasizes, for having made the individual’s quest for intimacy with God the center of the religious way. He was a Kierkegaard before his time, believing in the utter abandon of the life of faith and the risk of paradoxicality. . . . He was, more than all others, the predecessor of Kafka, whose tales, like Nahman’s, have no explicit key and rankle, flush and irritate the spirit, compelling us—even in our failure to understand—to acknowledge their potency and challenge.”

—New York Times

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cover of Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks

Tough as Nails

The Life and Films of Richard Brooks

Douglass K. Daniel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Called “God’s angry man” for his unyielding demands in pursuit of personal and artistic freedom, Oscar-winning filmmaker Richard Brooks brought us some of the mid-twentieth century’s most iconic films, including Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. “The important thing,” he once remarked, “is to write your story, to make it believable, to make it live.” His own life story has never been fully chronicled, until now.
            Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks restores to importance the career of a prickly iconoclast who sought realism and truth in his films. Douglass K. Daniel explores how the writer-director made it from the slums of Philadelphia to the heights of the Hollywood elite, working with the top stars of the day, among them Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons, Sidney Poitier, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, and Diane Keaton. Brooks dramatized social issues and depicted characters in conflict with their own values, winning an Academy Award for his Elmer Gantry screenplay and earning nominations for another seven Oscars for directing and screenwriting.
            Tough as Nails offers illuminating insights into Brooks’s life, drawing on unpublished studio memos and documents and interviews from stars and colleagues, including Poitier, director Paul Mazursky, and Simmons, who was married to Brooks for twenty years. Daniel takes readers behind the scenes of Brooks’s major films and sheds light on their making, their compromises, and their common threads. Tough as Nails celebrates Brooks’s vision while adding to the critical understanding of his works, their flaws as well as their merits, and depicting the tumults and trends in the life of a man who always kept his own compass.
 
 
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
 
Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
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cover of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words

Tove Jansson

Life, Art, Words

Boel Westin

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

An in-depth, perceptive account of the unconventional life of the Moomins’ beloved creator, now available in the United States

Tove Jansson achieved fame as the creator of the Moomins, beloved by generations of readers around the world. Remarkably, the Moomins were only part of the prodigious creative output of this Finnish-Swedish writer and artist. Jansson’s work also includes short stories and five novels for adults, as well as paintings, murals, and book illustrations. In this acclaimed biography, Boel Westin relies on numerous conversations with Jansson and unprecedented access to her journals, letters, and personal archives to present an engrossing and comprehensive review of the life and world of Scandinavia’s best-loved author.

As Westin’s meticulous research makes clear, Jansson’s artistic and literary works reflected what was most important to her: the love of family and nature and the desire to pursue her art. Guided by her personal motto, “Love and work,” Jansson seized both with uncompromising joy. And while her romantic relationships with men proved unfulfilling, she found those with women—especially with her longtime partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä—both grounding and inspiring.

Westin weaves together the many threads of Jansson’s rich, complex life: an education interrupted to help her family; the bleak war years and her emergence as a painter; the decades of Moominmania across books, newspaper comic strips, merchandise, and adaptations; her later fictions, including her popular The Summer Book; and her time with Pietilä on the solitary island of Klovharu. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers fans and admirers around the world the most complete portrait of the writer Philip Pullman described as “a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

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cover of Tracking the Meaning of Life: A Philosophical Journey

Tracking the Meaning of Life

A Philosophical Journey

Yuval Lurie

University of Missouri Press, 2006

What intelligent person has never pondered the meaning of life? For Yuval Lurie, this is more than a puzzling philosophical question; it is a journey, and in this book he takes readers on a search that ranges from ancient quests for the purpose of life to the ruminations of postmodern thinkers on meaning. He shows that the question about the meaning of life expresses philosophical puzzlement regarding life in general as well as personal concern about one’s own life in particular.
            Lurie traces the emergence of this question as a modern philosophical quandary, riddled with shifts and turns that have arisen over the years in response to it. Tracking the Meaning of Life is written as a critical philosophical investigation stretching over several traditions, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and existentialism. It maps out a journey that explores pivotal responses to this question, drawing especially on the thought of Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Camus and exploring in depth the insights these thinkers offer regarding their own difficulties concerning the meaning of life.
            In the book’s four sections, Lurie discusses Tolstoy’s challenge to experience the religious and transcendental meaning of life by choosing a simple, hardworking existence; Wittgenstein’s focus on ethics and discovering the sense of the world, his conclusion that the question of the meaning of life makes no sense, and his turning to experience the mystical aspect of the world; Sartre’s positing of freedom as the basis of human life, stipulating a personal answer to the question of the meaning of life; and Camus’ view of the absurdity of life, unalleviated by any personal meaning. Guided by these views, Lurie imparts new insight to ideas that underlie our concern with life’s meaning, such as the difference between attitudes toward life and beliefs and opinions about life, the meaning of words versus the meaning of events, shared meanings versus personal meanings, and the link between ethics and personal identity.
            Tracking the Meaning of Life is no mere dry philosophical study but a journey that dramatically illustrates the poignancy of the quest for meaning, showing that along the way it gradually becomes more obvious how personal meaning may be found in the pulsations of everyday life. The book offers stimulating reading not only for scholars in philosophy but also for general readers who wish to see how their personal concerns are echoed in modern philosophical thought. More than a description of a journey, it is a map to anxieties and puzzlements we all face, pointing to ideas that can guide readers on their own search for meaning.
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cover of Tracks in the Amazon: The Day-to-Day Life of the Workers on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad

Tracks in the Amazon

The Day-to-Day Life of the Workers on the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad

Gary Neeleman

University of Utah Press, 2014

When construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad began in 1867, Bolivia had lost its war with Chile, causing it to become landlocked and unable to ship its minerals and other products from the Pacific Coast. Since Bolivia needed to find a way to move products from the Atlantic Coast, the government decided a railroad should be built around the Madeira River—which originates in Bolivia and travels almost 2,000 miles through Brazil to the Amazon—facilitating shipment to foreign markets via the Amazonian waterway. Completion of the railroad was initially stalled by lack of funding, but the project was resurrected in the early twentieth century and completed in 1912. Intended as an integral piece of the rubber export industry, the railroad became unnecessary once the world supply of rubber moved from Brazil to Asia.

Although there have been many brief chronicles and writings about the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad over the years, most barely scratch the surface of this incredible story. Of particular import in Tracks in the Amazon are the photographs—which until now have rarely been seen—taken by Dana Merrill, a New York photographer hired to document the construction of the railroad. It also includes reproductions of the Porto Velho Marconigram, an English-language newspaper written for and by the American expatriates who lived in the construction headquarters at Porto Velho. Because this unique railroad traversed the densest tropical jungle on earth, more than 10,000 workers lost their lives laying the first five miles of track. The images and descriptions of the life of the workers on the railroad illustrate the challenges of working in the jungles—the unforgiving climate, malaria and yellow feverbearing mosquitoes, and the threat of wild animals—which made conditions for the workers next to impossible.

Finalist for the International Latino Book Awards: Best Book in Nonfiction in Portuguese. 
 
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cover of Travels in a Tree House: Essays on Life and Other Joys

Travels in a Tree House

Essays on Life and Other Joys

John Workman

University of Arkansas Press, 2001

In a collection of separate, mostly unrelated essays written for his newspaper column over many years, Workman charms with his grace, comforts with his wisdom and makes us smile with his wit. Like his previous collections of inspirational columns, Open Windows and Fireflies in a Fruitjar, this is a book to be read and given as a gift to those we love.
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cover of Trees as a Way of Life: An Arborist’s Story

Trees as a Way of Life

An Arborist’s Story

R. Bruce Allison

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2027

An arborist’s lifelong journey reveals the deep connections between people and trees.
Bruce Allison has spent decades listening to trees and making sense of what they tell us. In this intimate and absorbing memoir, he deftly weaves personal stories, botanical insights, and moments of wonder and revelation into a captivating ode to trees.
Trees as a Way of Life follows Allison on his journey from seedling to sapling to maturity, as he explores a eucalyptus grove as a boy in Bonita, California; learns the tree ethic as an apprentice arborist in Baltimore, Maryland; and establishes his own tree care company in Madison, Wisconsin. After more than fifty years as a professional arborist, he tells stories of stewarding the trees at the Wisconsin State Capitol and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, among other sites, and describes formative encounters with notable tree-loving clients, including American Girl creator Pleasant Rowland and Epic Systems founder Judith Faulkner. As he tells his own story, Allison incorporates the voices and stories of renowned naturalists like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.
Allison also uses his own tree encounters as jumping-off points for deep dives into individual species, memorable moments in tree history, and tips and tricks for tree care and maintenance. As only an accomplished arborist and educator could, he provides a detailed-yet-accessible tutorial on trees, from the upper canopy of stem and crown, through the veil of bark, to the hidden underground landscape of tree roots and fungi.
In the tradition of the international bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees, this book carries readers root by root and limb by limb to a deeper understanding of the trees that feed us, protect us, shade us, and inspire us. In an engaging narrative style that blends the personal, the scientific, and the poetic, Allison’s story is an intimate love letter to trees, a master class in understanding and appreciating them, and an invitation to readers who also long to make trees a way of life.

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cover of Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

Turning Archival

The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies

Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, editors

Duke University Press, 2022

The contributors to Turning Archival trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. Highlighting the growing significance of the archival to LGBTQ scholarship, politics, and everyday life, they draw upon accounts of queer archival encounters in institutional, grassroots, and everyday repositories of historical memory. The contributors examine such topics as the everyday life of marginalized queer immigrants in New York City as an archive; secondhand vinyl record collecting and punk bootlegs; the self-archiving practices of grassroots lesbians; and the decolonial potential of absences and gaps in the colonial archives through the life of a suspected hermaphrodite in colonial Guatemala. Engaging with archives from Africa to the Americas to the Arctic, this volume illuminates the allure of the archive, reflects on that which resists archival capture, and outlines the stakes of queer and trans lives in the archival turn.

Contributors. Anjali Arondekar, Kate Clark, Ann Cvetkovich, Carolyn Dinshaw, Kate Eichhorn, Javier Fernández-Galeano, Emmett Harsin Drager, Elliot James, Marget Long, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Daniel Marshall, María Elena Martínez, Joan Nestle, Iván Ramos, David Serlin, Zeb Tortorici
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cover of Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Twain in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Gary Scharnhorst

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Never one to suffer fools gladly, especially if they wore crinolines, Mark Twain lost as many friends as he made, and he targeted them all indiscriminately. The first major American writer born west of the Mississippi River, he enjoys a reputation unrivaled in American literary history, and from the beginning of his career he tried to control that reputation by fiercely protecting his public persona. Not a debunking account of Twain’s life but refreshingly immune from his relentless image making, Gary Scharnhorst’s Twain in His Own Time offers an anecdotal version of Twain’s life over which the master spin-doctor had virtually no control.

The ninety-four recollections gathered in Twain in His Own Time form an unsanitized, collaborative biography designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the iconic author. Opening with an interview with his mother that has never been reprinted, it includes memoirs by his daughters and by men who knew him when he was roughing it in Nevada and California, an interview with the pilot who taught him to navigate the Mississippi River, reminiscences from his illustrators E. M. Kemble and Dan Beard and two of his so-called adolescent angelfish, contributions from politicians and from such literary figures as Dan De Quille and George Bernard Shaw, and one of the most damning assessments of his character—by the author Frank Harris—ever published.

Each entry is introduced by a brief explanation of its historical and cultural context; explanatory notes provide further information about people and places; and Scharnhorst’s introduction and chronology of Twain’s eventful life are comprehensive and detailed. Dozens of lively primary sources published incrementally over more than eighty years, most recorded after his death, illustrate the complexities of this flamboyant, outspoken personality in a way that no single biographer could.

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cover of Twelve Twenty-Five: The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive

Twelve Twenty-Five

The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive

Kevin P. Keefe

Michigan State University Press, 2016

The against-all-odds story of a World War II–era steam locomotive and the determination of two generations of volunteers to keep it running comes alive in Twelve Twenty-Five: The Life and Times of a Steam Locomotive.
 
Pere Marquette 1225 was built in 1941 at the peak of steam locomotive development. The narrative traces the 1225’s regular freight service in Michigan, its unlikely salvation from the scrapyard for preservation at Michigan State University, and the subsequent work to bring it back to steam, first by a student club and later by a railroad museum. Milestones along the way include 1225’s retirement in 1951, its donation to MSU in 1957, its return to steam in 1988, a successful career hauling tens of thousands of excursion riders, and its starring role in the 2004 movie The Polar Express. The massive infrastructure that supported American steam locomotives in their heyday disappeared long ago, forcing 1225’s faithful to make their own spare parts, learn ancient railroad skills, and interpret the entire effort for the public. As such, the continuing career of 1225 is a triumph of historic preservation.
 
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cover of Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins

Twentieth Century Drifter

The Life of Marty Robbins

Diane Diekman

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is the first biography of this legendary country music artist and NASCAR driver who scored sixteen number-one hits and two Grammy awards. Yet even with fame and fortune, Marty Robbins always yearned for more.
 
Drawing from personal interviews and in-depth research, biographer Diane Diekman explains how Robbins saw himself as a drifter, a man always searching for self-fulfillment and inner peace. Born Martin David Robinson to a hardworking mother and an abusive alcoholic father, he never fully escaped the insecurities burned into him by a poverty-stricken nomadic childhood in the Arizona desert. In 1947 he got his first gig as a singer and guitar player. Too nervous to talk, the shy young man walked onstage singing. Soon he changed his name to Marty Robbins, cultivated his magnetic stage presence, and established himself as an entertainer, songwriter, and successful NASCAR driver.
 
For fans of Robbins, NASCAR, and classic country music, Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins is a revealing portrait of this well-loved, restless entertainer, a private man who kept those who loved him at a distance.

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