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Engrossing and enlightening, Vardis Fisher illuminates the acclaimed author's impact on Mormon culture, American letters, and the literary tradition of the American West.

The dominant public figure in Brazil from 1930 until 1954 was a highly contradictory and controversial personality. Getúlio Vargas, from the pampas of the southern frontier state of Rio Grande do Sul, became the dictator who ruled without ever forgetting the lower classes.

Vargas was a consummate artist at politics. He climbed the political ladder through seats in the state and national legislatures to the post of federal Finance Minister and to the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul. His career then took him to the National Palace as Provisional President and as Constitutional President, and later as the dictator of his "New State." After his deposition in 1945 and a period of semiretirement, his continuing widespread popularity resulted in his successful come-back campaign in 1950 for the Presidency on the Labor Party ticket.

Vargas' contributions to Brazilian political and economic life were many and important. Taking advantage of the power which his political magic provided him, he brought Brazil from a loose confederacy of semifeudal states to a strongly centralized nation. He was a great eclectic, welding into his social, political, and economic policies what he found good in various programs. He was also a great opportunist in the sense that he adroitly took advantage of conditions and circumstances to effect his ends. He was intimately related to the revolutionary changes in Brazilian life after 1930.

Vargas, "Father of the Brazilians," attributed achievements such as these to power in his own hands. His foes, however, still feared the political wizard, and they cheered the military when it deposed him. After his return, "on the arms of the people," Vargas saw that the armed forces were determined to repeat history, and in 1954 he chose another path—suicide.

All of these exciting events are related in John W. F. Dulles's Vargas of Brazil: A Political Biography. Despite its emphasis on Vargas the politician and statesman, the reader comes to know Vargas the man.

For this portrait of Vargas and of Brazil the author has drawn much material from State Department papers in the National Archives and from other public sources, and from interviews with numerous persons who were participants in the events he describes or observers of them. The result is an interesting, revealing, valid account of an important people. Many illustrations supplement the text.

José Vasconcelos—lawyer, politician, writer, educator, philosopher, prophet, and mystic—was one of the most influential and controversial figures in the intellectual life of twentieth-century Mexico.

Vasconcelos was driven by the desire to gain a complete and comprehensive vision of reality, employing his own aesthetic-emotive method and a poetic mode of expression. The complex philosophical system that resulted is what he called “aesthetic monism.” But this is only one side of the man. Vasconcelos was also vitally interested in both the proximate realities and remote possibilities of Mexico, in the character of the “cosmic race” of his homeland, and in the relations between his own country and the others of this hemisphere.

Soon after Vasconcelos’s death in 1959, Eduardo García Máynez spoke of him, in a moving tribute, as “without question the most inspiring intellectual and human figure that Mexico has produced.” Unhappily—and perhaps disgracefully—he has remained almost unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. Histories of Mexico published in English usually give passing mention to his role as Minister of Public Education or his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, but his aesthetic system and his socio-political ideas have been ignored by philosophers in the United States.

Here, for the first time, is a unified, inclusive, and occasionally critical presentation of the entire range of Vasconcelos’s thought, from his metaphysics and theory of knowledge through his aesthetics and ethics to his social and political philosophy. It is enriched by an appendix in which the most significant passages from Vasconcelos’s own philosophical writings are presented in English translations.

Moore's personal, from-the-hip history spans the long-running war against dons and drug dealers and covers agents' daring infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell's Angels, and other violent groups. He reveals the cutting-edge forensics work that helped crack the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and also provides an insider account of the raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco. Finally, Moore discusses the ATF's rivalry with the FBI and the political power games that impede the government's ability to fight crime.

The "first lady of Argentine letters," Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house.

In this first biographical study in English of "la superbe Argentine," originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampo's role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American public—through the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampo's personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this century—including José Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for women's rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Perón regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953.

Fifteen of Victoria Ocampo's essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.

In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: “As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature.” This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam–Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a “page-turner”—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

Virginia’s Apple is a collection of fourteen literary memoirs that explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone yet they are linked—characters reappear and, taken together, they create a larger narrative.

The content is wide-ranging: the early days of the Second Wave of feminism—the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times; navigating a sometimes precarious existence as an out lesbian long before it was commonplace; leaving England and becoming an American citizen; finding a life partner; and growing old with an inherited disability. The author’s friendship with the distinguished poet Adrienne Rich is the subject of one story. In another, there’s an appearance by the notorious murderer, Lord Lucan, whose wife was a chance acquaintance.

These stories are laced with humor and joy, while pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.

Voice Lessons explores the rich personal and political terrain of Alice Embree, a 1960s activist and convert to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, bringing a woman’s perspective to a transformational time in US history. This riveting memoir traces the author’s roots in segregated Austin and her participation in efforts to integrate the University of Texas. It follows her antiwar activism from a vigil in front of President Lyndon Johnson’s ranch in 1965 to a massive protest after the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Embree’s activism brought her and the Students for a Democratic Society into conflict with Frank Erwin, the powerful chairman of the UT Board of Regents, and inspired a campus free speech movement. She recounts her experiences living in New York during the tumultuous years of 1968 and 1969, including the Columbia University strike and the Woodstock music festival. She also tells about protesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention, her interactions with Yippies and poets, and her travels to Chile, Cuba, and Mexico. Embree highlights the radical roots of the women’s liberation movement in Austin and the audacious women’s community that challenged gender roles, fought for reproductive justice, and inspired a lifetime of activism.