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4 books match the query '1928-2016'

cover of Edward Albee

Edward Albee

Toby Zinman

University of Michigan Press, 2008

A theater lover’s guide to the dramatic works of one of America’s most important living playwrights

Edward Albee was a giant in American theater, in the same pantheon with Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. His prolific career included three Pulitzer Prizes and the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.

Albee continued producing major works for the theater into his eighties, including a prequel to The Zoo Story, which shocked the country when it first appeared in 1958—and his plays have seen major revivals on and off Broadway in recent years. Yet even with this resurgence of popularity, no up-to-date treatment of his plays is currently in print.

With engaging discussions of his most famous plays, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Three Tall Women, as well as his lesser known works, this essential guide reveals the heart of Albee’s drama, highlighting the themes of sex, death, loneliness, and time that have occupied the playwright during his more than fifty years in the theater.

Toby Zinman is the theater critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has written for numerous publications, including Variety,American Theater, and Theatre Journal. She is Professor of English at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.


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cover of Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership

Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership

Mark Chmiel

Temple University Press, 2001

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel has long opposed the silence of bystanders that allows atrocities like the Holocaust to occur. Nevetheless, since the 1980's, Wiesel has come under criticism for his refusal to speak out about the State of Israel's treatment of Palestinian people.

Mark Chmiel's thoroughly researched and penetrating study is the first book to examine both Wiesel's practice of solidarity with suffering people and his silence before Israeli and American power. Drawing on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's studies on "worthy and unworthy victims," the author analyzes Wiesel's initiatives of Jewish and universal solidarity with groups ranging from Holocaust survivors and Russian Jews to Vietnamese boat people and Kosovar refugees.

Chmiel also critically engages Wiesel's long-standing defense of the State of Israel as well as his confrontations and collaborations with the U.S. government, including the birth of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the 1985 Bitburg affair with President Reagan, and U.S. intervention in the Balkans.

Throughout, the author probes the nuances and ambiguities of Wiesel's human rights activism and shows the various uses to which his Holocaust discourse has been put, both in the Middle East conflict and in issues involving U.S. foreign policy.

Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership provides a provocative view of one of the most acclaimed moralists in recent American history and raises important questions about what it means to be a responsible intellectual in the United States.
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cover of Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette

Mary M. Wiles

University of Illinois Press, 2012

As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world's perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Céline et Julie vont en bateau--Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret défense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty.
 
In this study of Rivette, Mary M. Wiles provides a thorough account of the director's career from the burgeoning French New Wave to the present day, focusing on the theatricality of Rivette's films and his explorations of the relationship between cinema and fine arts such as painting, literature, music, and dance. Wiles also explores the intellectual interests that shaped Rivette's approach to film, including Sartre's existentialism, Barthes's structuralism, and the radical theater of the 1960s. The volume concludes with Wiles's insightful interview with Rivette.
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cover of Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery

Richard Selzer and the Rhetoric of Surgery

Charles M. Anderson

Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Anderson provides the context from which Selzer’s writing grows and a concept of language adequate to his purposes and accomplishments. He takes a careful look at Selzer’s writing to demonstrate that these abstract considerations do tell us why a surgeon would write. The works Anderson examines are "Jonah and the Whale" (an important early short story) and the first three essays in Mortal Lessons. These examples show the reader exactly how the symbols of literature interact directly with the world and the everyday communications of both writer and reader. According to Anderson, Mortal Lessons is also Selzer’s most artistic statement of his own sense of why and how he became a writer.

Selzer’s books include Rituals of Surgery, Mortal Lessons, Confessions of a Knife, Letters to a Young Doctor, and Taking the World in for Repairs.

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