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35 books match the query '1935-'

cover of Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy

Arts of Wonder

Enchanting Secularity - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy

Jeffrey L. Kosky

University of Chicago Press, 2012

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by ‘the disenchantment of the world.’” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the modern condition: the increasing capabilities of knowledge and science have banished mysteries, leaving a world that can be mastered technically and intellectually. And though this idea seems empowering, many people have become disenchanted with modern disenchantment. Using intimate encounters with works of art to explore disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment, Arts of Wonder addresses questions about the nature of humanity, the world, and God in the wake of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity.
 
Jeffrey L. Kosky focuses on a handful of artists—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy—to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation. What might be thought of as religious longings, he argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art. Developing a model of religion that might be significant to secular culture, Kosky shows how this model can be employed to deepen interpretation of the art we usually view as representing secular modernity. A thoughtful dialogue between philosophy and art, Arts of Wonder will catch the eye of readers of art and religion, philosophy of religion, and art criticism.
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cover of Attu Boy: A Young Alaskan's WWII Memoir

Attu Boy

A Young Alaskan's WWII Memoir

Nick Golodoff

University of Alaska Press, 2015

In the quiet of morning, exactly six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese touched down on American soil. Landing on the remote Alaska island of Attu, they assailed an entire village, holding the Alaskan villagers for two months and eventually corralling all survivors into a freighter bound for Japan.
One of those survivors, Nick Golodoff, became a prisoner of war at just six years old. He was among the dozens of Unangan Attu residents swept away to Hokkaido, and one of only twenty-five to survive. Attu Boy tells Golodoff’s story of these harrowing years as he found both friendship and cruelty at the hands of the Japanese. It offers a rare look at the lives of civilian prisoners and their captors in WWII-era Japan. It also tells of Golodoff’s bittersweet return to a homeland torn apart by occupation and forced internments. Interwoven with other voices from Attu, this richly illustrated memoir is a testament to the struggles, triumphs, and heartbreak of lives disrupted by war.
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cover of Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent

Buying the Night Flight

The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent

Georgie Anne Geyer

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Buying the Night Flight is Georgie Anne Geyer's retelling of her thrilling rise from cub reporter to foreign correspondent as she made her way into the male-dominated world of journalism. Geyer transports the reader to Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, and Cambodia, recounting the history and politics, adventure and exhaustion of the time from a truly unique perspective. Told with brilliance and dead-on honesty, this book vividly captures the triumphs of a determined and talented young reporter.
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cover of Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies 1959-2009

Changing the Subject

Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies 1959-2009

Edited and with an Introduction by Joseph Roach

University of Michigan Press, 2009

The new field of theatre studies changed rapidly in the post-World War II, post-Sputnik expansion of higher education, driven by the expressive urgencies of the baby boom and the ferment of the revolutionary 1960s. Internationally focused, communicatively multilingual, and culturally provocative, theatre lent itself particularly well to the agendas of many constituencies, some of them violently opposed, in the arts and politics. The remarkable career of one theatre scholar has mapped the issues, ideas, and methods of this emerging discipline during the most fertile period of its formation. Marvin Carlson's distinguished record of scholarship includes fifteen books and more than a hundred articles on the Western European and Arabic-speaking stages; he has also been a prolific translator, editor, and reviewer and has taught and inspired generations of students, many of whom have become major scholars in their own right. Changing the Subject collects newly commissioned essays by eminent scholars to create a casebook on the changes in the field over the past fifty years. The elegant construction of this innovative collection allows readers to trace the evolution of major paradigms in theatre studies (including the drive to document historic performances, the rise of radical theatres and theatre artists, the application of theory to the field, and the birth of performance studies) while they simultaneously follow Marvin Carlson's development as a scholar, teacher, and mentor.
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cover of Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee

Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing

André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee

Rosemary Jane Jolly

Ohio University Press, 1995

The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator?

Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee—to consider violence in the context of apartheid and colonialism and their inherent patriarchies.

Jolly also discusses the violence attendant upon the act of narration in the broader context of critiques of Kafka, Freud, Hegel, the postcolonial critics Jan Mohamed and Bhabha, and feminists such as Susan Suleiman.

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cover of Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music

Cybersonic Arts

Adventures in American New Music

Godon Mumma, Edited by Michelle Fillion

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Composer, performer, instrument builder, teacher, and writer Gordon Mumma has left an indelible mark on the American contemporary music scene. A prolific composer and innovative French horn player, Mumma is recognized for integrating advanced electronic processes into musical structures, an approach he has termed ""Cybersonics.""

Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma's writings, presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career. Here, through words and astonishing photos, is Mumma's chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century: his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music; his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music; performances with the Sonic Arts Union; and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In addition, Mumma describes his collaborations with composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

Candid and insightful, Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observer.

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cover of Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge

Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge

Robert A. Morace

Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Morace analyzes the novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge together because they provide a dialogue of conflicting views, styles, and forms of the contemporary novel. This dialogue parallels the views of these two British novelists as critics.

Beginning as realists, as novelists of manners, as writers of campus novels, Bradbury and Lodge explore the possibilities and the limitations of realistic writing. Bradbury and Lodge, however, are not only heirs of English literary tradition. Both are also literary critics with a keen interest in recent critical theories. Morace shows us how the debate between Bradbury and Lodge over the nature and purpose of fiction and criticism has found its way into their novels. The realistic conflicts between civilian and military, English and American, pre- and post-Vatican II values gradually give way to an exploration of the semiotics behind such conflicts.

Morace finds Bradbury’s and Lodge’s works far more open-ended than the "doggedly indeterminate fictions" of many contemporary writers. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, he identifies the ways in which language and values simultaneously compete with and support one another in their novels.

This first book-length study of Bradbury or Lodge deals with all of their novels, including Changing Places, How Far Can You Go?, and Small World by Lodge, as well as Bradbury’s The History of Man and Rates of Exchange.

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cover of Encyclopedia of the Dead

Encyclopedia of the Dead

Danilo Kis

Northwestern University Press, 1997

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes—the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.
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cover of Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary

Envisioning Taiwan

Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary

June Yip

Duke University Press, 2004

In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory.

Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.

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cover of Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama

Felt

Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama

Chris Thompson

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Felt provides a nonlinear look at the engagement of the postwar avant-garde with Eastern spirituality, a context in which the German artist Joseph Beuys appears as an uneasy shaman. Centered on a highly publicized yet famously inconclusive 1982 meeting between Beuys and the Dalai Lama, arranged by the Dutch artist Louwrien Wijers, Chris Thompson explores the interconnections among Beuys, the Fluxus movement, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice.

Building from the resonance of felt, the fabric, in both Tibetan culture and in Beuys’s art, Thompson takes as his point of departure Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus of felt as smooth space that is “in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction,” its structure determined by chance as opposed to the planned, woven nature of most fabrics. Felt is thus seen as an alternative to the model of the network: felt’s anarchic form is not reducible to the regularity of the net, grid, or mesh, and the more it is pulled, tweaked, torn, and agitated, the greater its structural integrity.

Felt thus invents its methodology from the material that represents its object of inquiry and from this advances a reading of the avant-garde. At the same time, Thompson demonstrates that it is sometimes the failures of thought, the disappointing meetings, even the untimely deaths that open portals through which life flows into art and allows new conjunctions of life, art, and thought. Thompson explores both the well-known engagement of Fluxus artists with Eastern spirituality and the more elusive nature of Beuys’s own late interest in Tibetan culture, arriving at a sense of how such noncausal interactions—interhuman intrigue—create culture and shape contemporary art history.
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cover of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War

Free Speech and Koch Money

Manufacturing a Campus Culture War

Ralph Wilson

Pluto Press, 2021

In recent years hundreds of high-profile ‘free speech’ incidents have rocked US college campuses. Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers have faced considerable protest, with many being disinvited from speaking. These incidents are widely circulated as examples of the academy’s intolerance towards conservative views.

But this response is not the spontaneous outrage of the liberal colleges. There is a darker element manufacturing the crisis, funded by political operatives, and designed to achieve specific political outcomes. If you follow the money, at the heart of the issue lies the infamous and ultra-libertarian Koch donor network.

Grooming extremist celebrities, funding media platforms that promote these controversies, developing legal organzations to sue universities and corrupting legislators, the influence of the Koch network runs deep. We need to abandon the ‘campus free speech’ narrative and instead follow the money if we ever want to root out this dangerous network from our universities.

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cover of Friday Night Fighter: Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing

Friday Night Fighter

Gaspar "Indio" Ortega and the Golden Age of Television Boxing

Troy Rondinone

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Friday Night Fighter relives a lost moment in American postwar history, when boxing ruled as one of the nation's most widely televised sports. During the 1950s and 1960s, viewers tuned in weekly, sometimes even daily, to watch widely recognized fighters engage in primordial battle; the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights was the most popular fight show. Troy Rondinone follows the dual narratives of the Friday Night Fights show and the individual story of Gaspar "Indio" Ortega, a boxer who appeared on prime-time network television more than almost any other boxer in history. From humble beginnings growing up poor in Tijuana, Mexico, Ortega personified the phenomenon of postwar boxing at its greatest, appearing before audiences of millions to battle the biggest names of the time, such as Carmen Basilio, Tony DeMarco, Chico Vejar, Benny "Kid" Paret, Emile Griffith, Kid Gavilan, Florentino Fernández, and Luis Manuel Rodriguez.

Rondinone explores the factors contributing to the success of televised boxing, including the rise of television entertainment, the role of a "reality" blood sport, Cold War masculinity, changing attitudes toward race in America, and the influence of organized crime. At times evoking the drama and spectacle of the Friday Night Fights themselves, this volume is a lively examination of a time in history when Americans crowded around their sets to watch the main event.

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cover of From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide

From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi

Our Embassy Years during Genocide

By Ambassador Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger

University of Texas Press, 2007

In 1994, while nations everywhere stood idly by, 800,000 people were slaughtered in eight weeks in Rwanda. Arriving as U.S. Ambassador to neighboring Burundi a few weeks later, Bob Krueger began drawing international attention to the genocide also proceeding in Burundi, where he sought to minimize the killing and to preserve its fledgling democratic government from destruction by its own army. From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi is a compelling eyewitness account of both a horrific and persistent genocide and of the ongoing efforts of many courageous individuals to build a more just society.

Krueger and his wife Kathleen graphically document the slaughter occurring all around them, as well as their repeated efforts to get the U.S. government and the international community to take notice and take action. Bob Krueger reconstructs the events of the military coup that precipitated the Burundi genocide and describes his efforts to uncover the truth by digging up graves and interviewing survivors. In straightforward and powerful language, Kathleen Krueger recounts her family's experience living amid civil war, including when she faced down a dozen AK-47-wielding African soldiers to save the life of a household worker.

From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi shines a piercing light on a genocide that has gone largely unreported, and identifies those responsible for it. It also offers hope that as the truth emerges and the perpetrators are brought to account, the people of Burundi will at last achieve peace and reconciliation.

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cover of George Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me

George Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me

David R. Slavitt

Northwestern University Press, 2009

Taking its inspiration from Sanders’s own autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad (1960), this book is part witty, bawdy, and irreverent memoir, part moving meditation on the price of fame; like most of David Slavitt’s work, it defies easy categorization.In George Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me, Slavittlooks back to his career as a film critic in the glamorous—at least superficially—world of 1950s Hollywood, when he traveled in circles that included the talented British actor George Sanders (1906–1972) and his then-wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was talented at, well, being famous.

Sanders, who seemed to maintain an ironic detachment from roles that were often beneath him, nonetheless couldn’t bear the decline of his later years and committed suicide at the age of sixty-five. Darkly humorous to the end, his note read, "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck." Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, remains in the headlines (with her dubiously named husband Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt) at age ninety-two. Although he punctuates his story with witty asides—the author’s encounter with Marilyn Monroe is particularly memorable—Slavitt turns a critic’s eye toward questions of talent and art, while also tackling the difficult and universal questions of aging, relationships, and mortality.

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cover of Gibson's Last Stand: The Rise, Fall, and Near Misses of the St. Louis Cardinals, 1969-1975

Gibson's Last Stand

The Rise, Fall, and Near Misses of the St. Louis Cardinals, 1969-1975

Doug Feldmann

University of Missouri Press, 2013

 
During star-pitcher Bob Gibson’s most brilliant season, the turbulent summer of 1968, he started thirty-four games and pitched every inning in twenty-eight of them, shutting out the opponents in almost half of those complete games. After their record-breaking season, Gibson and his teammates were stunned to lose the 1968 World Series to the Detroit Tigers. For the next six years, as Bob Gibson struggled to maintain his pitching excellence at the end of his career, changes in American culture ultimately changed the St. Louis Cardinals and the business and pastime of baseball itself.
Set against the backdrop of American history and popular culture, from the protests of the Vietnam War to the breakup of the Beatles, the story of the Cardinals takes on new meaning as another aspect of the changes happening at that time. In the late 1960s, exorbitant salaries and free agency was threatening to change America’s game forever and negatively impact the smaller-market teams in Major League Baseball. As the Cardinals’ owner August A. Busch Jr. and manager Albert “Red” Schoendienst attempted to reinvent the team, restore its cohesiveness, and bring new blood in to propel the team back to contention for the pennant, Gibson remained the one constant on the team.
In looking back on his career, Gibson mourned the end of the Golden Era of baseball and believed that the changes in the game would be partially blamed on him, as his pitching success caused team owners to believe that cash-paying customers only wanted base hits and home runs. Yet, he contended, the shrinking of the strike zone, the lowering of the mound, and the softening of the traditional rancor between the hitter and pitcher forever changed the role of the pitcher in the game and created a more politically correct version of the sport.
Throughout Gibson’s Last Stand, Doug Feldmann captivates readers with the action of the game, both on and off the field, and interjects interesting and detailed tidbits on players’ backgrounds that often tie them to famous players of the past, current stars, and well-known contemporary places. Feldmann also entwines the teams history with Missouri history: President Truman and the funeral procession for President Eisenhower through St. Louis; Missouri sports legends Dizzy Dean, Mark McGwire, and Stan “the Man” Musial; and legendary announcers Harry Caray and Jack Buck. Additionally, a helpful appendix provides National League East standings from 1969 to 1975.
Bob Gibson remains one of the most unique, complex, and beloved players in Cardinals history. In this story of one of the least examined parts of his career—his final years on the team—Feldmann takes readers into the heart of his complexity and the changes that swirled around him.
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cover of God's Horse and The Atheists' School

God's Horse and The Atheists' School

Wilhelm Dichter

Northwestern University Press, 2012

Wilhelm Dichter's autobiographical novels, God's Horse and The Atheists' School, have been translated into English for the first time and are presented here in a single volume. From the gradually maturing perspective of the narrator, a Polish Jewish youngster, they recount the harrowing tale of his family's struggle to survive the Holocaust and their privileged post-Holocaust lives as members of Poland's political elite. God's Horse depicts the sudden reversal of victim status that occurred when, in the postwar period, the hidden Jewish child became a little Red prince, thanks to his stepfather, a Jewish rising star in the communist regime. The Atheists' School, the sequel, follows the narrator through the years of high Stalinism into young adulthood and depicts the tensions between dedicated Jewish communists, some of whom join the elite, and Jews who are convinced that the Jews in Poland will inevitably be victimized again. 

In spare, precise prose, Dichter brings to life the tensions between ideologues and pragmatists, Polish patriots and their Soviet masters. These evocative novels also provide a psychologically persuasive and profoundly moving portrait of the narrator. The author's alter ego, supported by his stalwart and overly indulgent mother, possesses the tenacity to transform himself from an awkward, traumatized child survivor into an unsettled but eventually independent-minded young man.
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cover of Grandeur of the Everyday: The Paintings of Dale Kennington

Grandeur of the Everyday

The Paintings of Dale Kennington

Dale Kennington, Introduction by Daniel White, Conversation with Kristen Miller Zohn, Essay by Rebecca Brantley

University of Alabama Press, 2017

A lavishly illustrated overview of the life and work of realist painter Dale Kennington, featuring more than eighty-five of her most renowned works.

Grandeur of the Everyday is the first full-length volume dedicated to the life and work of Dale Kennington—an accomplished master of contemporary American realism. Kennington’s works often hold a strange familiarity, even for those coming to her work for the first time. Her paintings are at once familiar and yet defy specificity of place, clear and lucid while also dense in content. These effects derive from her unique ability to capture the essence of everyday living, the ordinary “in between” moments we often overlook in our day-to-day habits and transactions.

Kennington referred to her paintings as “merged memories.” Combining elements of photography, memory, and imagination, Kennington’s art is an entrancing blend of contemporary and magical realism, with themes ranging from loneliness to community and culture, from class and race relations to the juxtaposition of private and public life. Rather than study the spectacular, she concentrated on commonplace moments of human interaction, inviting observers of her paintings to ponder their significance and to complete their implicit narratives. Often relying on local subjects for her paintings—barbershops, bars, restaurants, gospel concerts, motel rooms, nursing homes—she presented a diversity of local experience.

Grandeur of the Everyday is a treasure trove of her most accomplished creations and includes more than eighty-five examples of both Kennington’s easel paintings on canvas and her freestanding wooden folding screens. The volume also offers an original interview with the artist conducted by Kristen Miller Zohn, an introduction by art historian Daniel White, and a critical essay by the director of the Wiregrass Museum of Art, Rebecca Brantley.
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cover of Hollow and Home: A History of Self and Place

Hollow and Home

A History of Self and Place

E. Fred Carlisle

West Virginia University Press, 2017

Hollow and Home explores the ways the primary places in our lives shape the individuals we become. It proposes that place is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. Place refers to geographical and constructed places—location, topography, landscape, and buildings. It also refers to the psychological, social, and cultural influences at work at a given location. These elements act in concert to constitute a place.
 
Carlisle incorporates perspectives from writers like Edward S. Casey, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Witold Rybczynski, but he applies theory with a light touch. Placing this literature in dialog with personal experience, he concentrates on two places that profoundly influenced him and enabled him to overcome a lifelong sense of always leaving his pasts behind. The first is Clover Hollow in Appalachian Virginia, where the author lived for ten years among fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation residents. The people and places there enabled him to value his own past and primary places in a new way. The story then turns to Carlisle’s life growing up in Delaware, Ohio. He describes in rich detail the ways the town shaped him in both enabling and disabling ways. In the end, after years of moving from place to place, Carlisle’s experience in Appalachia helped him rediscover his hometown—both the Old Delaware, where he grew up, and the New Delaware, a larger, thriving small city—as his true home.
 
The themes of the book transcend specific localities and speak to the relationship of self and place everywhere.
 
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cover of Kinship, Language, and Prehistory: Per Hage and the Renaissance in Kinship Studies

Kinship, Language, and Prehistory

Per Hage and the Renaissance in Kinship Studies

Doug Jones

University of Utah Press, 2011

A chronicle of the renaissance in kinship studies, these seventeen articles pay tribute to Per Hage, one of the founding fathers of the movement and long-time faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. With mathematician Frank Harary, Hage pioneered the use of graph theoretical models in anthropology, a systematic analysis of diverse cognitive, social, and cultural components that provides a common technical vocabulary for the entire field. Anthropological studies have benefited from quantitative evaluation, particularly kinship, which is newly appreciated for its application to all social sciences. The chapters of this book, some original works by the contributors and some unpublished Hage material, attest to the importance of the continual study of kinship.

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cover of Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n Roll Song; Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing for the First Time Anywhere, the

Louie Louie

The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n Roll Song; Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing for the First Time Anywhere, the

Dave Marsh

University of Michigan Press, 2004

A new edition of Dave Marsh's classic work on the three-chord song that rocked the world

"A tale as compelling as any John Grisham thriller."
-Rolling Stone

"Dave Marsh's Louie Louie is part rant, part rock criticism and part cultural analysis, with a good dose of Ripley's Believe It or Not! thrown in."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Marsh keeps the story of one trashy song interesting by revealing how 'three chords and a cloud of dust' contains within it the history and future of rock 'n' roll."
-Booklist

"What you don't know about 'Louie Louie' probably won't hurt you. But everything you need to know is in Marsh's book, including the lyrics-the real ones and the ones people thought they heard. If there is a better measure of your pop-cultural IQ, I don't know where to find it."
-USA Today
 
Since his days as the original editor of Creem, Dave Marsh has been revered as one of rock's greatest critics. During the 70s he was record editor at Rolling Stone, and in 1983 he founded Rock & Roll Confidential. His other books include Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (1987), and Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who (1983).

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cover of Messages from the Wild: An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History

Messages from the Wild

An Almanac of Suburban Natural and Unnatural History

By Frederick R. Gehlbach

University of Texas Press, 2002

Seeking a closer connection with nature than the manicured lawns of suburbia, naturalist Fred Gehlbach and his family built a house on the edge of a wooded ravine in Central Texas in the mid-1960s. On daily walks over the hills, creek hollows, and fields of the ravine, Gehlbach has observed the cycles of weather and seasons, the annual migrations of birds, and the life cycles of animals and plants that also live in the ravine.

In this book, Gehlbach draws on thirty-five years of journal entries to present a composite, day-by-day almanac of the life cycles of this semiwild natural island in the midst of urban Texas. Recording such events as the hatching of Eastern screech owl chicks, the emergence of June bugs, and the first freeze of November, he reminds us of nature's daily, monthly, and annual cycles, from which humans are becoming ever more detached in our unnatural urban environments. The long span of the almanac also allows Gehlbach to track how local and even global developments have affected the ravine, from scars left by sewer construction to an increase in frost-free days probably linked to global warming.

This long-term record of natural cycles provides one of only two such baseline data sets for North America. At the same time, the book is an eloquent account of one keen observer's daily interactions with his wild and human neighbors and of the lessons in connectedness and the "play of life" that they teach.

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cover of Missing Pieces: A Chronicle Of Living With A Disability

Missing Pieces

A Chronicle Of Living With A Disability

Kenneth Zola

Temple University Press, 2003

The personal odyssey of a man with a disability, this passionate book tries to tell as well as analyze what it is like to have a disability in a world that values vigor and health. Zola writes, "Missing Pieces is an unraveling of a social problem in the manner of Black Like Me. Like its author, I, too, am a trained social observer, but for me 'passing' was not an issue. For I already have the stigmata of the disabled—the braces, the limp, the cane—though I have spent much of my life denying their existence." The author started out in the role of a social scientist on a seven-day excursion to acquaint himself with an extraordinary experiment in living—Het Dorp, one of the few places in the world designed to promote "the optimum happiness" of those with severe physical disabilities. Neither a medial center nor a nursing home, Het Dorp is a village in the western-most part of the Netherlands. What began as a sociological attempt to describe this unusual setting became, through the author's growing awareness, what can only be called a socio-autobiography. Resuming his prior dependence on a wheelchair, the author experienced his own transformation from someone who is "normal" and "valid" to someone who is "invalid." The routine of Het Dorp became his: he lived in an architecturally modified home, visited the workshops, and shared meals, social events, conversation, and perceptions with the remarkably diverse residents. The author confronts some rarely discussed issues—the self-image of a person with a chronic disability, how one fills one's time, how one deals with authority and dependence, and love and sex. Missing Pieces offers striking insights into an aspect of the human condition shared by nearly 30 million Americans. It is must-read for the general reader, as well as for the rehabilitation counselor, social worker, or social scientist.
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cover of Mutilating The Body: Identity In Blood And Ink

Mutilating The Body

Identity In Blood And Ink

Kim Hewitt

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Kim Hewitt explores self-mutilation through history and across cultural divisions, finding these acts “positive expressions of social custom, individualism and resourcefulness . . . symptomatic of crises of identity, religious faith, or modern social structures.” In modern contexts, such ancient rituals continue to function as an avenue of symbolic death and rebirth. In her analysis of the origins and motivations of body modification, the author draws upon psychological, medical, and cultural theories on self-inflicted pain—tattooing and scarification as well as fasting, bulimia, and some performance art. She finds such contemporary acts of self-mutilation may “express a change in how society perceives marginalization.”
[more]
cover of No Small Potatoes: How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business

No Small Potatoes

How a Family Potato Salad Recipe is Fast Becoming a Billion Dollar Business

Al Reser

Oregon State University Press, 2010

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cover of One Ranger Returns

One Ranger Returns

By H. Joaquin Jackson, with James L. Haley

University of Texas Press, 2008

No Texas Ranger memoir has captured the public's imagination like Joaquin Jackson's One Ranger. Readers thrilled to Jackson's stories of catching criminals and keeping the peace across a wide swath of the Texas-Mexico border—and clamored for more. Now in One Ranger Returns, Jackson reopens his case files to tell more unforgettable stories, while also giving readers a deeply personal view of what being a Texas Ranger has meant to him and his family.

Jackson recalls his five-year pursuit of two of America's most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. He sets the record straight about the role of the Texas Rangers during the United Farm Workers strike in the Rio Grande Valley in 1966-1967. Jackson also describes the frustration of trying to solve a cold case from 1938—the brutal murder of a mother and daughter in the lonely desert east of Van Horn. He presents a rogue's gallery of cattle rustlers, drug smugglers, and a teetotaling bootlegger named Tom Bybee, a modest, likeable man who became an ax murderer. And in an eloquent concluding chapter, Jackson pays tribute to the Rangers who have gone before him, as well as those who keep the peace today.

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cover of One Ranger: A Memoir

One Ranger

A Memoir

By H. Joaquin Jackson with David Marion Wilkinson

University of Texas Press, 2005

When his picture appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly, Joaquin Jackson became the icon of the modern Texas Rangers. Nick Nolte modeled his character in the movie Extreme Prejudice on him. Jackson even had a speaking part of his own in The Good Old Boys with Tommy Lee Jones. But the role that Jackson has always played the best is that of the man who wears the silver badge cut from a Mexican cinco peso coin—a working Texas Ranger. Legend says that one Ranger is all it takes to put down lawlessness and restore the peace—one riot, one Ranger. In this adventure-filled memoir, Joaquin Jackson recalls what it was like to be the Ranger who responded when riots threatened, violence erupted, and criminals needed to be brought to justice across a wide swath of the Texas-Mexico border from 1966 to 1993.

Jackson has dramatic stories to tell. Defying all stereotypes, he was the one Ranger who ensured a fair election—and an overwhelming win for La Raza Unida party candidates—in Zavala County in 1972. He followed legendary Ranger Captain Alfred Y. Allee Sr. into a shootout at the Carrizo Springs jail that ended a prison revolt—and left him with nightmares. He captured "The See More Kid," an elusive horse thief and burglar who left clean dishes and swept floors in the houses he robbed. He investigated the 1988 shootings in Big Bend's Colorado Canyon and tried to understand the motives of the Mexican teenagers who terrorized three river rafters and killed one. He even helped train Afghan mujahedin warriors to fight the Soviet Union.

Jackson's tenure in the Texas Rangers began when older Rangers still believed that law need not get in the way of maintaining order, and concluded as younger Rangers were turning to computer technology to help solve crimes. Though he insists, "I am only one Ranger. There was only one story that belonged to me," his story is part of the larger story of the Texas Rangers becoming a modern law enforcement agency that serves all the people of the state. It's a story that's as interesting as any of the legends. And yet, Jackson's story confirms the legends, too. With just over a hundred Texas Rangers to cover a state with 267,399 square miles, any one may become the one Ranger who, like Joaquin Jackson in Zavala County in 1972, stops one riot.

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cover of Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics

Peggy Seeger

A Life of Music, Love, and Politics

Jean R. Freedman

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Born into folk music's first family, Peggy Seeger has blazed her own trail artistically and personally. Jean Freedman draws on a wealth of research and conversations with Seeger to tell the life story of one of music's most charismatic performers and tireless advocates. Here is the story of Seeger's multifaceted career, from her youth to her pivotal role in the American and British folk revivals, from her instrumental virtuosity to her tireless work on behalf of environmental and feminist causes, from wry reflections on the U.K. folk scene to decades as a songwriter. Freedman also delves into Seeger's fruitful partnership with Ewan MacColl and a multitude of contributions which include creating the renowned Festivals of Fools, founding Blackthorne Records, masterminding the legendary Radio Ballads documentaries, and mentoring performers in the often-fraught atmosphere of The Critics Group. Bracingly candid and as passionate as its subject, Peggy Seeger is the first book-length biography of a life set to music.
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cover of Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews

Quarter Notes

Improvisations and Interviews

Charles Wright

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Quarter Notes harvests recent reviews, essays, memoirs, and interviews by acclaimed poet Charles Wright. Wright uses creative variations on the form of the linear essay including interviews with himself as interviewee, correspondence (with Charles Simic), and experimentation with what he calls Improvisations "non- linear associational storylines". The book's short, staccato-like bursts add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism and the hydrosyllabic foot in poetry; a comparison of poems and journeys; appreciation of poets Donald Justice and John Crow Ransom; an attempt to define "image"; discussions of the current state of poetry; and various highlights from the Charles Wright Literary Festival.
Charles Wright's books of poetry include The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He received the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the 1992 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Souder Family Professor of English, University of Virginia.
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cover of Saved for a Purpose: A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values

Saved for a Purpose

A Journey from Private Virtues to Public Values

James A. Joseph

Duke University Press, 2015

The son of a minister, James A. Joseph grew up in Louisiana’s Cajun country, where his parents taught him the value of education and the importance of serving others. These lessons inspired him to follow a career path that came to include working in senior executive or advisory positions for four U. S. Presidents and with the legendary Nelson Mandela to build a new democracy in South Africa. Saved for a Purpose is Joseph’s ethical autobiography, in which he shares his moral philosophy and his insights on leadership.  

In an engaging and personal style, Joseph shows how his commitment to applying moral and ethical principles to large groups and institutions played out in his work in the civil rights movement in Alabama and as a college chaplain in California in the turbulent 1960s. His time later as vice president of the Cummins Engine Company provided an opportunity to promote corporate ethics, and his tenure as Under Secretary of the Interior in the Carter Administration underscored the difficulty and weight of making the right decisions while balancing good policy analysis with transcendent moral principles.

In 1996 President Clinton selected Joseph to become the United States Ambassador to South Africa. His recollections of working with Nelson Mandela, whom he describes as a noble and practical politician, and his observations about what he learned from Desmond Tutu and others about reconciliation contain some of the book’s most poignant passages.

Saved for a Purpose is unique, as Joseph combines his insights from working to integrate values into America’s public and private sectors with his long engagement with ethics as an academic discipline and as a practical guide for social behavior. Ultimately, it reflects Joseph’s passionate search for values that go beyond the personal to include the ethical imperatives that should be applied to the communal.
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cover of Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going

Ten Thousand Nights

Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going

Marvin Carlson

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Esteemed scholar and theater aficionado Marvin Carlson has seen an unsurpassed number of theatrical productions in his long and distinguished career. Ten Thousand Nights is a lively chronicle of a half-century of theatre-going, in which Carlson recalls one memorable production for each year from 1960 to 2010.  These are not conventional reviews, but essays using each theatre experience to provide an insight into the theatre and theatre-going at a particular time.  The range of performances covered is broad, from edgy experimental fare to mainstream musicals, most of them based in New York but with stops at major theatre events in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, and elsewhere. The engagingly written pieces convey a vivid sense not only of each production but also of the particular venue, neighborhood, and cultural context, covering nearly all significant movements, theatre artists, and groups of the late twentieth century. 
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cover of The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

The West Side of Any Mountain

Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

J. Scott Bryson

University of Iowa Press, 2005

In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics.

Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, The West Side of Any Mountain participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field.

One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan’s place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin.

The West Side of Any Mountain will be of great interest to scholars and teachers working in the field of contemporary nature poetry. It is recommended for nature-writing courses as well as classes dealing with 20th-century poetry, contemporary literary criticism, and environmental theory.
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cover of The Westside Slugger: Joe Neal's Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

The Westside Slugger

Joe Neal's Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

John L. Smith

University of Nevada Press, 2019

The Westside Slugger is the powerful story of civil rights in Las Vegas and Nevada through the eyes and experience of Joe Neal, a history-making state lawmaker in Nevada. Neal rose from humble beginnings in Mound, Louisiana, during the Great Depression to become the first African American to serve in the Nevada State Senate.

Filled with an intense desire for education, he joined the United States Air Force and later graduated from Southern University—studying political science and the law at a time of great upheaval in the racial status quo. As part of a group of courageous men, Neal joined a Department of Justice effort to register the first black voters in Madison Parish.

When Neal moved to southern Nevada in 1963 he found the Silver State to be every bit as discriminatory as his former Louisiana home. As Neal climbed through the political ranks, he used his position in the state senate to speak on behalf of the powerless for more than thirty years. He took on an array of powerful opponents ranging from the Clark County sheriff to the governor of the state, as well as Nevada’s political kingmakers and casino titans. He didn’t always succeed—he lost two runs for governor—but he never stopped fighting. His successes included improved rights for convicted felons and greater services for public education, mental health, and the state’s libraries. He also played an integral role in improving hotel fire safety in the wake of the deadly MGM Grand fire and preserving the pristine waters of Lake Tahoe, which brought him national attention.

Neal lived a life that personified what is right, just, and fair. Pushing through racial and civil rights hurdles and becoming a lifelong advocate for social justice, his dedication and determination are powerful reminders to always fight the good fight and never stop swinging.
 
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cover of Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets

Uncertainty and Plenitude

Five Contemporary Poets

Peter Stitt

University of Iowa Press, 1997

From the extraordinary diversity of contemporary poetry, Peter Stitt, the distinguished critic and editor of the Gettysburg Review, has chosen in this book to write about five poets only, all premier practitioners—John Ashbery, Stephen Dobyns, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and Charles Wright, with a special look at Stanley Kunitz in relation to Wright. Stitt's confident and inventive assessments of these fine poets' work help us gain some focus on the “uncertainty and plenitude” of the current poetry scene, demonstrating that concentrated and knowledgeable criticism can show us ways to begin measuring the accomplishments of our poetic age.

Stitt's interest in these five poets is intellectual and aesthetic. As he states, “I chose these particular writers because their work continues to interest me deeply, both intellectually and formally, even after years of familiarity.” He uses his understanding of the philosophical implications inherent in modern physics, as they apply to both content and form, as the basis for his close analysis.

Stitt attends to the poets' writerly strategies so that we may discover in their poetry where “surface form” intersects and complements meaning and thus becomes, in John Berryman's terms, “deep form.” He explains what these poets say and how they say it and what relationships lie between. He also shows how humor plays a part in some of their work.
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cover of Very Special Agents: The Inside Story of America's Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency--The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

Very Special Agents

The Inside Story of America's Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency--The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

James Moore, ATF (Ret.)

University of Illinois Press, 1997

When James Moore joined the ATF in 1960, it was an arm of the Internal Revenue Service with one job: to catch the Mafia bootleggers whose distilleries cheated Uncle Sam of millions in tax revenue. During his twenty-five years of service, Moore saw the organization shift to enforcing of gun laws, be reborn as a separate bureau, and take on bombings and arson cases that most law officers wrote off as impossible to solve.

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.

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cover of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen

Woody on Rye

Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen

Edited by Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg

Brandeis University Press, 2013

Although Woody Allen’s films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contributors—whose work is richly contextualized in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, theater, and comedy—examine the schlemiel, Allen and women, the Jewish take on the “morality of murder,” Allen’s take on Hebrew scripture and Greek tragedy, his stage work, his cinematic treatment of food and dining, and what happens to “Jew York” when Woody takes his films out of New York City. Considered together, these essays delineate the intellectual, artistic, and moral development of one of cinema’s most durable and controversial directors.
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