Results by title
15 books match the query '1972-'
African Meditations
Felwine Sarr
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
An influential thinker’s fascinating reflections and meditations on reacclimating to his native Senegal as a young academic after years of study abroad
The call to morning prayer. A group run at daybreak along the Corniche in Dakar. A young woman shedding tears on a beach as her friends take a boat to Europe. In African Meditations, paths to enlightenment collide with tales of loss and ruminations, musical gatherings, and the everyday sights and sounds of life in West Africa as a young philosopher and creative writer seeks to establish himself as a teacher upon his return to Senegal, his homeland, after years of study abroad.
A unique contemporary portrait of an influential, multicultural thinker on a spiritual quest across continents—reflecting on his multiple literary influences along with French, African Francophone, and Senegalese tribal cultural roots in a homeland with a predominantly Muslim culture—African Meditations is a seamless blend of autobiography, journal entries, and fiction; aphorisms and brief narrative sketches; humor and Zen reflections.
Taking us from Saint-Louis to Dakar, Felwine Sarr encounters the rhythms of everyday life as well as its disruptions such as teachers’ strikes and power outages while traversing a semi-surrealistic landscape. As he reacclimates to his native country after a life in France, we get candid glimpses, both vibrant and hopeful, sublime and mundane, into his Zen journey to resecure a foothold in his roots and to navigate academia, even while gleaning something of the good life, of joy, amid the struggles of life in Senegal.
Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction
Jerry Rafiki Jenkins
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
Bamboo Son
A Hmong Refugee’s Search for Identity and the American DreamPao Lor
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2026
“In Hmong, the word bamboo or ntsuag has two meanings. It refers to the bamboo plant, which has many significant cultural and practical uses in Hmong life. The word also means orphan. Therefore, bamboo son, in Hmong, means tub ntsuag or orphan son. To survive and succeed as a Hmong orphan, like bamboo, one must be resilient and adaptable, bend without breaking, and stand tall against enormous odds.”
In this follow-up to his acclaimed memoir, Modern Jungles, Pao Lor picks up his story as a young Hmong immigrant building a new life in a new home and shares the narrative of his ensuing journey into adulthood. Lor emerged from war and tragedies in the jungles of Laos and refugee camps of Thailand in the 1970s to pursue a vision of the American dream in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1980s. The distance between his humble beginnings and that dream life was littered with challenges as well as possibilities.
Lor’s transformation from an insecure but determined high school student to a husband, father, teacher, administrator, and author is marked by triumph and defeat, trauma and joy, and always hope and optimism. As he navigates school, first loves, family relationships, and a career, Lor must contend with language barriers, discrimination, and his own inner demons stemming from feelings of inferiority. Threads of his identity—Hmong, American, and Wisconsinite—intersect and occasionally come into conflict.
Lor’s search for belonging comes full circle when he travels to Laos and Thailand with his wife, Maya, in 2022. Seeing his birthplace for the first time in forty-five years, he revisits the isolated mountain villages where he spent his early childhood; the places where his parents and sister died as the family fled the region in the violent aftermath of the Vietnam War; and the two refugee camps where Pao and his siblings lived before being relocated to the United States when he was seven. As he reexamines these memories and reconciles his past, Lor finds peace and the freedom to move forward with his soul renewed.
Lor’s story is an uplifting journey of resilience, adaptation, love, and forgiveness, inspiring readers to reflect on the meaning and accessibility of the American dream.
Desert Birthright
A Midwife's MemoirLori Wrankle
University of Utah Press, 2025
Lori Wrankle was sixteen when she helped deliver her first baby. “I witnessed the entire universe unfold at my feet,” she writes in Desert Birthright. Later, working as a hospital doula, Wrankle observed firsthand the suffering inflicted upon birthing women by male-dominated Western childbirth practices, from casual racism to unnecessary and nonconsensual procedures, including the dreaded “husband stitch.” After a traumatic labor and delivery of her own, she decided to take back woman-centered childbirth and start a homebirth midwifery practice.
Desert Birthright traverses twenty-five years of midwifery, often in fundamentalist polygamist circles, weaving together birth stories with childhood memories as Wrankle grapples with her shifting Mormon faith. Her poetic voice shines—a placenta becomes the tree of life, the folds in a baby’s arm layers of sand in the desert. Desert Birthright is a deeply personal story of life, death, and modern womanhood in the rural Southwest, and of one midwife’s journey of faith, self-discovery, and liberation in the face of adversity.
Hidden Prairie
Photographing Life in One Square MeterChris Helzer
University of Iowa Press, 2020
This book is packed with gorgeous full-page close-up photos of prairie plants and animals, interspersed with a dozen short essays that include both ecology and natural history tidbits and enthralling and gently humorous anecdotes about Helzer’s experience staring into a tiny bit of prairie for one year. Helzer writes eloquently about the conservation value of prairies and uses his photos and stories to reinforce a conservation ethic among his readers.
Horror and Indigeneity
Literature, Film, and TelevisionEdited by Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes
University of Texas Press, 2026
A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.
How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of Western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indigenous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.
Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary antiracism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provocactive terms.
Melt with Me
Coming of Age and Other ’80s PerilsPaul Crenshaw
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
Modern Jungles
A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of SurvivalPao Lor
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope.
Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
On the Wandering Paths
Sylvain Tesson
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
A walking journey through France’s vast interior becomes a meditation on both personal recovery and the role of history in the present—more than 425,000 copies sold in France
After a free-climbing accident lands him in a coma and a hospital for four months, the French writer Sylvain Tesson makes a promise to himself: if he’s ever able to walk again, he will traverse the entire country of France on foot.
Part literary adventure, part philosophical reflection on our contemporary consumer culture, On the Wandering Paths takes us deep into the heart of what Tesson terms France’s “hyperrural” zones. Tracing the obscure paths peasants once followed throughout the countryside, Tesson embarks on a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation as he walks along vast stretches of mountain ranges and rivers, encountering ancient Roman stone bridges and walkways, the French Foreign Legion, pagan prayer sites, Provençal villages, and the majestic Mont-Saint-Michel. Connecting deeply with the places he visits, his experiences inspire reflection on the essential need to disengage from the digital and immerse oneself in natural beauty.
Rich with humor, historical insight, and literary power, On the Wandering Paths is both a meditation on the act of recovery and a potent recognition of the traces of our past in the present. Asking us to reassess our values and our relationship to the land, Tesson’s exquisite chronicle through landscapes that continue to resist urbanization and technology is a thoughtful—and thought-provoking—glimpse into a poet’s adventurous life. Les Chemins de Pierre, a film based on the book starring Jean Dujardin, is due to release in 2022.
Reading in the Postgenomic Age
Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American LiteratureLesley Larkin
The Ohio State University Press, 2025
Rising Star
The Meaning of Nikki Haley, Trump’s Unlikely AmbassadorJason A. Kirk
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
Something All Our Own
The Grant Hill Collection of African American ArtGrant Hill
Duke University Press, 2003
The forty-six pieces documented here include thirteen works that span the career of the great Romare Bearden, from his 1941 gouache painting Serenade to the important collages of the 1980s. Hill’s fascination with artists’ depiction of women is represented in Elizabeth Catlett’s lithographs, many of them from the 1992 series “For My People,” and her sculptures in stone, bronze, and onyx. In addition to these two giants of twentieth-century art, the Hill Collection features pieces by Phoebe Beasley, Arthello Beck Jr., John Biggers, Malcolm Brown, John Coleman, Edward Jackson, and Hughie Lee Smith.
Hill began collecting art in the early 1990s after learning from his parents to appreciate artworks not only as objects of beauty but as expressions of heritage and culture. According to the internationally known curator Alvia J. Wardlaw, he is part of an emerging group of young African American collectors who have “raised the bar for others.” Hill writes, “Getting to know yourself means understanding your background and appreciating those who have come before you. My father has a saying he uses in speeches: ‘To be ignorant of your past is to remain a boy. ‘The interest in my heritage as an African American is reflected in this collection.”
Something All Our Own features Wardlaw’s essay on the history of African American collecting. It also features articles about Bearden and Catlett by the scholars Elizabeth Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall and reflections about Hill by the historian John Hope Franklin, Duke’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, and the sportswriter William C. Rhoden. Hill and his father, the NFL great Calvin Hill, contribute a dialogue that explores their motivations for collecting art.
At the heart of the book are the exquisite color photographs of the forty-six artworks included in the exhibition, with commentary by Wardlaw and by Hill himself.
As a star athlete, Grant Hill is well aware that African Americans who excel in sports and entertainment are more broadly recognized than their counterparts in artistic fields. He strives to inspire young people to explore their heritage and broaden their concept of excellence by learning more about African American art. By sharing his artworks with collectors and fans, Hill reminds us that while the jump shot is ephemeral, art is enduring.
The Danish Voter
Democratic Ideals and ChallengesRune Stubager, Kasper M. Hansen, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Richard Nadeau
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The authors of The Danish Voter investigate a series of interesting questions concerning voters’ reactions to these macrosocial challenges and how their reactions affect the foundations for the ideal. Indeed, due to an electoral system open to new influences, the Danish case is an important test case for theories about political development of contemporary Western societies.
The Power of Two
A Twin Triumph Over Cystic FibrosisIsabel Byrnes and Anabel Stenzel
University of Missouri Press, 2007
For most people, a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis means the certainty of a life ended too soon. But for twin girls with the disease, what began as a family’s stubborn determination grew into a miracle.
The tragedy of CF has been touchingly recounted in such books as Frank Deford’s Alex: The Life of a Child, but The Power of Two is the first book to portray the symbiotic relationship between twins who share this life-threatening disease through adulthood. Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and Anabel Stenzel tell of their lifelong struggle to pursue normal lives with cystic fibrosis while grappling with the realization that they will die young. Their story reflects the physical and emotional challenges of a particularly aggressive form of CF and tells how the twins’ bicultural heritage—Japanese and German—influenced the way they coped with these challenges.
Born in 1972, seventeen years before scientists discovered the genetic mutation that causes CF, Isabel and Anabel endured the daily regimen of chest percussion, frequent doctor visits, and lengthy hospitalizations. But they tell how, in the face of innumerable setbacks, their deep-seated dependence on each other allowed them to survive long enough to reap the benefits of the miraculous lung transplants that marked a crossroads in their lives: “We have an old life—one of growing up with chronic illness—and a new life—one of opportunities and gifts we have never imagined before.” In this memoir, they pay tribute to the people who shaped their experience.
The Power of Two is an honest and gripping portrayal of day-to-day health care, the impact of chronic illness on marriage and family, and the importance of a support network to continuing survival. It conveys an important message to both popular and professional readers as it addresses key psychosocial issues in chronic illness throughout the sufferer’s lifespan and illuminates the human side of advances in biotechnology.
Even as gene therapy and stem cell research increase the chances for eradicating CF, this stirring account portrays its effects on one family that refused to give up. These two remarkable sisters have much to teach about the power of perseverance—and about the ultimate power of hope.
Theories of Dependent Foreign Policy and the Case of Ecuador in the 1980s
Jeanne A. K. Hey
Ohio University Press, 1995
How do economic weakness and dependence influence foreign policy decisions and behavior in third world countries? Theories in Dependent Foreign Policy examines six foreign policy theories: compliance, consensus, counterdependence, realism, leader preferences and domestic politics, and each is applied to a series of case studies of Ecuador’s foreign policy during the 1980s under two regimes: Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984) and his successor León Febres Cordero (1984-1988).
Hey shows that Ecuador during this period represented the third world in many ways. It was a new democracy, having just emerged from years of military rule, extremely indebted to the West, and dependent on primary product export economy that relied heavily on importers, especially the United States.
Jeanne Hey finds that some of the most popular and enduring theories in western research, such as realism and compliance, poorly account for Ecuadorian foreign policy. She explains that poor countries like Ecuador have substantial foreign policy latitude in the diplomatic area. Drawing on archival research and interviews with policy makers including Presidents Hurtado and Febres Cordero, Dr. Hey convincingly argues that many of the traditional foreign policy theories do not “fit” dependent states, and inadequately account for the complexity of foreign policy in the third world.