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26 books match the query 'Back'

cover of Across America and Back: Retracing My Great-Grandparents' Remarkable Journey

Across America and Back

Retracing My Great-Grandparents' Remarkable Journey

Mary Ann Hooper

University of Nevada Press, 2018

After unearthing her great-grandparents’ diaries, Mary Ann Hooper set out on a journey to retrace their 1871 trip across the United States on the newly-opened Transcontinental Railroad—via Chicago, just destroyed by the Great Fire, then across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to the Golden City of San Francisco. Filled with rich details of time, place, and culture, Mary Ann’s thoughtful and compelling narrative is both a re-creation of a family journey and a thoughtful account of how the American West has changed over the last 150 years. 
 
Using the common thread of the same train trip across the American landscape, she weaves together the two stories—her great grandparents, Charles and Fannie Crosby’s leisurely Victorian tourist trip described in both their diaries—and her own trip. Mary Ann’s adventurous and determined voice fills the pages with entertaining encounters on the train, escapades on her folding bike, and her reflections on her birth country and her own life story.

During her journey, she discovers the stories of her 1950s childhood reflect a “Wild West” at odds with the West her great-grandparents record in their diaries, leading her to uncover more of the real and meatier history of the American West—going through conquest, rapid settlement, and economic development. As Mary Ann fulfills her quest to understand better why glorified myths were created to describe the Wild West of her childhood, and reflects on the pitfalls of what “progress” is doing to the environment, she is left with a much bigger question: Can we transform our way of doing things quickly enough to stop our much-loved West becoming an uninhabitable desert?
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cover of Back To Birmingham: Richard Arrington, Jr., and His Times

Back To Birmingham

Richard Arrington, Jr., and His Times

Jimmie Lewis Franklin

University of Alabama Press, 1989

The story of Richard Arrington Jr., the first African American mayor of Birmingham, Alabama

During the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama was the central battleground in the struggle for human rights in the American South. As one of the most segregated cities in the United States, the city of Birmingham became infamous for its suppression of civil rights and for official and vigilante violence against its African American citizens, most notoriously the use of explosives in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the bombing of the home of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
 
In October of 1979, Birmingham elected its first Black mayor, Richard Arrington Jr. He was born in the rural town of Livingston, Alabama. His family moved to Birmingham when he was a child. A man of quiet demeanor, he was nevertheless destined to bring to fruition many of the fundamental changes that the Civil Rights Movement had demanded. This is his story. Not a conventional political or Civil Rights history, Back to Birmingham is the story of a man who demonstrated faith in his region and people. The work illuminates Arrington's sense of place, a quality that enables a person to claim sentimentally a portion of the natural and human environment. Franklin passionately underscores the importance of the attachment of Southern Blacks to their land and place. 
 
Back to Birmingham will appeal to both the general reader and the serious student of American society. The book endeavors to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly history. It is guided by the assumption that Americans of whatever description can find satisfaction in comprehending social change and that they are buoyed by the individual triumph of those who beat the odds.
 
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cover of Back in School: How Student Parents Are Transforming College and Family

Back in School

How Student Parents Are Transforming College and Family

A. Fiona Pearson

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Fifty years ago, students who were parents were a rarity in college classrooms, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, over a quarter of all undergraduate students were parents. In Back in School, A. Fiona Pearson explores how these student parents navigate cultural norms and institutional resources, forging pathways as they journey to become better parents and successful students. Back in School examines how policy makers, professors, college administrators, counselors, and social workers provide or deny access to child care, tutoring, financial aid, or other campus- or community-based resources. Pearson further explores how social norms and governmental and organizational policies influence access to these resources and student parents’ experiences on campus and at home.
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cover of Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy

Back of the Yards

The Making of a Local Democracy

Robert A. Slayton

University of Chicago Press, 1986

"Robert A. Slayton's Back of the Yards is one of the finest accounts I have ever read on an urban, working-class neighborhood in twentieth-century America. Its focus on family, politics, and worklife is penetrating and its conclusions reinforce an emerging scholarly picture of ordinary people exercising unique forms of power."—John Bodnar, author of The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
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cover of Back to Bizkaia: A Basque-American Memoir

Back to Bizkaia

A Basque-American Memoir

Vince J. Juaristi

University of Nevada Press, 2011

Nevada sheep rancher Joe Juaristi spoke for years about making a trip back to the Spanish Basque Country that he left sixty years earlier, but each time the subject came up the discussion evolved into a family debate about the scope and members of the journey. Finally Joe's son, Vince, secretly resolved to organize the trip that his father wanted and needed--the two of them, traveling alone, making a quiet reunion with Joe's twin sister, who suffers from Alzheimer's, visiting other aging siblings and friends, and recounting the places that formed Joe's memories of his youth.

Back to Bizkaia is part travel book, part memoir of two men exploring their mutual roots and their unique father-son bond. The narrative intertwines an engaging account of the contemporary Basque Country with Joe's experiences as an immigrant making his way in a new country and Vince's memories of growing up in a close Basque-American community in the American West. This is a book about Basques and their American families, but on another level it is every immigrant's story of return to a beloved homeland.

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cover of Back to Black: Jules Feiffer’s Noir Trilogy

Back to Black

Jules Feiffer’s Noir Trilogy

Fabrice Leroy

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Named the Best Academic Work of 2025 by The Comics Journal 

The legendary American cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer has enjoyed a long and varied career, working on everything from illustrating The Phantom Tollbooth to writing the screenplay for the film Popeye. But some of his most innovative work came very late in his career, with a trio of graphic novels he composed in his eighties: Kill My Mother (2014), Cousin Joseph (2016), and The Ghost Script (2018).
 
Back to Black provides the first full-length critical analysis of this trilogy, exploring how it pays homage to the iconography and themes of film noir through constant graphic experimentation and a striking reinvention of Feiffer’s distinctive style. Fabrice Leroy shows how Feiffer deftly alternates between dramatic and satirical tones as he plays with the conventions of noir to provide a caustic yet moving commentary on mid-twentieth-century American life. Through close readings of each novel in the trilogy, he examines Feiffer’s singular depiction of the central political issues in the United States from the Great Depression to the 1950s, which still resonate today: unionization struggles, cinematic propaganda, McCarthyism, the American Dream, immigration, antisemitism, civil rights, and gender discrimination. Placing the noir trilogy into the context of Feiffer’s long career, Back to Black demonstrates how he offers a loving pastiche of the genre without losing his unique voice or critical edge.
 

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cover of Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism

Back to Earth

Tomorrow's Environmentalism

Anthony Weston

Temple University Press, 1994

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cover of Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America

Back to the Breast

Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America

Jessica Martucci

University of Chicago Press, 2015

After decades of decline during the twentieth century, breastfeeding rates began to rise again in the 1970s, a rebound that has continued to the present. While it would be easy to see this reemergence as simply part of the naturalism movement of the ’70s, Jessica Martucci reveals here that the true story is more complicated. Despite the widespread acceptance and even advocacy of formula feeding by many in the medical establishment throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, a small but vocal minority of mothers, drawing upon emerging scientific and cultural ideas about maternal instinct, infant development, and connections between the body and mind, pushed back against both hospital policies and cultural norms by breastfeeding their children. As Martucci shows, their choices helped ideologically root a “back to the breast” movement within segments of the middle-class, college-educated population as early as the 1950s.
           
That movement—in which the personal and political were inextricably linked—effectively challenged midcentury norms of sexuality, gender, and consumption, and articulated early environmental concerns about chemical and nuclear contamination of foods, bodies, and breast milk. In its groundbreaking chronicle of the breastfeeding movement, Back to the Breast provides a welcome and vital account of what it has meant, and what it means today, to breastfeed in modern America.
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cover of Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance

Back to the Dance Itself

Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance

Edited with Essays by Sondra Fraleigh

University of Illinois Press, 2018

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life.

Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

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cover of Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

Back to the Land

The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America

Dona Brown

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

For many, “going back to the land” brings to mind the 1960s and 1970s—hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. More recently, the movement has reemerged in a new enthusiasm for locally produced food and more sustainable energy paths. But these latest back-to-the-landers are part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land ever since they started to leave it. In Back to the Land, Dona Brown explores the history of this recurring impulse.            ?           
            Back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or romantic nature-lovers. But their own words reveal a more complex story. In such projects as Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City,” and Helen and Scott Nearing’s quest for “the good life,” Brown finds that the return to the farm has meant less a going-backwards than a going-forwards, a way to meet the challenges of the modern era. Progressive reformers pushed for homesteading to help impoverished workers get out of unhealthy urban slums. Depression-era back-to-the-landers, wary of the centralizing power of the New Deal, embraced a new “third way” politics of decentralism and regionalism. Later still, the movement merged with environmentalism. To understand Americans’ response to these back-to-the-land ideas, Brown turns to the fan letters of ordinary readers—retired teachers and overworked clerks, recent immigrants and single women. In seeking their rural roots, Brown argues, Americans have striven above all for the independence and self-sufficiency they associate with the agrarian ideal.
 
 
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

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cover of Back to the Roots: Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

Back to the Roots

Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

Sara Shostak

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, urban farmers and gardeners are reclaiming cultural traditions linked to food, farming, and health; challenging systemic racism and injustice in the food system; demanding greater community control of resources in marginalized neighborhoods; and moving towards their visions of more equitable urban futures. As part of this urgent work, urban farmers and gardeners encounter and reckon with both the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past. Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants.
 
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cover of Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World

Back to the Soil

The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World

Robert Alan Goldberg

University of Utah Press, 1986

The image of the Jew solely as urbanite may stem from the period of 1880 to 1920, when two million Jews left their homes in Eastern Europe and established themselves in the urban centers of America. Lesser known are the agrarian efforts of Jewish immigrants. In Back to the Soil, Robert Goldberg focuses on the attempt of one such Jewish colony in Clarion, Utah. In 1911, eighty-one families left eastern cities to farm the Clarion tract. Jewish families funded the venture, the governor of Utah en-couraged it, and the Mormon Church financially aided the community. Despite these efforts, Clarion died as an organizational entity in 1916, with the dozen remaining families departing by the mid-1920s.

Goldberg sheds light on the values and ideals of the colonists, the daily rhythm of life, the personalities of the settlers, and the struggle for and eventual collapse of their dream. Of all the attempts to establish a Jewish colony on the land, Clarion was the largest and had the longest existence of any colony west of the Appalachians. The Clarion fragment, lost and forgotten, thus becomes a crucial part of the larger mosaic of Jewish history in the West.

Release of this new paperback edition is timed to coincide with the celebration of the centennial of the founding of the Clarion colony.
 

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cover of Back to the Woods

Back to the Woods

Cynthia Cruz

Four Way Books, 0

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Cynthia Cruz reevaluates the paradox of the death drive in her eighth collection of poetry, Back to the Woods. Could it be that in ceaselessly snuffing ourselves out we are, in fact, trying to survive? In “Shine,” Cruz’s speaker attests that “if [she] had a home, it would be // a still in a film / where the sound / got jammed.” This book inhabits the silence of the empty orchestra pit, facing “dread, and its many / instruments of sorrow.” The quiet asks, “Did you love this world / and did this world / not love you?” We return to the site of our suffering, we perform the symphony of all our old injuries, to master what has broken us. To make possible the future, we retreat into the past. “I don’t know / the ending. // I don’t know anything,” our speaker insists, but she follows the wind’s off-kilter song of “winter / in the pines” and “the dissonance / of siskins.” Cruz heeds the urgency of our wandering, the mandate that we must get back to the woods, not simply for the forest to devour us — she recognizes in the oblivion “flooding out / from its spiral branches” an impossible promise. At the tree line, we might vanish to begin again. 
 

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cover of From Vienna to Chicago and Back: Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America

From Vienna to Chicago and Back

Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America

Gerald Stourzh

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria.

This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, From Vienna to Chicago and Back will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.

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cover of German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back

German Ideology

From France to Germany and Back

Louis Dumont

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In this comparative anthropological analysis, Louis Dumont illuminates German and French ideology, European culture, and cultural interaction. His analysis of texts by Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe, and others, against the background of previously gathered evidence and of French common notions, specify the differences—otherwise frequently but vaguely alluded to—between French and German cultures.

Anyone interested in the fate of national ideology and the concept of the individual will benefit from this radical reinterpretation of modern values and the place of modernity in history.

"What François Furet did for French history, Dumont did for anthropology, turning it away from engaged politics and towards the sober study of the modern age." —Mark Lilla, London Review of Books

"There are many fine things in Dumont's study. Beyond any doubt, his cultural anthropology of the modern spirit highlights some of the key energies of the of the last two centuries. . . . [An] impressive . . . detailed analysis." —Martin Swales, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[An] unsettling, rich, demanding, profound study." —Publishers Weekly
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cover of Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

Gershom Scholem

From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

Noam Zadoff

Brandeis University Press, 2017

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. Scholem famously recounted rejecting his parents’ assimilationist liberalism in favor of Zionism and immigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation’s intellectual landscape in Mandatory Palestine. Despite Scholem’s public renunciation of Germany for Israel, Zadoff explores how the life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins.
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cover of Heartthrob: Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back

Heartthrob

Del Balboa Cafe al Apartheid and Back

Susana Chávez-Silverman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

On a wintry Thursday night in San Francisco, Susana Chávez-Silverman catches her first glimpse of a handsome stranger through the window as he passes the infamous Balboa Cafe. She knows immediately he is the man of her dreams. His eyes meet hers, he turns and enters the bar . . .
Their attraction was intense, but the social and political climate of South Africa, still in the grip of apartheid, threatened to tear them apart. Describing the vicissitudes of the Latina migratory experience, Chávez-Silverman struggles to overcome the hostility of a place that is so unwelcoming to nonwhite persons and outsiders.
Heartthrob, a love story for the ages, implores us to consider how things could have been. In these romantic crónicas based on detailed diary entries and confessional letters to family and friends, Chávez-Silverman weaves together English and Spanish to lay bare the raw intensity and true fragility of love. Anyone who has wondered about the-one-that-got-away or sought out the true meaning of happily-ever-after will be enraptured by this intimate exploration of love, loss, and regret.
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cover of I Wonder U: How Prince Went beyond Race and Back

I Wonder U

How Prince Went beyond Race and Back

Adilifu Nama

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Featured in the 2020 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

In 1993, Prince infamously changed his name to a unique, unpronounceable symbol. Yet this was only one of a long string of self-reinventions orchestrated by Prince as he refused to be typecast by the music industry’s limiting definitions of masculinity and femininity, of straightness and queerness, of authenticity and artifice, or of black music and white music.
 
Revealing how he continually subverted cultural expectations, I Wonder U examines the entirety of Prince’s diverse career as a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, record label mogul, movie star, and director. It shows how, by blending elements of R&B, rock, and new wave into an extremely videogenic package, Prince was able to overcome the color barrier that kept black artists off of MTV. Yet even at his greatest crossover success, he still worked hard to retain his credibility among black music fans. In this way, Adilifu Nama suggests, Prince was able to assert a distinctly black political sensibility while still being perceived as a unique musical genius whose appeal transcended racial boundaries.
 
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cover of Lessons and Legacies X: Back to the Sources: Reexamining Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders

Lessons and Legacies X

Back to the Sources: Reexamining Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders

Sara R Horowitz

Northwestern University Press, 2012

The essays in the tenth volume of Lessons and Legacies offer a sense of the issues that run through current thinking about the Holocaust and ideas about the different ways we engage with a broad range of sources. New sources ranging from traditional archival finds to microhistories accessible via newer technology infuse Holocaust research. At the same time, the fields of Holocaust research and Jewish studies have an increasing impact upon other disciplines. Overall, the editor and writers find that the integration of insights, methodologies, critiques, and questions from psychology, literary studies, visual arts, and other fields with those of history, political science, and other social sciences sharpens the tools of analysis. The essays in this volume testify to the evolution of the field of Holocaust studies and also indicate a future direction.
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cover of On the Back of a Turtle: A Narrative of the Huron-Wyandot People

On the Back of a Turtle

A Narrative of the Huron-Wyandot People

Lloyd Divine Jr.

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

On the Back of a Turtle is an all-inclusive history of the Huron-Wyandot people—from before the creation of the Great Island, now called North America, to the present day. No other full-length history of the Huron-Wyandot people exists. Presented in a conversational, easy-to-read style, the book is a compelling and informative telling of the story of the Huron-Wyandot people as told by a tribal historian.

As characters and tribes emerge in the Huron-Wyandot’s oral tradition of creation, and take their respective places upon the Great Island, the author reveals the most difficult element of the Huron-Wyandot’s history: how the tribal name was obtained. With the knowledge of how both Huron and Wyandot are relevant names for one tribe of people, the author then shares his tribe’s amazing history. The reader will be fascinated to learn how one of the smallest tribes, birthed amid the Iroquois Wars, rose to become one of the most respected and influential tribes of North America.
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cover of On the Back of an Envelope: A Life in Writing

On the Back of an Envelope

A Life in Writing

Peter Hennessy

Haus Publishing, 2025

New and selected writings by one of the United Kingdom’s leading contemporary historians.

As one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts and contemporary historians, Peter Hennessy has spent his professional life unpicking the arcane world of Whitehall and Westminster. He began his career as a journalist for the Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times, developing a network of insider contacts who helped him shine a light on some of the dustiest corners of the British establishment. As a journalist, prize-winning contemporary historian, and political commentator, he has chronicled the workings of the British state with wit, affection, and a healthy sense of the absurd over a five-decade career. Now a crossbench peer, he has, in his own words, “moved in with his exhibits.” Hennessy is also a stalwart of BBC election night coverage and a regular commentator on BBC Radio 4, bringing a historical and constitutional perspective on current events.

In this new volume, he brings together selected journalism, unpublished lectures, and new writing alongside personal recollections and reflections on his time observing postwar Britain, how it is governed, and those who do the governing. He reflects on the making and unmaking of prime ministers from Attlee to Truss, life in the House of Lords, and the changing constitutional landscape in the wake of Brexit and amid uncertainty about the future of the Union. Interspersed with lectures, journalism, and new pieces, Hennessy also looks back at a fascinating career, reflecting on his own experiences as a young green graduate navigating the hard-nosed world of Fleet Street in the 1970s, bringing to life a cast of characters from a world now largely gone. He revisits his time as a public historian, academic, and crossbench peer with a levity reflected in his belief that history is “gossip with footnotes.”
 
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cover of Oregon: There and Back in 1877

Oregon

There and Back in 1877

Wallis Nash

Oregon State University Press, 1976

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cover of The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf: Back to the Blue

The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf

Back to the Blue

Bobbie Holaday

University of Arizona Press, 2003

The return of the Mexican gray wolf to Arizona's Blue Range in 1998 marked more than a victory for an endangered species. Long hated by ranchers, the gray wolf had been hunted to the brink of extinction until one woman took on the challenge of restoring it to its natural habitat.

Inspired by the plight of the Mexican gray wolf, retiree Bobbie Holaday formed the citizens advocacy group Preserve Arizona's Wolves (P.A.WS.) in 1987 and embarked on a crusade to raise public awareness. She soon found herself in the center of a firestorm of controversy, with environmentalists taking sides against ranchers and neighbors against neighbors. This book tells her story for the first time, documenting her eleven-year effort to bring the gray wolf back to the Blue.

As Holaday quickly learned, ranchers exerted considerable control over the state legislature, and politicians in turn controlled decisions made by wildlife agencies. Even though the wolf had been listed as endangered since 1976, opposition to it was so strong that the Arizona Game and Fish Department had been unable to launch a recovery program. In The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf, Holaday describes first-hand the tactics she and other ordinary citizens on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team adopted to confront these obstacles. Enhanced with more than 40 photographs—32 in color—her account chronicles both the triumphs of reintroduction and the heartbreaking tragedies the wolves encountered during early phases.

Thanks to Holaday's perseverance, eleven wolves were released into the wild in 1998, and the Blue Range once again echoed with their howls. Her tenacity was an inspiration to all those she enlisted in the cause, and her story is a virtual primer for conservation activists on mobilizing at the grassroots level. The Return of the Mexican Gray Wolf shows that one person can make a difference in a seemingly hopeless cause and will engage all readers concerned with the preservation of wildlife.

All royalties go to the Mexican Wolf Trust Fund administered by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

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cover of The View from the Back of the Band

The View from the Back of the Band

Chris Smith

University of North Texas Press, 2014

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cover of Through the Boondocks and Back: A Novella

Through the Boondocks and Back

A Novella

Alex DiFrancesco

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A queer, rollicking retelling of The Odyssey

Zane Viaggio’s life has been fraught since leaving New York City for Cleveland. Uprooted and missing his life in the city, he escapes into parties and pills. When he wakes up vomiting several days in a row, he’s convinced by his three drag queen roommates and his best trans-femme friend to get a pregnancy test, learning that not only is he pregnant, but pregnant in an Ohio that has just outlawed abortion. Zane must then embark on an epic journey around Lake Erie and its surrounding towns on a stolen jet ski to find the man who impregnated him, get the money to go back to New York City for an abortion, and get his life back to normal. In this queer and trans retelling of The Odyssey, Zane encounters all sorts of strange and challenging characters—including one-eyed cats, force-femmed prophets, and his own chosen family—who help him discover that, perhaps, finding home is the greatest journey of all.

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cover of To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back: Memories of an East LA Outlaw

To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back

Memories of an East LA Outlaw

By Ernie López and Rafael Pérez-Torres

University of Texas Press, 2005

When Ernie López was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, his father beat him when he failed to bring home the expected eighty to ninety cents a day. When the beatings became unbearable, he took to petty stealing to make up the difference. As his thefts succeeded, Ernie's sense of necessity got tangled up with ambition and adventure. At thirteen, a joyride in a stolen car led to a sentence in California's harshest juvenile reformatory. The system's failure to show any mercy soon propelled López into a cycle of crime and incarceration that resulted in his spending decades in some of America's most notorious prisons, including four and a half years on death row for a murder López insists he did not commit.

To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the personal life story of a man who refused to be broken by either an abusive father or an equally abusive criminal justice system. While López freely admits that "I've been no angel," his insider's account of daily life in Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence, arbitrary infliction of excessive punishment, and unending monotony that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return to the streets. Rafael Pérez-Torres discusses how Ernie López's experiences typify the harsher treatment that ethnic and minority suspects often receive in the American criminal justice system, as well as how they reveal the indomitable resilience of Chicanos/as and their culture. As Pérez-Torres concludes, "López's story presents us with the voice of one who—though subjected to a system meant to destroy his soul—not only endured but survived, and in surviving prevailed."

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