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In Breaks in the Chain, Paul Apostolidis investigates the personal life stories of a group of Mexican immigrant meatpackers who are at once typical and extraordinary. After crossing the border clandestinely and navigating the treacherous world of the undocumented, they waged a campaign to democratize their union and their workplace in the most hazardous industry in the United States.

Breaks in the Chain shows how immigrant workers-individually and sometimes collectively-both reinforce and contest a tacit but lethal form of biopolitics that differentiates the life chances of racial groups. Examining their personal narratives, Apostolidis recasts our understanding of the ways immigrants construct and transform social power.
Apostolidis uses empirical inquiry to spark new reflections in critical theory as he analyzes how immigrant workers' local practices confront structural power within and beyond America's borders. Linking stories of immigration to stories about working on the meat production line-the chain-he reveals the surprising power of activism by immigrant workers and their allies and demonstrates how it can-and should-promote social and political democracy in America.

Barred from political engagement and legal advocacy, the second sophists composed and performed epideictic works for audiences across the Mediterranean world during the early centuries of the Common Era. In a wide-ranging study, author Susan C. Jarratt argues that these artfully wrought discourses, formerly considered vacuous entertainments, constitute intricate negotiations with the absolute power of the Roman Empire. Positioning culturally Greek but geographically diverse sophists as colonial subjects, Jarratt offers readings that highlight ancient debates over free speech and figured discourse, revealing the subtly coded commentary on Roman authority and governance embedded in these works.
 
Through allusions to classical Greek literature, sophists such as Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, and Philostratus slipped oblique challenges to empire into otherwise innocuous works. Such figures protected their creators from the danger of direct confrontation but nonetheless would have been recognized by elite audiences, Roman and Greek alike, by virtue of their common education.  Focusing on such moments, Jarratt presents close readings of city encomia, biography, and texts in hybrid genres from key second sophistic figures, setting each in its geographical context. Although all the authors considered are male, the analyses here bring to light reflections on gender, ethnicity, skin color, language differences, and sexuality, revealing an underrecognized diversity in the rhetorical activity of this period.
While US scholars of ancient rhetoric have focused largely on the pedagogical, Jarratt brings a geopolitical lens to her study of the subject. Her inclusion of fourth-century texts—the Greek novel Ethiopian Story, by Heliodorus, and the political orations of Libanius of Antioch—extends the temporal boundary of the period. She concludes with speculations about the pressures brought to bear on sophistic political subjectivity by the rise of Christianity and with ruminations on a third sophistic in ancient and contemporary eras of empire.
 

For most of the last twenty years, sociologists have studied the “decline” of religion in the modern world—a decline they saw as a defining feature of modernity, which promotes materialism over spirituality. The revival and political strength of varying religious traditions around the world, however, has forced sociologists to reconsider.

This paradox has led Hervieu-Léger to undertake a sociological redefinition and reexamination of religion. For religion to endure in the modern world, she finds, it must have  deep roots in traditions and times in which it was not defined as irrelevant. This reasoning leads her to develop the concept of a “chain of memory”—a process by which individual believers become members of a community that links past, present, and future members. Thus, like cultural tradition, religion may be understood as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw upon the deep well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present.

Hervieu-Legér also argues that the modern secular societies of the West have not, as is commonly assumed, outgrown or found secular substitutes for religious traditions; nor are they more “rational” than past societies. Rather, modern societies have become “amnesiacs,” no longer able to maintain the chain of memory that binds them to their religious pasts. Ironically, however, even as the modern world is destroying and losing touch with its traditional religious bases, it is also creating the need for a spiritual life and is thus opening up a space that only religion can fill.

After One and Waking established Tom Sleigh as one of the most original and accomplished poets in contemporary America. In The Chain, Sleigh explores the nature of memory—its uncanny ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegies, portraits, and love poems, he movingly dramatizes the ambiguous nature of truth and the difficulties the moral imagination must overcome in recalling, understanding, and judging the past. The publication of The Chain confirms Tom Sleigh's place among the most imaginative, unpredictable, and formally sophisticated poets of his generation.

"Tom Sleigh's precision marks him as the diamond cutter of poetry; his verse has a tense musicality, and his ability to convey exact emotions, even the state of consciousness itself, is unerring."—The New York Times Book Review, Notable Books of the Year, 1990-1991

Written in the style of a detective novel, The Chain of Chance is classic Lem: a combination of action, hard science, and philosophical investigation. An ex-astronaut is hired to look into the death of several wealthy businessmen. The authorities suspect a pattern, but neither the police nor a supercomputer enlisted for the investigation can crack the case.

On a trail leading across Europe, the ex-astronaut barely escapes numerous attempts on his life. Having set himself up as a potential victim, he realizes that he may now be the target of a conspiracy--and that the conspiracy is not the work of a criminal mind, but a manifestation of the laws of nature. Certain patterns have begun to emerge from the chaos of modern society. Some of those patterns can be fatal. . .