Results by title
3 books match the query 'Lost Causes'
Distant Corners
American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost CausesDavid Wangerin
Temple University Press, 2014
In Distant Corners, his follow-up to Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin details several of the people, places, and events that shaped American soccer history. Despite its struggle for popular acceptance, soccer in the United States has a rich history. Wangerin profiles Tom Cahill, the almost-forgotten "father of American soccer," and writes passionately about the 1979 North American Soccer League season, the high-water mark of the game in the twentieth century.
Wangerin shows how the American appetite for soccer has ebbed and grown over the years, chronicling the game at the college and professional levels and describing the city of St. Louis's unique historic attachment to the sport. Wangerin believes that the time is ripe for American fans to look into their own history and recognize the surprisingly deep connection their country has to soccer.
LOST CAUSES
Historical Consciousness in Victorian LiteratureJason B. Jones
The Ohio State University Press, 2006
What if we didn’t always historicize when we read Victorian fiction?
Lost Causes shows that Victorian writers frequently appear to have a more supple and interesting understanding of the relationship between history, causality, and narrative than the one typically offered by readers who are burdened by the new historicism. As a return to these writers emphasizes, the press of modern historicism deforms Victorian novels, encouraging us to read deviations from strict historical accuracy as ideological bad faith. By contrast, Jason B. Jones argues through readings of works ranging from The French Revolution to Middlemarch that literature’s engagement with history has to be read otherwise.Perhaps perversely, Lost Causes suggests simultaneously that psychoanalysis speaks pressingly to the vexed relationship between history and narrative, and that the theory is neither a- nor anti-historical. Through his readings of Victorian fiction addressing the recent past, Jones finds in psychoanalysis not a set of truths, but rather a method for rhetorical reading, ultimately revealing how its troubled account of psychic causality can help us follow literary language’s representation of the real. Victorian narratives of the recent past and psychoanalytic interpretation share a fascination with effects that persist despite baffling, inexplicable, or absent causes.
In chapters focusing on Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Lost Causes demonstrates that history can carry an ontological, as well as an epistemological, charge—one that suggests a condition of being in the world as well as a way of knowing the world as it really is. From this point of view, Victorian fiction that addresses the recent past is not a failed realism, as it is so frequently claimed, but rather an exploration of possibility in history.
Lost Causes
Blended Sentencing, Second Chances, and the Texas Youth CommissionBy Chad R. Trulson, Darin R. Haerle, Jonathan W. Caudill, and Matt DeLisi<br>Foreword by James W. Marquart
University of Texas Press, 2016
What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.
The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.