Essays Books

Book SynopsisNew essays on topics in the literature of Goethe and the Goethezeit, including contributions by both eminent scholars and new voices. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 21 contains eleven articles, including contributions by leading scholars David Wellbery and Katharina Mommsen; innovative work on the reception of Goethe's works around 1900, on women writers, and on Goethe's contemporary Albrecht von Haller; theoretically sophisticated interpretations, including articles on concepts of space in Alexis and Doraand on notions of sacrifice in Faust; and interdisciplinary pieces ranging from a discussion of contemporary psychological and medical theories of ill humor in relation to Goethe's Werther and an economic reading ofGoethe's Faust to an analysis of illustrations of Goethe's works. The review section collects responses by eminent scholars to a wide swath of recent books on Goethe and his age, both in German and English. Contributors: Liesl Allingham, William H. Carter, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, John B. Lyon, Waltraud Maierhofer, Catherine Minter, Katharina Mommsen, David Pan, Michael Saman, Leif Weatherby, David E. Wellbery. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.Trade Review[D]emonstrates a healthy pluralism of approaches to the work of Goethe and to the broader German literary culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . . . The breadth of approaches . . . is complemented by an explicit attempt to address a broader readership in one other important sense: in the case of English-language contributions [eight of eleven articles], the editors have established a new policy of providing English translations of all quotations . . . clearly a positive development . . . . This issue of the Goethe Yearbook is to be recommended [. . . and] gives clear evidence of the present strength and breadth in the study of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature in North America. * EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INTELLIGENCER *Table of ContentsOn the Logic of Change in Goethe's Work Space and Place in Goethe's "Alexis und Dora" Countermemory in Karoline von Günderrode's "Darthula nach Ossian": A Female Warrior, Her Unruly Breast, and the Construction of Her Myth Bad Habits of the Heart: Werther's Critique of Ill Humor in the Context of Contemporary Psychological Thought Confessions of a Childless Woman: Fictional Autobiography around 1800 Faust's Begehren: Revisiting the History of Political Economy in Faust II Sacrifice in Goethe's Faust Constructions of Goethe versus Constructions of Kant in German Intellectual Culture, 1900-1925 Das Innere der Natur und ihr Organ: von Albrecht von Haller zu Goethe Die Titelkupfer von Moritz Retzsch zu Goethes Ausgabe letzter Hand Zu Goethe und der Islam-Antwort auf die oft aufgeworfene Frage: War Goethe ein Muslim? Book Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisCutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on environmentalism. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 22 features a special section on environmentalism, edited by Dalia Nassar and Luke Fischer, with contributions on: the metaphor of music in Goethe's scientific work and its influence on Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Uexküll, and Zuckerkandl (Frederick Amrine); his conceptualization of modern civilization in Faust (Gernot Böhme); a non-anthropocentricvision of nature in his writings on the intermaxillary bone (Ryan Feigenbaum); his geopoetics of granite (Jason Groves); the historical antecedents of biosemiotics in "Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen" (Kate Rigby); and the conceptof the "Dark Pastoral" in Werther (Heather I. Sullivan). In addition, there are articles on Goethe as a spiritual predecessor of phenomenology (Iris Hennigfeld); concepts of the "hermaphrodite" in contributions to theEncyclopédie by Louis de Jaucourt and Albrecht von Haller (Stephanie Hilger); on Goethe's poem "Nähe des Geliebten" (David Hill); on the link between commerce and culture in West-östlicher Divan (Daniel Purdy); on Goethe's thoughts on collecting and museums (Helmut Schneider); and on intrigues in the works of J. M. R. Lenz (Inge Stephan). Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Gernot Böhme, Ryan Feigenbaum, Luke Fischer, Jason Groves, Iris Hennigfeld, Stephanie M. Hilger, David Hill, Dalia Nassar, Daniel Purdy, Kate Rigby, Helmut J. Schneider, Inge Stephan, Heather I. Sullivan. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmeris Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Special Section on Goethe and Environmentalism Art, Nature, and the Poesy of Plants in the Goethezeit: A Biosemiotic Perspective The Music of the Organism: Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty, Zuckerkandl, and Deleuze as Goethean Ecologists in Search of a New Paradigm Toward a Nonanthropocentric Vision of Nature: Goethe's Discovery of the Intermaxillary Bone Goethe's Petrofiction: Reading the Wanderjahre in the Anthropocene Nature and the "Dark Pastoral" in Goethe's Werther Goethe und die moderne Zivilisation Goethe's Phenomenological Way of Thinking and the Urphänomen Orientation and Supplementation: Locating the "Hermaphrodite" in the Encyclopédie Claudine von Villa Bella and the Publication of "Nähe des Geliebten" West-östliche Divan and the "Abduction/Seduction of Europe": World Literature and the Circulation of Culture Kunstsammlung und Kunstgeselligkeit: Zu Goethes Sammlungs- und Museumskonzeption zwischen 1798 und 1817 "Er hatte einen entschiedenen Hang zur Intrige": Überlegungen zu J. M. R. Lenz, seiner Rezeption und seinen Werken Review Essay: Goethe's Writings as a Minister of State in Saxe-Weimar and Eisenach Book Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisCutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and the Goethezeit, featuring in this volume a special section on Goethe and visual culture. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 23 features a special section on visual culture with contributions on the visual aesthetics of Goethe's 1815 production ofProserpina (Bersier); on the Farbenlehre (Lande); on Tableaux Vivants in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Solanki); on the relationship between Goethe and C. G. Carus and their respective views on the representation of nature in art and science (Allert); and on visual and verbal bricolage in Clemens Brentano's Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (MacLeod). There are also articles on Goethe and ancient mystery religions (Amrine); on Goethe's fairy-tale aesthetics (Brown); on the concept of neutrality (Holland); on the concept of the mathematical infinite (Smith); on virginity and maternity in Werther (Nossett); on the Classical aesthetics of Schlegel'sLucinde (ter Horst); and on motherless creations in Faust (Nielsen). Contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Amrine, Gabrielle Bersier, Jane K. Brown, Jocelyn Holland, Joel B. Lande, Catriona MacLeod, WendyC. Nielsen, Lauren Nossett, John H. Smith, Tanvi Solanki, Eleanor ter Horst. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Bookreview editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.Table of ContentsBuilding Bridges: Goethe's Fairy-Tale Aesthetics Goethe as Mystagogue Observing Neutrality, circa 1800 Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations Impossible Ideals: Reconciling Virginity and Maternity in Goethe's Werther Kant, Calculus, Consciousness, and the Mathematical Infinite in Us The Classical Aesthetics of Schlegel's Lucinde Acquaintance with Color: Prolegomena to a Study of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre "Hamiltonian-Hendelian" Mimoplastics and Tableau of the Underworld: The Visual Aesthetics of Goethe's 1815 Proserpina Production J. W. Goethe and C. G. Carus: On the Representation of Nature in Science and Art Brentano's Remains: Visual and Verbal Bricolage in Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (1838) A Book of Living Paintings: Tableaux Vivants in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) Book Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisCutting-edge scholarly articles on diverse aspects of Goethe and his age, featuring in this volume a special section on the poetics of space in the Goethezeit. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, encouraging North American Goethe scholarship by publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. Volume 24 features a special section titled "The Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit," co-edited by John Lyon and Elliott Schreiber, with contributions on blind spots in Goethe's Elective Affinities; on the topography and topoi of Goethe's autobiographical childhood; on disorientation and the subterranean in Novalis; on selfhood, sovereignty, and public space in Die italienische Reise and Dichtung und Wahrheit; on Goethe's theater of anamnesis in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; and on spatial mobilization in Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter. There are also articles on the horror of coming home in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige" and on Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Eduard Allwills Papiere. Contributors: Colin Benert, Stephanie Galasso, Tove Holmes, Edgar Landgraf, Sara Luly, John B. Lyon, Anthony Mahler, Monika Nenon, Joseph O'Neil, Elliott Schreiber, Inge Stephan, Gabriel Trop, Christian P. Weber. Adrian Daub is Associate Professor of German at Stanford. Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California Davis. Book review editor Birgit Tautz is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College.Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Special Section on the Poetics of Space in the Goethezeit The Theater of Anamnesis: The Spaces of Memory and the Exteriority of Time in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Affective Enclosures: The Topography and Topoi of Goethe's Autobiographical Childhood Blind Spots as Projection Spaces in Die Wahlverwandtschaften Disorientation in Novalis or "The Subterranean Homesick Blues" Selfhood, Sovereignty, and Public Space in Die italienische Reise, "Das Rochus-Fest zu Bingen," and Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book Five Spatial Mobilization: Kleist's Strategic Road Map for the Berliner Abendblätter and Tactical Displacements in the "Tagesbegebenheiten" "Daseyn enthüllen": Zum mediengeschichtlichen Kontext von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis Eduard Allwills Papiere The Horror of Coming Home: Integration and Fragmentation in Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's "Der Abtrünnige" Form and Contention: Sati as Custom in Günderrode's "Die Malabarischen Witwen" Absolute Signification and Ontological Inconsistency in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann Educational Environments: Narration and Education in Campe, Goethe, and Kleist "War Goethe ein Mohammedaner?": Goethes West-östlicher Divan (1819) als Spiegelungsfläche in Thomas Lehrs September. Fata Morgana (2010) Book Reviews

Read more less

Book SynopsisEssays on the apparitional, the incomprehensible, and the paranormal in conversation with art, travel, and storytellingOut of Nowhere Into Nothing is a collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional; the ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder.Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.Trade Review“Pagel is an investigative reporter carefully picking her way through the seemingly random and yet intricately related igneous rocks that form the spiral jetty of her mind. What does it mean for a woman to be “lost in thought,” doing “nothing,” and how does she find her way? By carefully piecing together the connections between the art, psychical events, and people that have led her to the place of writing. Pagel’s prose is a marvel. I stayed up late into the night reading this book, all too willing to be lost in (her, my) thought.” —Barbara Browning, author of The Gift “I appreciate Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing for how gently and generously it cares for the flawed and faulty machine of memory. Pagel is a thoughtful and skilled storyteller, weaving together narratives in a way that centers itself on trust and reliability. Reading this book was like hearing from an old friend, and having all of your favorite recollections painted back in.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest “Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a radical retelling of loneliness. With the ribbonlike precision of Woolf and Sebald, Pagel writes like ‘a ghost in the company of ghosts.’ Each essay reads not like a honeycomb, but like a ghostcomb. Each essay is shaped like a mass of hexagonal cells that contains the uncontainable: inside jokes, hallucinations, grief, love, art, nothingness, and the swell of being. I love Pagel’s poet brain. ‘Here,’ writes Pagel, ‘there were flowers growing through tree stumps.’ She reminds us of what we cannot afford to miss or forget or never know.” —Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis unique collection of the writings of Rudolf Klein - historian, journalist, political scientist and policy analyst - represents the products of his career as an observer of politics and society over the last four decades.Trade Review"Original voices are rare. Rudolf Klein has been a startling and important explicator of health policy and social services. His is still the most original voice in chronicling and critiquing the politics of the British health service. His forays into other systems, notably the U.S. system, have been equally provocative. Why do we have the systems we have? Why can we not agree on one way of organizing services and stick with it? Read Rudolf Klein and see." – Rosemary StevensTable of ContentsPreface. Acknowledgements.. Part I. Spectator Sports. 1. The Gargoyle Theatre. 2. London Opera. 3. A View from the Terrace. 4. Chelsea Knock Down Ambitious Arsenal. 5. Television. 6. Soccer and Society. 7. Chelsea Cover Up Their Weak Spots. 8. Left, Right & Other Stereotypes. 9. Ministering to Britain. 10. Crumbling the Barricades. 11. Orthodox Unconventionality. 12. Inequality and Politics.. Part II. Government Observed. 13. Shame and Prejudice. 14. The £6,000,000,000 Question. 15. Egoists of the World. 16. Planners Who Leap into the Dark. 17. Callaghan’s Dilemma: to Tax or Not to Tax. 18. New Deal for Incomes. 19. Labour Moves Closer to Tories on Welfare. 20. What is Wrong With Housing. 21. Jay as Wilson’s Secret Weapon. 22. A Man for All Classes. 23. Controlling THEM. 24. You Won’t Read This …. 25. Curbing Whitehall. 26. Saving Labour’s First-born. 27. The Message is McLuhan. 28. The Doers and the Done-to. 29. Masters Into Managers. 30. Participation v. Efficiency. 31. Barbara’s Strike Cure. 32. How to Live with Cannabis. 33. Who Should Run Our Schools?. 34. What is the Difference?. 35. The Wilson Era.. Part III. From Public to Social Policy. 36. The Management of Britain. 37. Growth and Its Enemies. 38. The Stalemate Society. 39. The Politics of Public Expenditure: American Theory and British Practice. 40. Universities in the Market Place. 41. The Welfare State: A Self-Inflicted Crisis?. 42. The Social Policy Man: Priest or Pragmatist?. 43. Edwin Chadwick 1800-90. 44. O’Goffe’s Tale, Or, What Can We Learn From the Success of the Capitalist Welfare States?. Part IV. The Politics of Health Care. 45. N.H.S Reorganisation: the Politics of the Second Best. 46. Ideology, Class and the National Health Service. 47. Models of Man and Models of Policy: Reflections on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Ten Years Later. 48. Health Care in the Age of Disillusionment. 49. The NHS and the Theatre of Inadequacy. 50. Acceptable Inequalities. 51. From Status to Contract: The Transformation of the British Medical Profession. 52. The State and the Profession: The Politics of the Double Bed. 53. Risks and Benefits of Comparative Studies: Notes from Another Shore. 54. Rationing in Action – Dimensions of Rationing: Who Should Do What?. 55. The Goals of Health Policy: Church or Garage?. 56. Labour’s Health Policy: A Retreat from Ideology.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe sixty-two short essays in ""After the Bell"" describe in many voices the emotional complexity and historical record of one experience most of us have in common: elementary and secondary school, from our first day all the way to graduation twelve years later. Whether public or private, rural or urban, school is the first place we navigate on our own, learning how we stand apart, how we stand out, and where we do - or don't - fit in. The essays are by emerging as well as established fiction writers, poets, social commentators, and educational theorists. Told from the point of view of students, teachers, parents, and administrators through the multiple perspectives of race, class, physical and intellectual abilities, and sexuality, the stories reveal how memories of our school days haunt and sustain us. As Naomi Shihab Nye notes, ""there will never be a last day of school."" That's the good news and the bad news about our common experience. From the staunchly Lutheran brick schoolhouse of Garrison Keillor's New Albion Academy in 1948 to Annie Thoms' Manhattan high school at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, from Alberto Rios' confusion as a bilingual child in a monolingual classroom to Henry Louis Gates' hard lessons in the segregated South, the essays in this funny, poignant, and stimulating collection capture the many public worlds of the school community as well as its idiosyncratic secrets.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWe have books that contain collected essays, verse, and humor. What we see less often are books that contain collected interviews on various topics. Interviews have a certain outside discipline about them. The one interviewed responds to a question someone else asks of him. Often the questions are unexpected, sometimes annoying. Answers have a freshness to them. They can be more personal, frank. The responses in At a Breezy Time of Day are occasioned when someone writes or phones with a request for an interview. There may be a common theme but often side questions come up. We are curious about what someone has to say – about sports, about God, about Plato, about education, about books, about just about anything. Usually central questions occur. The same question can be answered in different ways. We often have more to say on a given topic than we do say on our first being asked about it. These interviews appeared in various on-line and printed sources. Having them collected in one text makes the interview form itself seem more substantial. Interviews too often seem to be passing, ephemeral things, but often we want to hold on to them. There is something more existential about them. Yet there is also something more lightsome about them also. The truth of things seems more bearable when it is spoken, when it has a human voice. So, as the title of this collection intimates, we begin with the very first interview in the Garden of Eden. We touch many places and issues. The interview always has somewhere even in its written form the touch of the human voice. The one who interviews invites us to speak, to tell us what we hold, why we hold it. Interviews are themselves part of that engagement in conversation that defines our kind in its search for a full knowledge of what is. We know that when we have said the last word, much remains to be said. We can rejoice both in what we know, and in what we know that we do not know. I believe it was Socrates who, in an earlier form of interview at the end of The Apology, alerted us to be aware of what we know and to await the many other interviews that we hope to carry on with so many others of our kind in the Isles of the Blessed.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe essay is one of the great inventions of the human mind. It can talk about anything and everything. It can be lightsome or solemn. It can be witty or informative. Above all, it is short. It likes the passage in which Socrates told Callicles in the Gorgias to make his answers brief. Yet, we can find in essays things we need and want to know. Aquinas often managed to make the most profound arguments in two paragraphs. Samuel Johnson did the same. The Classical Moment is, indeed, a collection of “selected essays.” Such a collection is a classical and beloved form of English letters, the literary form most preferred by Schall. The essays in this book all touch on knowledge and its pleasures. Schall does not tarry on the effort and determination it often takes to say just what we want to say, then say it and know that we have said it. Somehow, when an essay is written, an author simply knows that it is complete, that it is what he wanted to say. He says to himself, “Yes, that is it.” An essayist may well be conscious that when he begins an essay, he really does not know what he will finally say. The writing is the saying. Our writing is our thinking, our thinking-through, our being pleased to know this is it . . . this is the point Schall, one of America’s greatest essayists, makes here. The “classical moment” is that intense experience of seeing or hearing or encountering some vista, or song, or person that takes us out of ourselves. We are most ourselves somehow when we are most outside of ourselves, seeing what is not ourselves. We are intended to be more than ourselves in being ourselves, to know with others what is the truth, to know what is. These essays originally appeared in regular columns done in various journals, papers, and on-line sources. One can read them in any order. The order of the author or collector does have a certain “logic,” but each essay is also a whole, something contained within itself. The unity of an essay collection is found more in a kind enthrallment that comes to us when we deal with the things that are both important and delightful. At bottom, these essays belong together. Aristotle warned us that if we did not delight in the things that are, we would seek our highest pleasures where they are not really found. We will always seek something to delight in. What civilization is about lies in finding what is really worthy of the capacity of delight that is given to us in our being. The “classical moment” is the perfect phrase that brings us to the threshold of this experience. We have to enter it ourselves, but once inside, we will find so much more than ourselves. And we will rejoice.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat is it about the nature of “soul” that makes it so difficult to adequately capture its complexity in a strictly discursive account? Why do some of the most profound human experiences elude our attempts to theorize them? How can a written document do justice to the dynamic activity of thinking, as opposed to merely presenting a collection of thoughts-as-artifacts? Finally, what can we learn about the activity of philosophizing, and about the human soul, by reflecting on the possibilities and limitations of writing?These concerns, in various forms and in different registers, have preoccupied Michael Davis throughout his distinguished career. This volume is in honor of, and in dialogue with, Davis’s work, which spans ancient philosophy and literature, continental philosophy and political philosophy. It includes original essays by numerous distinguished scholars in the fields of philosophy and political science. The remarkable range and caliber of the contributions attest to the breadth and depth of Davis’s influence.The essays in Part I of the volume explore the nature of soul through the lens of tragedy. Part II consists of three essays that explore the human longing for perfect knowledge and completion—and the obstacles to the fulfilment of that longing—in relation to the divine. In Part III, the essays address the distinctive challenges of the political sphere and philosophy’s relation to it. And while the relationship between philosophy and poetry is an implicit theme throughout the volume, the essays in Part IV focus directly on philosophy’s aestheticizing tendencies. Many different philosophical and literary works are discussed throughout these chapters, including ancient works such as Plato’s Republic, Euthydemus and Laws, Homer’s Iliad, and Euripides’ Trojan Women, as well as works by modern philosophers such as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In addition, three essays analyze some of Shakespeare’s plays in relation to the thought of Plato and Machiavelli. All of the essays are thematically linked by a common thread as they attend to the poetic dimension of philosophical thinking.Michael Davis is Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has taught since 1977 and has been the Sarah Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence (2003-2005). He has also taught on the graduate faculty at Fordham University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of numerous articles and books, which include: Ancient Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Science; The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle’s Poetics; The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics; The Autobiography of Philosophy; Rousseau’s The Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education; and The Soul of the Greeks: An Inquiry. He is also co-translator (with Seth Benardete) of Aristotle’s On Poetics.Contributors include: Abraham Anderson, Jonathan Badger, Robert Berman, Ronna Burger, Kenneth DeLuca, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Scott Hemmenway, Paul Kirkland, Mary Nichols, Denise Schaeffer, Paul Stern, Richard Velkley, Lisa Pace Vetter, Ann Ward, Lee Ward, Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert.About the Editor: Denise Schaeffer is Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Rousseau on Education, Freedom and Judgment and contributing co-editor (with Christopher Dustin) of Socratic Philosophy and Its Others. She is co-editor (with Gregory McBrayer and Mary P. Nichols) of the Focus Philosophical Library edition of Plato’s Euthydemus, for which she authored the Introduction and co-authored the Interpretive Essay.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEssays about teaching postwar Japanese fiction in its cultural and historical contexts.As Japan moved from the devastation of 1945 to the economic security that survived even the boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s, its literature came to embrace new subjects and styles and to reflect on the nation's changing relationship to other Asian countries and to the West. This volume will help instructors introduce students to novels, short stories, and manga that confront postwar Japanese experiences, including the suffering caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the echoes of Japan's colonialism and imperialism, new ways of thinking about Japanese identity and about minorities such as the zainichi Koreans, changes in family structures, and environmental disasters. Essays provide context for understanding the particularity of postwar Japanese literature, its place in world literature, and its connections to the Japanese past.This volume contains discussion of Tawada Yōko's "The Bath"; Nakagami Kenji's "The Cape"; works by Murakami Haruki; The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P; works by Mishima Yukio; Black Rain; Serai Yūichi's "Birds"; Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan; works by Ishimure Michiko; 3/11; Araki Tetsurō; Yasunari Kawabata's Thousand Cranes; Ariyoshi Sawako's The Twilight Years; Endō Shūsaku's Silence; and works by Kawabata Yasunari.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEssays featuring twentieth-century Korean thought on literature and culture.Faced with dramatic social and political changes, Korean writers of the twentieth century—writing in the context of Japanese imperialism, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War era—explored many pressing questions about modern life: What is the relationship between literature and society? How can intellectual concepts be used politically, for good or ill? What are the differences between Eastern and Western cultures? The essays in this collection, originally published between 1933 and 1957, explore these and other questions through varying lenses, including liberal humanism, socialism, fascism, and an early form of North Korea's Juche thought. Featuring works by Paik Ch'ŏl, Sŏ Insik, Ŏm Hosŏk, and Ch'oe Chaesŏ, the volume highlights the diversity of twentieth-century Korean thought, its developments during periods of upheaval, and its engagement with ideas of modernity that were being shared around the world.This volume contains discussion of writers such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, Plato, Marcel Proust, Yi Kwangsu, and Yi Sang; movements, schools of thought, and literary styles such as English Romanticism, European modernism, German idealism, the Kyoto school of philosophy, Marxism, naturalism, the New Tendency Group, nihilism, socialist realism, and tendentious literature; traditions such as Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism; and the sociopolitical and economic formation known as East Asian Community.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEssays featuring twentieth-century Korean thought on literature and culture.Faced with dramatic social and political changes, Korean writers of the twentieth century—writing in the context of Japanese imperialism, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War era—explored many pressing questions about modern life: What is the relationship between literature and society? How can intellectual concepts be used politically, for good or ill? What are the differences between Eastern and Western cultures? The essays in this collection, originally published between 1933 and 1957, explore these and other questions through varying lenses, including liberal humanism, socialism, fascism, and an early form of North Korea's Juche thought. Featuring works by Paik Ch'ŏl, Sŏ Insik, Ŏm Hosŏk, and Ch'oe Chaesŏ, the volume highlights the diversity of twentieth-century Korean thought, its developments during periods of upheaval, and its engagement with ideas of modernity that were being shared around the world.This volume contains discussion of writers such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, Plato, Marcel Proust, Yi Kwangsu, and Yi Sang; movements, schools of thought, and literary styles such as English Romanticism, European modernism, German idealism, the Kyoto school of philosophy, Marxism, naturalism, the New Tendency Group, nihilism, socialist realism, and tendentious literature; traditions such as Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism; and the sociopolitical and economic formation known as East Asian Community.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ""Family and History,"" includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ""Writers and Writing,"" offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ""Politics and Society,"" includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSoon after Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, he became an object of literary and journalistic scrutiny. This attention would continue until his last days, four decades and forty books later. Conversations with Kingsley Amis includes both the first and last interviews Amis gave. Celebrated by reviewers and critics for his wit and irreverence, Amis rose to the occasion whenever interviewed. His clever and common-sense views covered everything from the state of the novel and current intellectual trends to the circumstances of his domestic life. Not many writers can hold the interest of inquisitors from both Penthouse and the Economist as Amis does. Not many writers, for that matter, articulate views worth recording on sexual relations, about which Amis is something of a failed expert, and on the modern university, about which he could claim a greater authority. English periodicals of all varieties sought out Amis for his opinions on culture, both high and low. Along the way, Amis also entertained literary interrogators from the Paris Review and other journals, including talks with a number of distinguished men of letters such as Clive James, Michael Barber, and John Mortimer.Trade Review"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing" - Kingsley Amis"

Read more less

Book SynopsisIf Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't ""think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing,"" he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers, whether they be students, writers or academics, delighting in the diversity of his audience and in the ""greater democratization of commentary"" provided by alternative media.These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve. Most date from the late 1990s on, when the publication of Pulitzer-finalist Cloudsplitter in conjunction with the back-to-back release of film adaptations of his novels The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction suddenly put Banks in the spotlight as ""Hollywood's Hottest New Property.""Banks has always believed that the writer plays ""the role of the storyteller,"" fulfilling very basic and universal human needs: ""to talk about the human condition, to tell us something about ourselves."" Yet, for him, writing is not a one-way process. It is an exchange where the key is to tune in and listen--to the voices of the characters engaging the writer's imagination and to the voices of the readers sharing their own experiences of his books and of the world.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied source book for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologised or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed head notes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologised selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to everyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media. Trade Review“Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French are among the finest commentators of the genre today. Their presentation of the material is compelling and, in my opinion, will be extremely valuable to us all—we teachers, writers, critics, and educated readers who remain devoted to furthering the study of the essay.”—Robert Atwan, series editor, Best American Essays|“At long last, a book that collects critical ideas—from the minds of essay practitioners—about the oft-maligned yet exquisite literary adventure that is the essay. Not only does this anthology document the history of the essay, but it also provides guidance, via an extensive thematic guide, to the study of this form. Teachers, students, essayists, and essay enthusiasts will want this volume on their shelves.”—Kim Dana Kupperman, author, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe carefully crafted, meditative essays in On the Shoreline of Knowledge sometimes start from unlikely objects or thoughts, a pencil or some fragments of commonplace conversation, but they soon lead the reader to consider fundamental themes in human experience. The unexpected circumnavigation of the ordinary unerringly gets to the heart of the matter. Bringing a diverse range of material into play, from fifteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhism to how we look at paintings, and from the nature of a briefcase to the ancient nest-sites of gyrfalcons, Chris Arthur reveals the extraordinary dimensions woven invisibly into the ordinary things around us. Compared to Loren Eiseley, George Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Aldo Leopold, V. S. Naipaul, W. G. Sebald, W. B. Yeats, and other literary luminaries, he is a master essayist whose work has quietly been gathering an impressive cargo of critical acclaim. Arthur speaks with an Irish accent, rooting the book in his own unique vision of the world, but he addresses elemental issues of life and death, love and loss, that circle the world and entwine us all.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn a series of linked lyric essays, Detailing Trauma explores in vivid, sometimes graphic detail the many types of wounds from which the human body and spirit may suffer - and heal. Mapping the diseases and injuries that can afflict the body, the author asks how we can continue to live and love in the face of the great potential for suffering and loss. She names each section of the book for body parts or processes, then juxtaposes the functions and failures of human anatomy with experiences in her own life and those of people she knows and loves, meticulously stitching together life's fractures and ruptures with skillful narrative. Each essay offers glimpses of hope and reasons for living with the likelihood of chaos and pain, reasons for choosing to love despite the risks. Zwartjes's beautifully crafted poetic prose humanizes the technical descriptions of medical conditions and illuminates the scientific understanding of emotional states. Far more than a popularization of science, Detailing Trauma explores the wondrous anatomy and physiology of the human body, a geography of our human frailties - and also our wealth, as humans, of love and hope and the capacity for meditative thought.

Read more less

Book SynopsisNashville native Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who “went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.” Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash’s looming presence over his childhood, the relative pain of red paper wasp stings, Dolly Parton’s generative homesickness, the humiliations and consolations of becoming a new father, the experience of hearing his name in a Taylor Swift song, and the mystifying hymns treasured by both his great grandmother and D. H. Lawrence. Seamlessly blending memoir and arts criticism and aiming at both the heart and the head, this is a book about listening closely to stories and songs, about leaving home in order to find home, and about how the melodies and memories absorbed along the way become “a living music that advances and prevails upon us at formative moments, corralling chaos into the simple, liberating stockade of verse, chorus, verse.”

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collection of short essays delivers more joy than many books twice its size. Culled from two decades’ worth of Mary Helen Stefaniak’s “Alive and Well” column in the Iowa Source, each essay invites readers into the ordinary life of a woman “with a family and friends and a job . . . and a series of cats and a history living in one old house after another at the turn of the twenty-first century in the middle of the Middle West.” One great aunt presides over nineteen acres of pecan grove profitably strewn with junk. A borrowed hammer rings with the sound of immortality. Famous poets pipe up where you least expect them. Living and dying are found to be two sides of the same remarkable coin. What’s more, writing prompts at the end of the book invite readers to search their own lives for such moments—the kind that could be forgotten but instead are turned, by the gift of perspective and perfectly chosen detail, into treasure. The Six-Minute Memoir encourages people to tell their own stories even if they think they don’t have the kind of story that belongs in a memoir.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDogs have lived with humans for thousands of years as working partners. By the nineteenth century their role expanded to companions. American dog literature reflects this gradual but dramatic shift that continues even today. Our household dogs are quite literally closer than ever to us: sleeping in our beds, getting dressed in Halloween costumes, and serving as emotional support companions.In Dogs We Trust is the first comprehensive anthology of American dog literature. It features stories, anecdotes, and poetry that celebrate the many sterling virtues of the canine species. By mining the vast American literary archive of nineteenth and early twentieth-century periodicals, Jacob F. Rivers III and Jeffrey Makala reveal the mystique and magic of the human-canine relationship and what they believe is one of the best connections humans have to the mysteries of the natural world.This grand anthology features a rich harvest of fiction and nonfiction in which the canine heroes and heroines think and act in ways that illuminate their unquestioning loyalty and devotion. By taking dog literature seriously, Rivers and Makala believe we can learn more about our animal companions, ourselves, and our national literature. For them dog literature is American literature; it helps us explore and explain who we are and who we wish to be.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat do fishing with an otter, sitting atop a mountain at dawn with eighty Taiwanese backpackers, and driving home from Aldo Leopold's Shack have to say about the evolution of a personal environmental philosophy? Essays to My Daughter on Our Relationship With the Natural World provides a series of reflections by an environmental educator about lessons learned from time spent in nature. Originally conceived as personal letters to the author's daughter, this collection presents ethical questions outdoor enthusiasts regularly face as they work and play in the natural world. The essays in this book explore environmentalism in a modern-day context, with topics including sustainability education, the current relevance of environmental writers from the past, and the uncertainty of what is meant by words like "naturalist," "solitude," and "wilderness." There is no attempt to direct readers to any particular environmental philosophy. Instead, Simpson encourages readers to articulate their own perspective based on personal experiences in nature. Though Essays to My Daughter is written by a father to his daughter, the insights within the volume-and the questions they provoke-are valuable to all members of the next generation as they grapple with their own relationship to the natural world.Table of Contents Preface Introduction: Personal Philosophy and Individual Experiences Part I: The Pond and the Shack 1 The Good Oak Redux 2 Drowning Out All Our Muskrats 3 Wild Apples 4 Still Fishing 5 A Person's Leisure Time 6 Book Purge Part II: Sketches Here and There 7 Wisconsin East: A Small Square of Red 8 California With a Touch of Maine: Tide Pools East and West 9 Minnesota: Night of the Quintze 10 Iowa: The Birds of Iowa 11 Taiwan: Ascent of Jade Mountain 12 A Return to Taiwan: Old and American 13 Ontario: Goodbye, Deadbroke Island 14 Wisconsin West: Mark Twain on the Mekong 15 Wisconsin West: What About the Other Kids? 16 Three Outsdoorsmen and a Philosopher Part III: Continuums 17 The Preservationist and the Conservationist 18 The Wanderer and the Adventurer 19 The Homecomer and the Sojourner 20 The Romantic and the Scientist 21 The Restorer Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes About the Author

Read more less

Book SynopsisFearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.Trade Review"“Margaret Randall has an uncanny ability to verbalize the pressing thoughts and questions that often elude us. . . . opening us to possibilities that we might otherwise never encounter, inviting us to come to our own conclusions. Partnering and paralleling Randall’s words are the powerful, evocative drawings of Barbara Byers, the two creating together a work summed up perfectly by the final words of Luck: ‘no metaphor… only untiring passion carrying creativity on its wings.’”" -- Susan Sherman, founding editor of IKON Magazine and author of America’s Child"“With essays on everything from Aging to 9/11 to a manifesto/litany on Anger, from poetic meditations on the weather to memory itself, Truth is Margaret Randall’s essential philosophy. She is there in the pantheon with Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde. Her humanity and humor, her comedy and tragedy, her activism and her love, all that Margaret Randall is, is the definition of a poet.”" -- Bob Holman * poet, filmmaker, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club *"“Luck is both a collection of concise and adventurous philosophical essays by one of the modern world’s great poets, Margaret Randall, and a series of equally adventurous visual thought drawings by her life partner, the master generative artist and teacher, Barbara Byers. Both explore territory that cannot be experienced without the willing energy and daring that takes them beyond what even they might have expected from themselves in a process of creative exploration.”" -- V.B. Price * author of Memoirs of the World in 10 Fragments and Lucretius and the Logic of Venus *

Read more less

Book SynopsisFearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.Trade Review"“Margaret Randall has an uncanny ability to verbalize the pressing thoughts and questions that often elude us. . . . opening us to possibilities that we might otherwise never encounter, inviting us to come to our own conclusions. Partnering and paralleling Randall’s words are the powerful, evocative drawings of Barbara Byers, the two creating together a work summed up perfectly by the final words of Luck: ‘no metaphor… only untiring passion carrying creativity on its wings.’”" -- Susan Sherman, founding editor of IKON Magazine and author of America’s Child"“With essays on everything from Aging to 9/11 to a manifesto/litany on Anger, from poetic meditations on the weather to memory itself, Truth is Margaret Randall’s essential philosophy. She is there in the pantheon with Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde. Her humanity and humor, her comedy and tragedy, her activism and her love, all that Margaret Randall is, is the definition of a poet.”" -- Bob Holman * poet, filmmaker, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club *"“Luck is both a collection of concise and adventurous philosophical essays by one of the modern world’s great poets, Margaret Randall, and a series of equally adventurous visual thought drawings by her life partner, the master generative artist and teacher, Barbara Byers. Both explore territory that cannot be experienced without the willing energy and daring that takes them beyond what even they might have expected from themselves in a process of creative exploration.”" -- V.B. Price * author of Memoirs of the World in 10 Fragments and Lucretius and the Logic of Venus *

Read more less

Book SynopsisCONTRIBUTORSJohn Charles, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Bill V. Mullen, Rachel Peterson, Paula Rabinowitz, Rachel Rubin, James Smethurst, Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán The essayists in Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left examine Ann Petry's relationship to left-wing political circles in the years following World War II. Anthologies dedicated to African American writing, even those that consider the African American literary left, often exclude Petry (1908-1997). These essayists demonstrate how Petry's literary art, as well as her engagement in various community struggles, landed her squarely in a variety of progressive communities. Through analyses of Petry's three novels, her short fiction, and her nonfiction, scholars identify her literary forms and aesthetics, including pulp fiction, Marxist analysis, literary naturalism, and the realism Petry used to explore early Cold War racial, sexual, and class politics. Although Petry is not readily placed in leftist circles, the essays collected here show her engagement in a number of events centered in post-WWII Harlem, such as the Bronx Slave Market protest concerning treatment of African American female domestic workers and her role as contributor to Harlem's radical periodical, the People's Voice. Essays show that Petry's writing provides an important link between the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Alex Lubin, assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954, published by University Press of Mississippi.

Read more less

Book SynopsisToday, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things?The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDiverse in theme, style and cultural context, the American short story can take many forms. The only common theme is the short story’s unique ability to captivate an audience. This volume discusses the origin and popularity of the short story. Original critical essays on a diverse collection of writers highlight Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin and many others.Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of ""Works Cited,"" along with endnotes. Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources.

Read more less

Book SynopsisBest known for Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916), Horace Kephart's keen interest in exploring and documenting the great outdoors would lead him not only to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, but also to become the most significant writer about the Great Smoky Mountains in the early twentieth century. Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzell, Horace Kephart: Writings extends past Kephart's two well-read works of the early 1900s and dives into his correspondence with friends across the globe, articles and columns in national magazines, unpublished manuscripts, journal entries, and fiction in order to shed some deserved light on Kephart's classic image as a storyteller and practical guide to the Smokies. The book is divided into thematic subsections that call attention to the variety in Kephart's writings, its nine chapters featuring Kephart's works on camping and woodcraft, guns, southern Appalachian culture, fiction, the Cherokee, scouting, and the park and Appalachian trail. Each chapter is accompanied by an introductory essay by a notable Appalachian scholar providing context and background to the included works. Written for scholars interested in Appalachian culture and history, followers of the modern outdoor movement, students enamored of the Great Smoky Mountains, and general readers alike, Horace Kephart: Writings gathers a plethora of little-known and rarely seen material that illustrates the diversity and richness found in Kephart's work.Trade ReviewThis book gave me a whole new perspective on Horace Kephart, who was, indeed, a very significant figure in regional life and also had considerable national impact." - George Brosi, coeditor of Appalachian Gateway: An Anthology of Contemporary Stories and Poetry

Read more less

Book Synopsis“I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long,” wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a “chronicler”: a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos’s writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals.This wide-ranging and engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos’s views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist’s Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and “The Republic of Honest Men” increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.

Read more less

Book Synopsis“No man living has revealed so many important facts about the Negro race as has Rogers,” wrote W. E. B. DuBois. Indeed, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. contends, J. A. Rogers was often the only source for an ordinary Black person to learn of their history from the 1920s through the 1970s. Now Louis J. Parascandola makes available an accessible collection of Rogers’s writings for a new generation.Joel Augustus Rogers was born in Negril, Jamaica, in the late nineteenth century, where—although his father was a teacher—he received only basic education. Rogers emigrated to the United States and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago while working as a Pullman porter. He later took up journalism and moved to New York for better opportunities, writing for papers and journals published by the likes of Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. DuBois, and H. L. Mencken. While working with the Pittsburgh Courier, he was assigned to cover the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1937), becoming the first American Black foreign war correspondent. His column for the Courier became vital to the Black middle class, conveying stories of Black achievements and relating a distinguished history that imparted knowledge and pride. He continued this work with his books 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof, the two-volume The World’s Great People of Color 3000 B.C. to 1946 A.D., and the novel From Superman to Man.This engaging collection represents the wide range of Rogers’s work across time and demonstrates his intellectual philosophy. J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings is required reading for anyone interested in Black nationalism, Black journalism, Black literature, and Pan-African culture and identity.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Maine Woods, vast and largely unsettled, are often described as unchanged since Henry David Thoreau's 1847 journey across the backcountry, in spite of the realities of Indian dispossession and the visible signs of logging, settlement, tourism, and real estate development. In the summer of 2014 scholars, indigenous peoples, activists, and other individuals retraced Thoreau's route.Inspired partly by this expedition, the accessible and engaging essays here offer valuable new perspectives on conservation, the cultural ties that connect Native communities to the land, and the profound influence the geography of the Maine Woods had on Thoreau and writers and activists who followed in his wake. Together, these essays offer a rich and multifaceted look at this special place and the ways in which Thoreau's Maine experiences continue to shape understandings of the environment a century and a half later.Contributors include the volume editor, Kathryn Dolan, James S. Finley, James Francis, Richard W. Judd, Dale Potts, Melissa Sexton, Chris Sockalexis, Stan Tag, Robert M. Thorson, and Laura Dassow Walls.

Read more less

Book SynopsisSometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, ""What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?"" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return-to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way. Alternately honest, funny, and visceral, this powerful collection follows De Leon as she comes of age as a Guatemalan-American woman and learns to navigate the space between two worlds. Never rich or white enough for her posh college, she finds herself equally adrift in her first weeks in her parents' home country. During the years to follow, she would return to Guatemala again and again, meet ex-guerrillera and genocide survivors, get married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, and teach her newborn son about his roots.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEstablished in 1935, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent around 6,500 unemployed historians, teachers, writers, and librarians out to document America's past and present in the midst of the Great Depression. The English poet W. H. Auden referred to this New Deal program as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state."Featuring original work by scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides fresh insights into how this extraordinary program helped transform American culture. In addition to examining some of the major twentieth-century writers whose careers the FWP helped to launch—including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker—Rewriting America presents new perspectives on the role of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and women on the project. Essays also address how the project's goals continue to resonate with contemporary realities in the midst of major economic and cultural upheaval.Along with the volume editor, contributors include Adam Arenson, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Racheal Harris, Jerrold Hirsch, Kathi King, Maiko Mine, Deborah Mutnick, Diane Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, Robert Singer, James Sun, and David A. Taylor.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEven as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition.With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.Trade Review "Wisenberg is an affecting guide through the nuances, joys, and complications of contemporary Jewish womanhood; The Wandering Womb both celebrates those identities and mourns the past pains that they reflect."—Foreword Reviews “Each essay is a lens through which we are invited to view in Joycean detail the author’s deeply personal present, yet at the same time to ponder and to rethink larger worlds of history and cultures. It’s a collection that often is wry but never cynical, acutely learned and always alert to humor and wonder.”—David Toomey, author of Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own "Sometimes subtle, sometimes fierce, these brilliant essays express what it's like to be a Jewish woman today, and what it's like to be an embodied human being."—Paula Kamen, author of Finding Iris Chang “Wisenberg’s years as a journalist show in the precision of her writing, as she leads us through both the distant and proximate past, from Civil-War reenactments to the private world of the mikvah. In The Wandering Womb, history breathes into our lungs and speaks through every word we say.”—Riva Lehrer, author of Golem Girl: A Memoir “A sharp, deeply questioning mind and a wayward heart inform these delicious essays. They are wry, humorous, melancholy, and universally relatable, filled with the shock of recognition.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head: Essays

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes readers into the heart of ten great works of classical music—works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. These masters—Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev and Stravinsky—communicated their life experiences through music and through music they universalised the intimate. By expanding our perceptions of these ten pieces—composed in the years between 1784 and 1966—Sachs, in lush, exquisite prose, invites us to consider why music stimulates, disturbs, exalts and consoles us. He has lived with these masterpieces for a lifetime and his descriptions of them and the dramatic lives of the composers who wrote them bring a heightened dimension to the musical perceptions of readers who may be casual listeners, students, professional musicians or anyone in between.

Read more less

Book SynopsisRanging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s dazzling essays capture debates at the intersection of art, literature and politics in the twenty-first century with virtuosic intensity. In “Notes on Trap”, McCarthy borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to dissect the significance of trap music in American society, while in “The Master’s Tools”, Velázquez becomes a lens through which to view Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine survey the state of black letters. In “The Time of the Assassins”, McCarthy, a black American raised in France, writes about returning to Paris after the Bataclan massacre and finding a nation in mourning but dangerously unchanged. Taken together, these essays portray a brilliant critic at work, making sense of our dislocated times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art, identity and representation.Trade Review"McCarthy’s analyses and observations are masterfully articulated, as are his dissents… With a younger readership at the top of his mind but an open invitation to all, McCarthy seems determined to draw attention to African-Americans’ ‘true strength’ and ‘worth.’ He well knows that if despair brought on by a troubled world is to be kept in check, the right prescriptions must be offered, the right traditions advanced, the right lessons drawn, and from the right people." -- Jerald Walker - The New York Times Book Review"McCarthy, an assistant professor at Harvard, draws on a broad array of cultural and historical influences — from Kara Walker to Nas to Sappho — in these essays, which he began writing in 2014. He approaches the country’s cultural changes in the intervening years through the lens of the arts and intellectual culture, opening with a provocative question: “What do people owe each other when debts accrued can never be repaid?”" -- 16 New Books to Watch For in March - The New York Times"This is a very smart and soulful book. Jesse McCarthy is a terrific essayist." -- Zadie Smith"Remarkable... Their cumulative range and force are as exhilarating as they are compelling... The finest essays in this book function like origami, folding together the apparently disparate into a unique and seemingly inevitable form... In sum, they illuminate, almost like a guide for the novice, the rich contemporary cosmos of black American art, literature, and philosophy." -- Claire Messud - Harper’s Magazine

Read more less

Book SynopsisPresents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories selected. On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.Trade ReviewInsightful and personal (but not academic), these essays should be warmly welcomed by any fan of short fiction. * LIBRARY JOURNAL *A thoughtful collection. . . . The authors do a fantastic job of explaining their relationship to the stories that resonate with them and why. . . . Reading this made me feel like I was back in English class, getting life and literature lessons from the best teachers ever. * THE OKLAHOMAN *It is hard for an Englishman to confess, but Americans excel at the short story, and here is the proof. And what better guide could you have than fellow writers who explain why each story deserves our attention, in the process crucially revealing something of themselves. These are not critics deconstructing a text but authors explaining why, for them, each story lives on the pulse, and why, therefore, it might for us. Is a short story less compelling than a novel? You might as well ask whether a sonnet is less powerful than a narrative poem. It is the very form, the discipline, the intensity, which, as in the case of this remarkable collection, engraves it on the mind.-- -- Christopher Bigsby, novelist, biographer, and criticTable of ContentsIntroduction - Jackson R. Bryer "The Fourth Alarm" by John Cheever - Lee K. Abbott "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus - Elliot Ackerman "Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams - Julia Alvarez "Leaving the Colonel" by Molly Giles - Rilla Askew "A Cautionary Tale" by Deborah Eisenberg - Andrea Barrett "The Wounded Soldier" by George Garrett - Richard Bausch "Consolation" by Richard Bausch - Ann Beattie "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" by Eudora Welty - Doris Betts "How Can I Tell You?" by John O'Hara - Frederick Busch "Triumph Over the Grave" by Denis Johnson - Maud Casey "No One's a Mystery" by Elizabeth Tallent - Alan Cheuse "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?" by Gina Berriault - Kate Christensen "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver - Susan Coll "The Magic Barrel" by Bernard Malamud - Nicholas Delbanco "Dare's Gift" by Ellen Glasgow - R. H. W. Dillard "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien - Ellen Douglas "In Another Country" by Ernest Hemingway - Andre Dubus "Like Life" by Lorrie Moore - Pamela Erens "Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt" by William Goyen - George Garrett "The Tree of Knowledge" by Henry James - William H. Gass "Sur" by Ursula Le Guin - Molly Giles "FRAGO" by Phil Klay - Julia Glass "My Father Sits in the Dark" by Jerome Weidman - Herbert Gold "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" by Katherine Anne Porter - Jack Greer "The Bridegroom's Body" by Kay Boyle - Doris Grumbach "The Doorbell" by Vladimir Nabokov - Olga Grushin "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor - A. R. Gurney "Jubilee" by Kirstin Valdez Quade - Jane Hamilton "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Edmund Keeley "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz - Joyce Kornblatt "Goodbye and Good Luck" by Grace Paley - Beverly Lowry "Flight" by John Updike - Jill McCorkle "A Silver Dish" by Saul Bellow - Alice McDermott "Flying Home" by Ralph Ellison - Clarence Major "Blessed Assurance" by Langston Hughes - Edward Kelsey Moore "Big Black Good Man" by Richard Wright - Sabina Murray "Travelin Man" by Peter Matthiessen - Howard Norman "Pet Milk" by Stuart Dybek - Leslie Pietrzyk "The Pedersen Kid" by William H. Gass - E. Annie Proulx "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville - Joanna Scott "Old Boys, Old Girls" by Edward P. Jones - Rion Amilcar Scott "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber - Mary Lee Settle "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin - Joan Silber "The Laughing Man" by J. D. Salinger - Elizabeth Spencer "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid - Diana Wagman "Fatherland: A Short Story" by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Kao Kalia Yang "The Pura Principle" by Junot Diaz - Mako Yoshikawa "Honeydew" by Edith Pearlman - Mary Kay Zuravleff

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Western Journeys, Teow Lim Goh charts her journeys immigrating from Singapore and spending the last fifteen years living in and exploring the American West. Goh chronicles her lived experiences while building on the longer history of immigrants from Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing various, and often new insights to places, the historical record, and memory. These vital essays consider how we access truth in the face of erasure. In exploring history, nature, politics, and art, Goh asks, “What does it mean for an immigrant to be at home?” Looking beyond the captivating landscapes of the American West, Goh uncovers stories of the Chinese people who came to America during the exclusion era, the Indigenous peoples who have been written out of popular narratives, and the mountaineers’ merciless ambitions, among many others. She examines the links between the transcontinental railroad, the cowboy myth, and the anti-Chinese prejudice that persists today. These essays explore such subjects as the early efforts to climb Colorado’s highest peaks, the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and the increasingly destructive fire seasons in the West. Goh’s essays create a complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory story of people and landscape that asks more questions than it answers.Trade ReviewWestern Journeys is compelling, powerful, and important. The erasure that Goh wants to combat can only be addressed one word at a time. That is the power and the pain of recovery—it is slow—but once the hidden gets pulled into the light it cannot be lost again. Each of these essays is an act of hauling the past into the present, of naming what many might prefer to ignore or deny."—Jennifer Sinor, author of Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World and Ordinary Trauma"The writing in Western Journeys is gorgeous, alternatingly spare and lush, in explicating how Teow Lim Goh found her writerly voice as an immigrant enthralled by an American West built upon the legislated and violent erasure of non-whites."—Michelle Liu, University of WashingtonTable of Contents I: Beyond the Myths Hollywood Pilgrims Coastlines Dreams of Golden Mountain Firecracker At the Ruins II: Ordinary Legacies Western Journeys Ascent The Ideology of Paradise A Memory of Hills At the Ponds III: Visions of Land The Road Home: On Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s Over the River Flowers of Prison: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz Split Footsteps on the Sea Letter to the Arctic IV: Apocalypses Borders and Citizens Refuge: Rocky Flats, Colorado The Ghosts of Bitter Creek Home Lands Fire SeasonV: Off the Page The Stories that Bind Us The Subjective Passions Lost and Found: On Kate Zambreno’s Heroines On Tenacity The Dehumanizing Politics of Likability Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments

Read more less

Book SynopsisOutback Nevada is a collection of articles John M. Glionna wrote as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and as a freelance writer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. These stories introduce readers to the "real Nevada," revealing hidden subcultures, offbeat tales, and the diverse spirit and character of the state's rural people and the land they inhabit.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of essays on early modern women from a collection of leading figures in the field.Subject/Object and Beyond brings together essays by established and emerging scholars to honor the exceptionally rich contributions and career of scholar Colette H. Winn. It also celebrates fifty years of sustained scholarship on early modern women, along with the foundation of Women’s Studies as a recognized academic discipline in North America. The collection comprises seventeen articles that explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to various fields, including literature, music, politics, religion, and science.Trade Review“These essays give a sense of the really broad and incredibly varied swath of studies in early modern literature and culture that Colette Winn has influenced and helped to cultivate. The field of studying early modern women/writers is an incredibly vibrant, rich, and complex one, with really exciting things happening on many fronts." -- Nora Peterson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln“…une contribution substantielle aux études sur les femmes de la première modernité.” -- Luc Vaillancourt, Université de Quebec à ChicoutimiTable of ContentsIllustrations viiContributors ixPréfaceFrançois Rouget xviiColette H. Winn Publications 1IntroductionNancy M. Frelick, Edith Benkov 15PART ONETranslating “damoiselline facherie”: Claude Scève, Claude Nourry,and Urbain le mescongneu filz de l’Empereur Federic BarberousseEmily E. Thompson 25Hélisenne de Crenne’s “Roman de Dido”Marian Rothstein 49« Car ce te sera honte de quereler avec une femme » :Hélisenne de Crenne, Louise Labé et la satire au fémininBernd Renner 71Lost in the Labérynthe: Mythologizing Louise Labé and the École lyonnaiseNancy M. Frelick 91PART TWOFrom Trickery to Triumph: Female Alliances and the Paths to Powerin Heptaméron 4 and 58Dora E. Polachek 127Femmes, bagues et anneaux dans l’Heptaméron : le labyrintherhétorique du parcours amoureuxBrigitte Roussel 149Cross-Dressed Monks in Saints’ Lives and Their Parodies:A Source for Heptaméron 31Scott Francis 173Chasteté et honneur des veuves de l’Heptaméron de Margueritede NavarreCynthia Skenazi 195Gossip, Commérage, and Caquets: Women’s Words in Early Modern FranceKathleen M. Llewellyn 213PART THREEA Huguenot Noblewoman’s Poetry Collection:The Album Belonging to Louise de Coligny (1555–1620)Jane Couchman 237The Poetics of a Poetry AlbumStephen Murphy 263Music for Women and Fleas: The Example of Catherine Des RochesKendall Tarte 287Souvenir anatomique d’une femme : l’autopsie en vers de Madamede MercoeurHélène Martin 309PART FOURLa tragicomédie du suicide couplé, ou : lien et devoir conjugal selon « De trois bonnes femmes » (Montaigne, Essais, II, 35)Corinne Noirot 337“Le mestier des femmes”: Queens, Nuns, Peacemaking, and theWars of ReligionEdith Benkov 361Reading the Bodies of Witches: The Case of Jeanne des Anges(1632–1637)Cathy Yandell 381“[Dieu] se servit de Jeanne d’Arc”: The Textual Public Identity and Political Agency of Mining Engineer Martine de Bertereau, Baronne de Beausoleil (c. 1584–c. 1643)Anne R. Larsen 403

Read more less

Book SynopsisTeacher burn out contributes to the epidemic of early career exit. At least half of all new K?12 teachers leave theprofession by the time they reach their fifth year of teaching. Conversely, there are urban teachers who survive burn out and thrive as career? long educators. This book results from an in?depth qualitative study that explored one 40?year veteran teacher’s career narrative, analyzing how she not only survived the burn out epidemic, but also thrived as a highly effective career?long urban teacher.Part 1 of this book uses a critical socio?political lens is used to guide readers through the complexities of career thrival. Framed within the story of one new urban teacher’s typical morning, the book begins with an overview of the socio?political forces that lead to urban teacher burn out. In spite of the obstacles, the more hopeful idea of urban teacher thrival is uncovered through narrative methodology. Part 2 is dedicated to the dynamic narrative of a veteran urban teacher career journey. This inspiring story is related to frameworks established in Part 1, as well as painting a picture of how public education has evolved over the last 40 years, and it’s impact on the lives of teachers.Part 3 takes a deeper dive into three salient themes that permeated throughout the participant’s story. First hope springs eternal is the idea that sustaining hope supported the teacher’s career thrival. Next, the extended education family is the notion that familial?like relationships at school nourished her longevity. The third theme, creative autonomy, reveals that by being empowered with opportunities for curriculum development and instructional decision?making the teacher maintained her passion. This book concludes with recommendations for teachers, educational leaders and teacher educators to develop and maintain thriving teachers.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTeacher burn out contributes to the epidemic of early career exit. At least half of all new K?12 teachers leave theprofession by the time they reach their fifth year of teaching. Conversely, there are urban teachers who survive burn out and thrive as career? long educators. This book results from an in?depth qualitative study that explored one 40?year veteran teacher’s career narrative, analyzing how she not only survived the burn out epidemic, but also thrived as a highly effective career?long urban teacher.Part 1 of this book uses a critical socio?political lens is used to guide readers through the complexities of career thrival. Framed within the story of one new urban teacher’s typical morning, the book begins with an overview of the socio?political forces that lead to urban teacher burn out. In spite of the obstacles, the more hopeful idea of urban teacher thrival is uncovered through narrative methodology. Part 2 is dedicated to the dynamic narrative of a veteran urban teacher career journey. This inspiring story is related to frameworks established in Part 1, as well as painting a picture of how public education has evolved over the last 40 years, and it’s impact on the lives of teachers.Part 3 takes a deeper dive into three salient themes that permeated throughout the participant’s story. First hope springs eternal is the idea that sustaining hope supported the teacher’s career thrival. Next, the extended education family is the notion that familial?like relationships at school nourished her longevity. The third theme, creative autonomy, reveals that by being empowered with opportunities for curriculum development and instructional decision?making the teacher maintained her passion. This book concludes with recommendations for teachers, educational leaders and teacher educators to develop and maintain thriving teachers.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 1989, Laurence Gonzales was a young writer with his first book of essays, The Still Point, just published by the University of Arkansas Press. Imagine his surprise, one winter day, to receive a letter from none other than Kurt Vonnegut. 'The excellence of your writing and the depth of your reporting saddened me, in a way,' Vonnegut wrote, 'reminding me yet again what a tiny voice facts and reason have in this era of wrap-around, mega-decibel rock-and-roll.' Several books, many articles, and a growing list of awards later, Gonzales -- known for taking us to enthralling extremes - is still writing with excellence and depth. In this latest collection, we go from the top of Mount Washington and 'the worst weather in the world,' to 12,000 feet beneath the ocean, where a Naval Intelligence Officer discovers the Titanic using the government's own spy equipment. We experience night assaults with the 82nd Airborne Division, the dynamiting of the 100-foot snowpack on Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, a trip to the International Space Station, the crash of an airliner to the bottom of the Everglades, and more.Trade ReviewGonzales travels where few people might want to go, and he brings back wondrous tales." —Kirkus Reviews

Read more less