Search results for ""University of Texas Press""

Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.

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The “First Lady of Show Business” and the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker was a star in vaudeville, radio, film, and television. A gutsy, song-belting stage performer, she entertained audiences for sixty years and inspired a host of younger women, including Judy Garland, Carol Channing, and Bette Midler. Tucker was a woman who defied traditional expectations and achieved success on her own terms, becoming the first female president of the American Federation of Actors and winning many other honors usually bestowed on men. Dedicated to social justice, she advocated for African Americans in the entertainment industry and cultivated friendships with leading black activists and performers. Tucker was also one of the most generous philanthropists in show business, raising over four million dollars for the religious and racial causes she held dear.Drawing from the hundreds of scrapbooks Tucker compiled, Red Hot Mama presents a compelling biography of this larger-than-life performer. Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff tells an engrossing story of how a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants set her sights on becoming one of the most formidable women in show business and achieved her version of the American dream. More than most of her contemporaries, Tucker understood how to keep her act fresh, to change branding when audiences grew tired and, most importantly, how to connect with her fans, the press, and entertainment moguls. Both deservedly famous and unjustly forgotten today, Tucker stands out as an exemplar of the immigrant experience and a trailblazer for women in the entertainment industry.

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A musical force across four decades, a voice for the ages, and a great songwriter, Chrissie Hynde is one of America’s foremost rockers. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, she and her band The Pretenders have released ten albums since 1980. The Pretenders’ debut LP has been acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time by VH1 and Rolling Stone. In a business filled with “pretenders” and posers, Hynde remains unassailably authentic. Although she blazed the trail for countless female musicians, Hynde has never embraced the role of rock-feminist and once remarked, “It’s never been my intention to change the world or set an example for others to follow.” Instead, she pursued her own vision of rock—a band of “motorcycles with guitars.”Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography traces this legend’s journey from teenage encounters with rock royalty to the publication of her controversial memoir Reckless in 2015. Adam Sobsey digs deep into Hynde’s catalog, extolling her underrated songwriting gifts and the greatness of The Pretenders’ early classics and revealing how her more recent but lesser-known records are not only underappreciated but actually key to understanding her earlier work, as well as her evolving persona. Sobsey hears Hynde’s music as a way into her life outside the studio, including her feminism, signature style, vegetarianism, and Hinduism. She is “a self-possessed, self-exiled idol with no real forbears and no true musical descendants: a complete original.”

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This book is the classic work on forms of the European folktale.

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North Africa has been a vital crossroads throughout history, serving as a connection between Africa, Asia, and Europe. Paradoxically, however, the region's historical significance has been chronically underestimated. In a book that may lead scholars to reimagine the concept of Western civilization, incorporating the role North African peoples played in shaping "the West," Phillip Naylor describes a locale whose transcultural heritage serves as a crucial hinge, politically, economically, and socially.Ideal for novices and specialists alike, North Africa begins with an acknowledgment that defining this area has presented challenges throughout history. Naylor's survey encompasses the Paleolithic period and early Egyptian cultures, leading readers through the pharonic dynasties, the conflicts with Rome and Carthage, the rise of Islam, the growth of the Ottoman Empire, European incursions, and the postcolonial prospects for Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Western Sahara.Emphasizing the importance of encounters and interactions among civilizations, North Africa maps a prominent future for scholarship about this pivotal region.Now with a new afterword that surveys the “North African Spring” uprisings that roiled the region from 2011 to 2013, this is the most comprehensive history of North Africa to date, with accessible, in-depth chapters covering the pre-Islamic period through colonization and independence.

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The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times.Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."

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“The happiness I feel in offering these to you is vast as a savanna,” Pablo Neruda wrote his adored wife, Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, in his dedication of One Hundred Love Sonnets. Set against the backdrop of his beloved Isla Negra, these joyfully sensual poems draw on the wind and tides, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wildflowers, and the hot sun and salty scent of the sea to celebrate their love. Generations of lovers since Pablo and Matilde have shared these poems with each other, making One Hundred Love Sonnets one of the most popular books of poetry of all time. This beautifully redesigned volume, perfect for gift-giving, presents both the original Spanish sonnets and graceful English translations.

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Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award, 2016 Art of Eating Prize, 2015 BCALA Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, 2016Women of African descent have contributed to America’s food culture for centuries, but their rich and varied involvement is still overshadowed by the demeaning stereotype of an illiterate “Aunt Jemima” who cooked mostly by natural instinct. To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind.The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

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Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway's patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries.

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Theatrical scene design is one of the most beautiful, varied, and lively art forms. Yet there are relatively few books on the subject, and almost none for a general audience that combine expansive scholarship with lavish design. Making the Scene offers an unprecedented survey of the evolving context, theory, and practice of scene design from ancient Greek times to the present, coauthored by the world's best-known authority on the subject and enhanced by three hundred full-color illustrations. Individual chapters of the book focus on Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe (including liturgical drama, street pageants, festival outdoor drama, Spanish religious drama, and royal entries), the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth-century Europe, Classicism to Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, and contemporary scene design. Making the Scene's authors review everything from the effects of social status on theatre design to the sea changes between Classicism, Romanticism, and Naturalism and the influence of perspective-based thought. Particularly intriguing is their rediscovery of lost tricks and techniques, from the classical deus ex machina and special effects in coliseums to medieval roving stage wagons and the floating ships of the Renaissance to the computerized practices of today's theatres. Such ingenious techniques, interwoven with the sweeping beauty of scene design through the ages, combine with the keen scholarship of Oscar Brockett and Margaret Mitchell to create a book as involving as the art it showcases.

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Founded by Mexican American men in 1929, the League of United Latin-American Citizens (LULAC) has usually been judged according to Chicano nationalist standards of the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the personal papers of Alonso S. Perales and Adela Sloss-Vento, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed presents the history of LULAC in a new light, restoring its early twentieth-century context.Cynthia Orozco also provides evidence that perceptions of LULAC as a petite bourgeoisie, assimilationist, conservative, anti-Mexican, anti-working class organization belie the realities of the group's early activism. Supplemented by oral history, this sweeping study probes LULAC's predecessors, such as the Order Sons of America, blending historiography and cultural studies. Against a backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, gender discrimination, and racial segregation, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed recasts LULAC at the forefront of civil rights movements in America.

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In some countries, they call them the "abandonados," the abandoned ones. They're the impoverished mentally ill and mentally disabled patients being warehoused in psychiatric asylums that are more run-down, more uncaring than the most brutal American prisons. Confined in cage-like cells, tied to beds soiled with human waste, medicated to the point of senselessness, or wandering naked in unheated and garage-like wards, they live in what can only be called the shadows, their plight unseen and too easily ignored by the rest of the human family.Working first as a journalist, later as a volunteer for the human rights organization Mental Disability Rights International, photographer Eugene Richards gained access to psychiatric institutions in Mexico, Argentina, Armenia, Hungary, Paraguay, and Kosovo. His wrenchingly intimate images reveal the often inhumane treatment suffered by the mentally disabled. Offered little that would qualify as effective care, patients are denied even the most basic human amenities: privacy, protection from harm, clean clothing. Accompanying the book, A Procession of Them, is a DVD of a short film of the same name. Directed and narrated by Richards, this unique and expressionistic film speaks of the chaos, claustrophobia, and loneliness of these living hells.Making us face some hard truths, A Procession of Them drives home the point that when it comes to the plight of the mentally disabled, "no one much cares." As Richards concludes, it's "as if there is a kind of worldwide agreement that once people are classified as mentally ill or mentally retarded, you're free to do to them what you want."

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"The ancient Celts capture the modern imagination as do few other people of classical times. Naked barbarians charging the Roman legions, Druids performing sacrifices of unspeakable horror, women fighting beside their men and even leading armies—these, along with stunning works of art, are the images most of us call to mind when we think of the Celts," observes Philip Freeman. "And for the most part, these images are firmly based in the descriptions handed down to us by the Greek and Roman writers." This book draws on the firsthand observations and early accounts of classical writers to piece together a detailed portrait of the ancient Celtic peoples of Europe and the British Isles. Philip Freeman groups the selections (ranging from short statements to longer treatises) by themes—war, feasting, poetry, religion, women, and the Western Isles. He also presents inscriptions written by the ancient Celts themselves. This wealth of material, introduced and translated by Freeman to be especially accessible to students and general readers, makes this book essential reading for everyone fascinated by the ancient Celts.

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Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master's degree.Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman's struggle to secure political prisoners' rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment.Poetically rendered from Arabic into English by Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, Fatna El Bouih's memoir exposes the techniques of state-instigated "disappearance" in Morocco and condemns the lack of laws to protect prisoners' basic human rights.

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Of all the ancient civilizations that flourished in the Americas, only one perfected true portraiture of living people and produced it in quantity—the Moche who inhabited the north coast of Peru between approximately AD 100 and 800. Using the medium of three-dimensional ceramic vessels that could have contained liquid, Moche artisans typically formed the heads of the individuals they wished to portray, though sometimes they presented full figures with realistic portrait faces. Depicting an astonishing range of physical types, these portraits now allow us to meet Moche people who lived more than 1,500 years ago and to sense the nuances of their individual personalities.This pathfinding book presents the first wide-ranging, systematic study of the Moche portraits. Drawing on more than 900 examples from museums and private collections around the world—some 300 of which are illustrated here in full color—Christopher Donnan documents how the portrait tradition evolved, how the portraits were produced and distributed, who they portrayed, why they were made, and how they were used in Moche society. His analysis is supported by extensive archaeological evidence, which provides the context for portraits found in Moche tombs and midden deposits, as well as useful information for identifying the headdresses and ornaments worn by the individuals portrayed.

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Dreamtigers has been heralded as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century by Mortimer J. Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler—albeit a dazzling one—of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation.Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past — Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."

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Born in Mallorca, Pere Joan Riera (known professionally as Pere Joan) thrived in the underground comics world, beginning in the mid-1970s with the self-published collections Baladas Urbanas and MuŽrdago, both of which were released almost immediately after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and Spain's transition to democracy. The first monograph in English on a comics artist from Spain, The Art of Pere Joan takes a topographical approach to reading comics, applying theories of cultural and urban geography to Pere Joan’s treatment of space and landscape in his singular body of work.Balancing this goal with an exploration of specific works by Pere Joan, Benjamin Fraser demonstrates that looking at the thematic, structural, and aesthetic originality of the artist's landscape-driven work can help us begin to newly understand the representational properties of comics as a spatial medium. This in-depth examination reveals the resonance between the cultural landscapes of Mallorca and Pere Joan's metaphorical approach to both rural and urban environments in comics that weave emotional, ecological, and artistic strands in revolutionary ways.

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“The happiness I feel in offering these to you is vast as a savanna,” Pablo Neruda wrote his adored wife, Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, in his dedication of One Hundred Love Sonnets. Set against the backdrop of his beloved Isla Negra, these joyfully sensual poems draw on the wind and tides, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wildflowers, and the hot sun and salty scent of the sea to celebrate their love. Generations of lovers since Pablo and Matilde have shared these poems with each other, making One Hundred Love Sonnets one of the most popular books of poetry of all time. This beautifully redesigned volume, perfect for gift-giving, presents both the original Spanish sonnets and graceful English translations.

Read more less

In the late 1800s, archaeologists began discovering engraved stone plaques in Neolithic (3500-2500 BC) graves in southern Portugal and Spain. About the size of one's palm, usually made of slate, and incised with geometric or, more rarely, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic designs, these plaques have mystified generations of researchers. What do their symbols signify? How were the plaques produced? Were they worn during an individual's lifetime, or only made at the time of their death? Why, indeed, were the plaques made at all? Employing an eclectic range of theoretical and methodological lenses, Katina Lillios surveys all that is currently known about the Iberian engraved stone plaques and advances her own carefully considered hypotheses about their manufacture and meanings. After analyzing data on the plaques' workmanship and distribution, she builds a convincing case that the majority of the Iberian plaques were genealogical records of the dead that served as durable markers of regional and local group identities. Such records, she argues, would have contributed toward legitimating and perpetuating an ideology of inherited social difference in the Iberian Late Neolithic.

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