Search results for ""Touchstone""

The third volume of a catalogue raisonné of Luc Tuymans’s paintings, surveying nearly two hundred works, charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology.Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice and are typically painted from preexisting imagery that includes photographs and video stills. The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The Internet, in particular, is central to these works as well as the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings.This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

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The Old Kingdom is a place of free magic, necromancers and ancient spirits bound to elemental forces. Who will guard the living when the dead arise?Sabriel has spent most of her young life far away from the magical realm of the Old Kingdom, and the Dead that roam it. But then a creature from across the Wall arrives at her all-girls boarding school with a message from her father, the Abhorsen - the magical protector of the realm whose task it is to bind and send back to Death those that won't stay Dead. Since the demise of the Royal Family the Dead have become stronger and more fearless, and now it seems their forces are threatening to overwhelm the Old Kingdom. Sabriel's father has been trapped in Death by a dangerous Free Magic creature. He urges her to return to her homeland, and to discover who or what is behind this uprising. Armed with her father's binding-bells and sword, she soon finds companions in Mogget, an ancient spirit bound into the body of a cat, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage whom Sabriel frees from a long, magical imprisonment. As the three travel deep into the Old Kingdom, threats mount on all sides. And every step brings them closer to a battle that will pit them against the true forces of life and death - and bring Sabriel face-to-face with her own destiny.

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A Thorough, Comprehensive Guide to Seventy-Five of the Most Interesting and Influential Figures from the War Between the States, from Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman to Davis, Lee, and Jackson—and more For over 150 years, the Civil War has been an important touchstone in the history of the United States. Now, The Wikipedia Legends of the Civil War offers readers and history fans a new opportunity to learn about these legendary figures in greater depth and detail than ever before. Featuring extensive information about seventy-five important Civil War figures both famous and little-known, as well as a variety of supplemental information—photos, maps, documents, and more—this book is an essential guide for any Civil War fan, anyone curious about US history, or any reader who wants an insight into the most fascinating stories and interesting characters from this critical period for America. Included in The Wikipedia Legends of the Civil War, among many others, are: Robert E. Lee Ulysses S. Grant Frederick Douglass Stonewall Jackson William Tecumseh Sherman Abraham Lincoln Harriet Jacobs Jefferson Davis J.E.B. Stuart Clara Barton Ambrose Burnside Harriet Tubman Belle Boyd Robert Smalls and many others With nearly six million English language articles covering essentially any topic imaginable, Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites on the internet and an important resource for anyone curious to learn about the world. This curated selection of content has been carefully selected and compiled by our editors to be the definitive book on the subject.

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Christians in the United States and around the world are politically polarized today, unable to speak to one another across deep divisions regarding urgent social issues. Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice addresses this dire reality by offering a theological framework for Christian justice-seeking. Amy Carr and Christine Helmer draw on Paul's theology to center the idea of justification by faith in Christ as the primary ground of Christian belonging and community.This approach yields a theology of ordinary faith that resists the temptation to equate Christian identity with the performance of a heroic "here I stand" posture against moral and political positions felt to be inimical to a properly Christian life. An ordinary faith situates Christian identity on a baptismal belonging to Christ. Baptism draws Christians into the messy process of discerning together the shape of justice in and through the Beloved Community. With justification by faith as the touchstone of Christian unity, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times reveals how Christians who inhabit different ethical and political positions can navigate the disorientations and reorientations that arise when they debate what justice-seeking looks like from within the body of Christ.Carr and Helmer articulate ways that justification by faith grounds Christian practices of affective listening and storytelling, even on the most contentious ethical questions today, with the hope that mutual conversation in and through the Beloved Community can get Christians who disagree oriented towards each other again for the good of the world.

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At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France’s revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolution’s long wake, for others the first “successful” socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, keeping alive the revolution’s now-iconic goals and images. Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event. The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities. Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.

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The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, François Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

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First published in 1981, The Renewal of Buddhism in China broke new ground in the study of Chinese Buddhism. An interdisciplinary study of a Buddhist master and reformer in late Ming China, it challenged the conventional view that Buddhism had reached its height under the Tang dynasty (618–907) and steadily declined afterward.Chün-fang Yü details how in sixteenth-century China, Buddhism entered a period of revitalization due in large part to a cohort of innovative monks who sought to transcend sectarian rivalries and doctrinal specialization. She examines the life, work, and teaching of one of the most important of these monks, Zhuhong (1535–1615), a charismatic teacher of lay Buddhists and a successful reformer of monastic Buddhism. Zhuhong’s contributions demonstrate that the late Ming was one of the most creative periods in Chinese intellectual and religious history. Weaving together diverse sources—scriptures, dynastic history, Buddhist chronicles, monks’ biographies, letters, ritual manuals, legal codes, and literature—Yü grounds Buddhism in the reality of Ming society, highlighting distinctive lay Buddhist practices to provide a vivid portrait of lived religion.Since the book was published four decades ago, many have written on the diversity of Buddhist beliefs and practices in the centuries before and after Zhuhong’s time, yet The Renewal of Buddhism in China remains a crucial touchstone for all scholarship on post-Tang Buddhism. This fortieth anniversary edition features updated transliteration, a foreword by Daniel B. Stevenson, and an updated introduction by the author speaking to the ongoing relevance of this classic work.

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“Feels revolutionary in its freshness.” —Entertainment Weekly“The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.” —Rumaan AlamA rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father’s recent death, Idris, the family’s new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

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Although there are currently only a handful of members of the Shaker faith and one active community in the world today, Shakerism at its peak comprised thousands of members living in communal villages across the eastern United States. Kentucky's iconic Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill was one of these communities, and it remains an enduring cultural touchstone. The history of the Shakers is often reduced to the handmade objects they produced and sold, but their lives were so much more than their material culture. Their efforts were suffused with their religious beliefs: each piece's sturdy simplicity memorializes the Believers' devotion to God and how it guided their every action.Shaker Made is photographer Carol Peachee's love letter to the cultural artifacts - the architecture, furniture, and crafts - of one of America's most influential utopian societies. Peachee has photographed Pleasant Hill for more than four decades - from small items such as eyeglasses, embroidered handkerchiefs, elixir bottles, and bonnets, to the distinguished furniture and architecture of the more than 260 buildings that the Shakers built at Pleasant Hill. The curator of collections at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Rebecca Soules, provides an informative foreword to the photos, while Peachee herself offers a lovingly written introduction explaining her personal connection to the subject. The attention to detail in the simple yet beautifully composed photographs evokes the "spirit of the maker" and serves as an elegant and respectful tribute to the history and legacy of the Pleasant Hill Shakers - an often-misunderstood people who sought to honor the divine in all aspects of life.

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Ableism, a form of discrimination that elevates “able” bodies over those perceived as less capable, remains one of the most widespread areas of systematic and explicit discrimination in Western culture. Yet in contrast to the substantial body of scholarly work on racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism remains undertheorized and underexposed. In this book, James L. Cherney takes a rhetorical approach to the study of ableism to reveal how it has worked its way into our everyday understanding of disability.Ableist Rhetoric argues that ableism is learned and transmitted through the ways we speak about those with disabilities. Through a series of textual case studies, Cherney identifies three rhetorical norms that help illustrate the widespread influence of ableist ideas in society. He explores the notion that “deviance is evil” by analyzing the possession narratives of Cotton Mather and the modern horror touchstone The Exorcist. He then considers whether “normal is natural” in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and in the cultural debate over cochlear implants. Finally, he shows how the norm “body is able” operates in Alexander Graham Bell’s writings on eugenics and in the legal cases brought by disabled athletes Casey Martin and Oscar Pistorius. These three simple equivalencies play complex roles within the social institutions of religion, medicine, law, and sport. Cherney concludes by calling for a rhetorical model of disability, which, he argues, will provide a shift in orientation to challenge ableism’s epistemic, ideological, and visual components. Accessible and compelling, this groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of disability studies as well as to disability rights advocates.

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The New Frontier is a landmark publication of writing from the Irish Border, composed of non-fiction, fiction and poetry – it is a chorus of voices from some of the island’s greatest writers, that conveys in its multiplicity the true meaning of our border. At a time when the division of our shared island has once again become an international concern, the Border now a threshold between Europe and the United Kingdom, The New Frontier seeks to explore the meaning of this partition in the 21st century for those people that inhabit that divide. This collection of writing ultimately poses the question: What does it mean to be Irish, Northern Irish, or British in the modern age, and what does it mean to live on a threshold between a kingdom and a republic? The New Frontier will undoubtedly become a key cultural and literary touchstone. This anthology considers the border, and our historical divisions, through literature, by inviting writers from border areas to respond imaginatively and instinctively. By writing the land, writing the body, writing the lived experiences of this complex and misunderstood part of Ireland, The New Frontier looks to reclaim the border region from decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Featuring writing from: Conor O’Callaghan, Darran Anderson, Garrett Carr, Luke Cassidy, Nidhi Zak, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Michael Hughes, Séamas O’Reilly, Pat McCabe, Lias Saoudi, Maureen Boyle, Emily Cooper, Dean Fee, Jill Crawford, Annemarie ní Chuirrean, Peter Hollywood, John Kelly, Michelle Gallen, Marcel Krueger, Eoghan Walls, Orla McAlinden, Bronagh McAtasney, Mícheál McCann, Jess McKinney and Maria McManus

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Ecological restoration is an inherently challenging endeavour. Not only is its underlying science still developing, but the concept itself raises complex questions about nature, culture and the role of humans in the landscape. Using a recent controversy over ecological restoration efforts in Chicago as a touchstone for discussion, "Restoring Nature" explores the difficult questions that arise during the planning and implementation of restoration projects in urban and wildland settings. Contributors examine: moral and ethical questions regarding the practice of restoration; conflicts over how nature is defined and who should be included in decisions about restoration and management; and how managers can make restoration projects succeed given the various constraints and considerations that need to be taken into account. Using diverse examples from projects across the US, the book suggests ways in which restoration conflicts might be resolved, and provides examples of stewardship that show how volunteers and local residents can help make and maintain restored environments. Throughout, contributors set forth a wealth of ideas, case studies, methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives that shed light on the social underpinnings of ecological restoration and natural resource management. "Restoring Nature" is an intriguing exploration of human-nature interactions, of differing values and understanding of nature, and of how that information can be effectively used to guide science and policy. It provides new conceptual insights and practical solutions for anyone working to manage or restore natural ecosystems.

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As a young bride-to-be navigates the days before her wedding, three generations of women come together in a page-turning novel full of family secrets, heartwrenching drama, and a second chance at the love of a lifetime.Joey Abrams is trying to find herself. After quitting a career in big law, she's now a struggling artist. Yet she's found the nice Jewish boy of her dreams, so she thinks she may finally be on the right path. But the secrets Joey's been keeping about her family may just destroy the life she's so carefully building.Joey's mother is planning an extravagant wedding as if her life depends on it, and as if she knows a thing about happily ever after. But Joey knows better. Her parents' marriage isn't what it seems, and Joey's relationship with her mother is straining at the seams. And her beloved grandmother, always Joey's touchstone and confidant, is suddenly acting strange, talking for the first time about her time in Greece during the war. Is this the beginnings of dementia? Or is her grandmother keeping secrets of her own? As Joey navigates the days leading up to her wedding, the one person she thought she'd never see again appears. Her first love, back to remind her of the pact they made over a decade ago, one that could blow wide Joey's plans for her future, and leave her family in ruins.

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This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art's most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were born in the 1740s and 60s, were presented with the challenge of how best to compete with the continental old masters when they had only an impoverished native tradition on which to build. They cultivated the concept of the artist as an original genius, a psychological strategy born out of deep-seated anxiety. At the core of this identity formation was the artists' perception of William Shakespeare, whom they recast as the original genius incarnate. They strove to accomplish in art what they perceived he had accomplished in literature. Theseus's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy' (V.i.12) personified for them the Shakespeare of their imagining, and this conception of fine frenzy became the touchstone for their artistic identities, profoundly influencing both their lives and their art. This book pays special attention to their self-portraits in which they proclaim this new identity, one that emphasizes the impassioned and extravagant nature of their personal vision and their claims to original genius. The book includes more than 120 black-and-white illustrations.

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Greg Larson was a starry-eyed fan when he hurtled headfirst into professional baseball. As the new clubhouse attendant for the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Minor League affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, Larson assumed he’d entered a familiar world. He thought wrong. He quickly discovered the bizarre rituals of life in the Minors: fights between players, teammates quitting in the middle of the games, doomed relationships, and a negligent parent organization. All the while, Larson, fresh out of college, harbored a secret wish. Despite the team’s struggles and his own lack of baseball talent, he yearned to join the exclusive fraternity of professional ballplayers. Instead, Larson fell deeper into his madcap venture as the scheming clubbie. He moved into the clubhouse equipment closet, his headquarters to swing deals involving memorabilia, booze, and loads of cash. By his second season, Larson had transformed into a deceptive, dip-spitting veteran, now fully part of a system that exploited players he considered friends. Like most Minor Leaguers, the gravitational pull of baseball was still too strong for Larson—even if chasing his private dream might cost him his girlfriend, his future, and, ultimately, his love of the game. That is, until an unlikely shot at a championship gives Larson and the IronBirds one final swing at redemption.Clubbie is a hilarious behind-the-scenes tale of two seasons in the mysterious world of Minor League Baseball. With cinematic detail and a colorful cast of characters, Larson spins an unforgettable true story for baseball fans and nonfans alike. An unflinching look at the harsh experience of professional sports, Clubbie will be a touchstone in baseball literature for years to come.

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Guidance for ever-changing challenges, success through improved effectiveness Equip yourself to face the demands of a superintendent with this practical guide for new and veteran school leaders. Understanding leadership and budgets is only one piece of a pie that has grown to include privatization, performance-based teacher compensation, technology, and global comparisons like PISA. Based on 15 years of research with 300 superintendents, including members of the National Superintendents Roundtable, The Superintendent’s Fieldbook will become your touchstone for practical advice that you can implement today. The authors developed this new edition to help you Navigate difficult situations through sample cases and tips for action Lead with an eye on global impacts by illuminating education abroad Understand the Common Core standards as explained by fellow superintendents Explore instructional coaching and rounds as professional learning opportunities "This remarkable book for new as well as veteran superintendents is thoroughly researched, practical, and compelling. If I could have but one book on my shelf to support the all-encompassing work we do, The Superintendent′s Fieldbook would be the one." —Suzanne Cusick, Superintendent Longview School District, WA "I′ve found most guides for superintendents to be long on theory and short on practical advice. The Superintendent′s Fieldbook doesn′t make that mistake. This is where school leaders and aspiring superintendents can learn how to survive on the job, bargain like a pro, engage with the public, and work with their boards while tackling the achievement gap and explaining to the public what′s right with American schools." —Gloria J. Davis, Superintendent Decatur Public Schools, Decatur, IL

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In this new century, born in hope but soon thereafter cloaked in terror, many see religion and politics as a volatile, if not deadly, mixture. For All Peoples and All Nations uncovers a remarkable time when that was not so; when together, those two entities gave rise to a new ideal: universal human rights. John Nurser has given life to a history almost sadly forgotten, and introduces the reader to the brilliant and heroic people of many faiths who, out of the aftermath of World War II and in the face of cynicism, dismissive animosity, and even ridicule, forged one of the world's most important secular documents, the United Nations's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These courageous, persistent, visionary individuals—notable among them an American Lutheran Seminary professor from Philadelphia, O. Frederick Nolde—created the Commission on Human Rights. Eventually headed by one of the world's greatest humanitarians, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration has become the touchstone for political legitimacy. As David Little says in the foreword to this remarkable chronicle, "Both because of the large gap it fills in the story of the founding of the United Nations and the events surrounding the adoption of human rights, and because of the wider message it conveys about religion and peacebuilding, For All Peoples and All Nations is an immensely important contribution. We are all mightily in John Nurser's debt." If religion and politics could once find common ground in the interest of our shared humanity, there is hope that it may yet be found again.

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"Feels revolutionary in its freshness." —Entertainment Weekly “The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.”—Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

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An extensive look at historical, literary, and media representations of '68 in Germany, challenging the way it has been instrumentalized. In Germany, the concept of "1968" is enduring and synonymous with the German Student Movement, and is viewed, variously, as a fundamental liberalization, a myth, a second foundation, or an irritation. The movement's aims - radicalre-imagination of the political and economic order and social hierarchy - have been understood as requiring a "long march." While the movement has been judged at best a "successful failure," cultural elites continue to engage inthe construction of 1968. Ingo Cornils's book argues that writing about 1968 in Germany is no longer about the historical events or the specific objectives of a bygone counterculture, but is instead a moral touchstone, a marker ofsocial group identity meant to keep alive (or at bay) a utopian agenda that continues to fire the imagination. The book demonstrates that the representation of 1968 as a "foundational myth" suits the needs of a number of surprisingly heterogeneous groups, and that even attempts to deconstruct the myth strengthen it. Cornils brings together for the first time the historical, literary, and media representations of the movement, showing the motivation behindand effect of almost five decades of writing about 1968. In so doing, Cornils challenges the way 1968 has been instrumentalized: as a powerful imaginary that has colonized every aspect of life in Germany, and as symbolic capitalin cultural and political debates. Ingo Cornils is Professor of German Studies at the University of Leeds.

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The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brink of success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site of pop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youth traces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normative order have been negotiated and contained. Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, new media, and public policy, Julie Passanante Elman shows how the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late 1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven ‘edutainment’ prominently featuring narratives of disability—from the immunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC’s After School Specials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disability and adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the 1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about the incomplete and volatile “teen brain.” Undertaking a cultural history of youth that combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elman offers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s uneven passage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth shows how teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation and neoliberal governmentality.

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The life and times of an enduring work of Jewish spiritualityThe Babylonian Talmud, a postbiblical Jewish text that is part scripture and part commentary, is an unlikely bestseller. Written in a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic, it is often ambiguous to the point of incomprehension, and its subject matter reflects a narrow scholasticism that should hardly have broad appeal. Yet the Talmud has remained in print for centuries and is more popular today than ever. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer tells the remarkable story of this ancient Jewish book and explains why it has endured for almost two millennia.Providing a concise biography of this quintessential work of rabbinic Judaism, Wimpfheimer takes readers from the Talmud's prehistory in biblical and second-temple Judaism to its present-day use as a source of religious ideology, a model of different modes of rationality, and a totem of cultural identity. He describes the book's origins and structure, its centrality to Jewish law, its mixed reception history, and its golden renaissance in modernity. He explains why reading the Talmud can feel like being swept up in a river or lost in a maze, and why the Talmud has come to be venerated--but also excoriated and maligned—in the centuries since it first appeared.An incomparable introduction to a work of literature that has lived a full and varied life, this accessible book shows why the Talmud is at once a received source of traditional teachings, a touchstone of cultural authority, and a powerful symbol of Jewishness for both supporters and critics.

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Arguing that the presidency is not defined by the Constitution - which doesn't use the term - but by what presidents say and how they say it, "Deeds Done in Words" has been the definitive book on presidential rhetoric for more than a decade. "Presidents Creating the Presidency" expands and recasts this classic work for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the rhetorical strategies presidents use to increase and sustain the executive branch's powers.Identifying the primary genres of presidential oratory, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other types. They explain that in some genres, the president acts alone, while in others, such as speeches that urge a legislative agenda, the executive solicits reaction from the other branches. Many of these rhetorical acts, the authors contend, extend over time: George W. Bush's post - September 11 statements, for example, culminated in a speech at the National Cathedral and became a touchstone for his subsequent address to Congress.For two centuries, presidential discourse has both succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution - and in the process, it has increased and depleted political capital by enhancing authority or ceding it to the other branches. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency - and how they continue to recreate it.

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For more than 2,000 years, Sun Tzu's The Art of War has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. An elemental part of Chinese culture, it has also become a touchstone for the Western struggle for survival and success, whether in battle, in business or in relationships. Now, in this crisp, accessible new translation, John Minford brings this seminal work to life for today's readers. A lively, learned introduction, chronologies and suggested further reading are among the valuable apparatus included in this authoritative volume. Even those readers familiar with The Art of War will experience it anew, finding it more fascinating - and more chilling - than ever.Little is known about Sun Tzu (544-496 B.C.) and his life during the Warring States period after the decline of the Zhou dysnasty, but his classic, The Art of War, has been one of the central works of Chinese literature for 2500 years.John Minford studied Chinese at Oxford and at the Australian National University and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. He edited (with Geremie Barme) Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience and (with Joseph S. M. Lau) Chinese Classical Literature: An Anthology of Translations. He has translated numerous works from the Chinese, including the last two volumes of the Penguin Classics edition of Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone and the martial-arts fiction of the contemporary Hong Kong novelist Louis Cha.

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At last, the paperback edition of the monumental best-seller (almost half a million copies in print!) that has changed the way Americans think about sickness and health -- the companion volume to the landmark PBS series of the same name. In a remarkably short period of time, Bill Moyers's Healing And The Mind has become a touchstone, shaping the debate over alternative medical treatments and the role of the mind in illness and recovery in a way that few books have in recent memory. With almost half a million copies in print, it is already a classic -- the most widely read and influential book of its kind. In a series of fascinating interviews with world-renowned experts and laypeople alike, Bill Moyers explores the new mind/body medicine. Healing And The Mind shows how it is being practiced in the treatment of stress, chronic disease, and neonatal problems in several American hospitals; examines the chemical basis of emotions, and their potential for making us sick (and making us well); explores the fusion of traditional Chinese medicine with modern Western practices in contemporary China; and takes an up-close, personal look at alternative healing therapies, including a Massachusetts center that combines Eastern meditation and Western group therapy, and a California retreat for cancer patients who help each other even when a cure is impossible. Combining the incisive yet personal interview approach that made A World Of Ideas a feast for the mind and the provocative interplay of text and art that made The Power Of Myth a feast for the imagination, Healing And The Mind is a landmark work.

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Based on new evidence and deep reporting, the riveting truth about a case that has become a touchstone in the struggle for racial justice and Black lives.They Killed Freddie Gray exposes a conspiracy among Baltimore leaders to cover up what actually happened to Freddie Gray, who was fatally injured in police custody in April 2015. After Gray’s death, Baltimore became ground zero for Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests that exploded across the country. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby became a hero when she charged six officers in Gray’s death, and the trials of the officers generated national headlines for two years. Yet the cause of Gray’s death has remained a mystery. A viral video showed an officer leaning on Gray’s back while he cried out in pain. But the autopsy concluded he was fatally injured later that morning while the van was in motion—during a multi-stop “rough ride”—from sudden impact to his head. None of the officers were convicted of any crimes based on this theory. They Killed Freddie Gray solves the mystery of Gray’s death by uncovering new evidence of how he was killed by police and how his cause of death was covered up. In coordination with a documentary film now being produced, this book revisits a pivotal moment in US criminal justice history, providing new insight into what happened, the historical structures of power that allowed it to happen, and the personalities and dynamics involved—a story never told by the mainstream media. It includes a detailed map with annotations by the author, photographs, and a foreword by Rabia Chaudry.

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How can the example of Morehouse School of Medicine help other health-oriented universities create ideal collaborations between faculty and community-based organizations?Among the 154 medical schools in the United States, Morehouse School of Medicine stands out for its formidable success in improving its surrounding communities. Over its history, Morehouse has become known as an institution committed to community engagement with an interest in closing the health equity gap between people of color and the white majority population. In The Morehouse Model, Ronald L. Braithwaite and his coauthors reveal the lessons learned over the decades since the school's founding—lessons that other medical schools and health systems will be eager to learn in the hope of replicating Morehouse's success. Describing the philosophical, cultural, and contextual grounding of the Morehouse Model, they give concrete examples of it in action before explaining how to foster the collaboration between community-based organizations and university faculty that is essential to making this model of care and research work. Arguing that establishing ongoing collaborative projects requires genuineness, transparency, and trust from everyone involved, the authors offer a theory of citizen participation as a critical element for facilitating behavioral change. Drawing on case studies, exploratory research, surveys, interventions, and secondary analysis, they extrapolate lessons to advance the field of community-based participatory research alongside community health.Written by well-respected leaders in the effort to reduce health inequities, The Morehouse Model is rooted in social action and social justice constructs. It will be a touchstone for anyone conducting community-based participatory research, as well as any institution that wants to have a positive effect on its local community.

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BBC sports presenter Mark Chapman is no longer in his physical prime. There is an argument to suggest he has never been in his physical prime. Now in his forties, he is facing a world of knee replacements and ever-expanding waistlines, whilst his children are thriving.There is huge pride that they are doing so well, mixed with a fair amount of jealousy that actually they are better at a wide range of sport than he ever was. He is passionate about sport and it has played a huge part in his life. His parents encouraged him from a very early age and he wants to pass the baton on to his son and daughters. Although there is every chance he might drop it and have a massive strop instead. He is also very aware of the huge changes in sport today compared to when he was growing up; and he is determined that his own attitude to his son and daughters' sport - be it football, netball, cricket or gymnastics - will be exactly the same. And he wants to shine a light on grass roots sports - the incredible and largely unsung contribution that volunteers make in the sporting commnity, without whom - for example - no professional footballer would be in the game today.Funny, touching, passionate about sport and parenthood, Mark Chapman paints sport as a touchstone for everything important: growing up, becoming a parent, enjoying family time, getting old, learning how to win (and how to lose gracefully), the legacy we all hope to leave our children; in short, life and all that goes into it.

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'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES 'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN 'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller ______________ Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell’s own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell’s stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over – a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new. 'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell

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*THE JAPANESE CRIME CLASSIC - ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD*'One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year' David PeaceTokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his ethnicity; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who died in suspicious circumstances.Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan's largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company's corrupt financiers.Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by "the Monster with 21 Faces," Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan's literary masters.'A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts' Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police'Takamura's prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society' New York Times'Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire' NPR

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America was built on white pine. From the 1600s through the Civil War and beyond, it was used to build the nation’s ships and houses, barns, and bridges. It became a symbol of independence, adorning the Americans’ flag at Bunker Hill, and an economic engine, generating three times more wealth than the California gold rush. Yet this popularity came at a cost: by the end of the 19th century, clear cutting had decimated much of America’s white pine forests. In White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree, ecologist and writer John Pastor takes readers on walk through history, connecting the white pine forests that remain today to a legacy of destruction and renewal. Since the clear-cutting era, naturalists, foresters, and scientists have taken up the quest to restore the great white pine forests. White Pine follows this centuries-long endeavor, illuminating how the efforts shaped Americans’ understanding of key scientific ideas, from forest succession to the importance of fire. With his keen naturalist’s eye, Pastor shows us why restoring the vitality of these forests has not been simple: a host of other creatures depend on white pine and white pine depends on them. In weaving together cultural and natural history, White Pine celebrates the way humans are connected to the forest—and to the larger natural world. Today, white pine forests have begun to recover, but face the growing threat of climate change. White Pine shows us that hope for healthy forests lies in understanding the lessons of history, so that iconic species survive as a touchstone for future generations.

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Marvel at 100 years of the 24 Hours of Le Mans with the official illustrated history packed with photography, narrative, and race results. Held on the Circuit de la Sarthe comprising closed public roads and dedicated racecourse, Le Mans features cars and two-driver teams that can cover more than 3,000 miles during the race. Le Mans 100 is a thorough year-by-year history showcasing all aspects of the grueling contest, including: A slew of legendary marques and models, including Porsche, Ferrari, Ford, Corvette, Cobra, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, BMW, McLaren, and more A who’s-who of motorsport legends like Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Carroll Shelby, Dan Gurney, Ken Miles, Jackie Ickx, Derek Bell, and Tom Kristensen (among dozens others) All the classes that ran in each year’s event, including the top LMP1 and LMP2 (Le Mans Prototype) categories and GT (grand tourer) A list of each year’s top three overall finishers In addition, author and award-winning Le Mans historian Glen Smale details touchstone events such as the late-1960s battles between Ford and Ferrari popularized in the film Ford vs Ferrari, and the 1955 tragedy that claimed the lives of more than 80 spectators. The oldest active endurance race is intended to showcase mechanical reliability as much as driver skill and fortitude. This beautifully designed and extensively illustrated book celebrates those attributes, chronicling the exploits of both factory-sponsored cars and privateer entries, from the early open-cockpit racers right through to today’s hybrid era. Compiled by a meticulous author with a passion for motorsport, Le Mans 100 is the ultimate chronicle of a marquee race.

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The teenager has often appeared in culture as an anxious figure, the repository for American dreams and worst nightmares, at once on the brink of success and imminent failure. Spotlighting the “troubled teen” as a site of pop cultural, medical, and governmental intervention, Chronic Youth traces the teenager as a figure through which broad threats to the normative order have been negotiated and contained. Examining television, popular novels, science journalism, new media, and public policy, Julie Passanante Elman shows how the teenager became a cultural touchstone for shifting notions of able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. By the late 1970s, media industries as well as policymakers began developing new problem-driven ‘edutainment’ prominently featuring narratives of disability—from the immunocompromised The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to ABC’s After School Specials and teen sick-lit. Although this conjoining of disability and adolescence began as a storytelling convention, disability became much more than a metaphor as the process of medicalizing adolescence intensified by the 1990s, with parenting books containing neuro-scientific warnings about the incomplete and volatile “teen brain.” Undertaking a cultural history of youth that combines disability, queer, feminist, and comparative media studies, Elman offers a provocative new account of how American cultural producers, policymakers, and medical professionals have mobilized discourses of disability to cast adolescence as a treatable “condition.” By tracing the teen’s uneven passage from postwar rebel to 21st century patient, Chronic Youth shows how teenagers became a lynchpin for a culture of perpetual rehabilitation and neoliberal governmentality.

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Ableism, a form of discrimination that elevates “able” bodies over those perceived as less capable, remains one of the most widespread areas of systematic and explicit discrimination in Western culture. Yet in contrast to the substantial body of scholarly work on racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism remains undertheorized and underexposed. In this book, James L. Cherney takes a rhetorical approach to the study of ableism to reveal how it has worked its way into our everyday understanding of disability.Ableist Rhetoric argues that ableism is learned and transmitted through the ways we speak about those with disabilities. Through a series of textual case studies, Cherney identifies three rhetorical norms that help illustrate the widespread influence of ableist ideas in society. He explores the notion that “deviance is evil” by analyzing the possession narratives of Cotton Mather and the modern horror touchstone The Exorcist. He then considers whether “normal is natural” in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and in the cultural debate over cochlear implants. Finally, he shows how the norm “body is able” operates in Alexander Graham Bell’s writings on eugenics and in the legal cases brought by disabled athletes Casey Martin and Oscar Pistorius. These three simple equivalencies play complex roles within the social institutions of religion, medicine, law, and sport. Cherney concludes by calling for a rhetorical model of disability, which, he argues, will provide a shift in orientation to challenge ableism’s epistemic, ideological, and visual components. Accessible and compelling, this groundbreaking book will appeal to scholars of rhetoric and of disability studies as well as to disability rights advocates.

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For more than a century, the Lower East Side of New York City has been recognized and scrutinized as the largest and most vibrant immigrant Jewish neighborhood in America. In recent years a spate of art works, performances, and tourist productions have fostered increased interest in the neighborhood. This lively book explores the dynamics of Lower East Side memory and considers the changing ways that this unique neighborhood has been embraced by American Jews over the course of a century. Part 1, "The Dynamics of Remembrance," investigates multiple facets of life on the Lower East Side and considers the emerging repertoire of memory that took shape around the neighborhood. Themes include the naming of the Lower East Side, a century of photography of the neighborhood, and the colorful histories of synagogues and schools, restaurants and cabarets. Part 2, "Contemporary Recollections," examines the recent upsurge of interest in the Lower East Side as a site of Jewish heritage and cultural innovation. Topics include the creation of the Tenement Museum, walking tours of the neighborhood and visits to popular "period" restaurants, the experience of a documentary filmmaker, and the performance of memory in a refurbished synagogue. A generous selection of photographs enhances the book's wide-ranging insights into how the Lower East Side became a touchstone of Jewish identity and history.Contributors include Stephan Brumberg, Hasia R. Diner, Joseph Dorman, Paula Hyman, Eve Jochnowitz, Seth Kamil, David Kaufman, Jack Kugelmass, David Lobenstine, Mario Maffi, Deborah Dash Moore, Riv-Ellen Prell, Moses Rischin, Jeffrey Shandler, Suzanne Wasserman, Aviva Weintraub, and Beth S. Wenger.

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'Beautiful and tender, profound and absorbing. I never wanted to put it down', Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild'A gritty and passionate memoir', Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, LoveCentered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her thirteen-year waitressing job and said "yes," despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, "I got you." Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of "I am not enough." Jen will help readers find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.

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Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum offers an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relationship between British Romantic poetry and the rise of national museum culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a simultaneously theoretical and historical analysis, it studies a range of poetry and aesthetic philosophy in relation to the first hundred years of the British Museum, from its establishment in the 1750's to the completion of its current edifice in the 1850's. It thereby provides a sequence of aesthetic reflections on the various social, cultural, and imaginative challenges posed by this novel institution. In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poetic Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics. Both the museum and the nation it serves are realized imaginatively through an imperfect aesthetic accommodation of difference and identity. The museum's official statements of institutional purpose and curatorial design describe a harmonious relationship between an ennobling exhibition and a unified nation. However, accounts of the institution in the popular press, guidebooks to the sights of London, private correspondence, and parliamentary debates depict the museum as a touchstone for social and political conflict. In this fraught domain of national self-promotion, the language of aesthetics provides a nascent curatorial theory of material and cultural reconciliation. An emphasis on the pleasures of imagination grants the poet and spectator especially prominent positions in Romantic culture as both are newly empowered as active participants in the visual and conceptual creation of knowledge. As this role is made available to an ever-widening portion of the national public-including women and members of the working classes-both the nation and the museum dev

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A new path for exploring the culture and values of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.“Rather than inventing an alien world into which human and familiar characters are introduced, as in science fiction, Tolkien created a natural environment that is also home to `supernatural’ beings and elements, as in medieval works like Beowulf. The Shire is always the touchstone to which the hobbits return mentally and against which they (and we) measure the rest of Middle-earth. By creating a sense of familiarity and belonging early and then in each of the cultures encountered, we can meet `others’ without feeling estranged.” —from the IntroductionBeautifully illustrated with dozens of original full-color and black-and-white drawings, The Plants of Middle-earth connects readers visually to the world of Middle-earth, its cultures and characters and the scenes of their adventures. Tolkien’s use of flowers, herbs, trees, and other flora creates verisimilitude in Middle-earth, with the flora serving important narrative functions. This botanical tour through Middle-earth increases appreciation of Tolkien’s contribution as preserver and transmitter of English cultural expression, provides a refreshing and enlivening perspective for approaching and experiencing Tolkien’s text, and allows readers to observe his artistry as sub-creator and his imaginative life as medievalist, philologist, scholar, and gardener.The Plants of Middle-earth draws on biography, literary sources, and cultural history and is unique in using botany as the focal point for examining the complex network of elements that comprise Tolkien’s creation. Each chapter includes the plants’ description, uses, history, and lore, which frequently lead to their thematic and interpretive implications. The book will appeal to general readers, students, and teachers of Tolkien as well as to those with an interest in plant lore and botanical illustration.

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Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece The Color Purple—as well as the acclaimed 1985 film from Steven Spielberg, the Tony-winning Broadway musical, and the all-new film adaptation with this gorgeously designed exploration of the novel’s enduring legacy, featuring contributions from Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Colman Domingo, Fantasia Barrino, Danny Glover, and more. Since its publication in 1982, The Color Purple has resonated with generations of readers across the globe. The novel catapulted author Alice Walker to international fame, brought Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg acting acclaim in the 1985 film adaptation, and inspired theatrical productions around the world, including the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. This cultural touchstone—which so profoundly touches on race, family, survival, spirituality, sisterhood, and love in all forms—continues to beget new iterations, most recently a feature film. Now, an in-depth exploration celebrates The Color Purple’s ever-expanding legacy as never before: Purple Rising features oral histories and fresh anecdotes based on more than fifty original interviews, as well as vibrant, never-before-seen images. It reveals the crucial real-life experiences that inspired the novel, and the transcendent humanity of its themes that continue to connect with audiences, each new adaptation speaking to the changing times and cultural contexts. Creators, actors, producers, activists, cultural critics, and well-known fans comment on the power of Walker’s story and how it has affected their lives and artistic choices, including Whoopi Goldberg, Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Halle Bailey, Blitz Bazawule, Jon Batiste, H.E.R., Salamishah Tillet, Ricky Dillard, Gabrielle Union, and many more. An insightful and vivid celebration of an enduring classic, Purple Rising is the ultimate gift for fans of all ages and a true celebration of Black joy, storytelling, and achievement.

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Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.

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The book that inspired the hit film! Sundance U.S. Dramatic Audience Award Sundance Grand Jury Prize This is the funniest book you&;ll ever read about death. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. But on the first day of his senior year, Greg Gaines thinks he&;s figured it out. The answer to the basic existential question: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad? His strategy: remain at the periphery at all times. Keep an insanely low profile. Make mediocre films with the one person who is even sort of his friend, Earl. This plan works for exactly eight hours. Then Greg&;s mom forces him to become friends with a girl who has cancer. This brings about the destruction of Greg&;s entire life. Fiercely funny, honest, heart-breaking&;this is an unforgettable novel from a bright talent, now also a film that critics are calling "a touchstone for its generation" and "an instant classic." Includes a teaser chapter from Jesse Andrews' new novel, Munmun! STARRED REVIEW &;One need only look at the chapter titles (&;Let&;s Just Get This Embarrassing Chapter Out of the Way&;) to know that this is one funny book.&; &;Booklist, starred review STARRED REVIEW &;Though this novel begs inevitable thematic comparisons to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (2011), it stands on its own in inventiveness, humor and heart.&; &;Kirkus Reviews, starred review New York Times bestseller! Capitol Choices 2013 - Noteworthy Titles for Children and Teens Cooperative Children&;s Book Center (CCBC) Choices 2013 list - Young Adult Fiction YALSA 2013 Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers YALSA 2013 Best Fiction for Young Adults YALSA 2014 Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults

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"Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science."—Jane Lubchenco, Nature "Estes's refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists."—Science To newly minted biologist James Estes, the sea otters he was studying in the leafy kelp forests off the coast of Alaska appeared to have an unbalanced relationship with their greater environment. Gorging themselves on the sea urchins that grazed among the kelp, these small charismatic mammals seemed to give little back in return. But as Estes dug deeper, he unearthed a far more complex relationship between the otter and its underwater environment, discovering that otters play a critical role in driving positive ecosystem dynamics. While teasing out the connective threads, he began to question our assumptions about ecological relationships. These questions would ultimately inspire a lifelong quest to better understand the surprising complexity of our natural world and the unexpected ways we discover it. Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems. Part memoir, part natural history, and deeply inquisitive, Serendipity will entertain and inform readers as it raises thoughtful questions about our relationship with the natural world.

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An environmental historian delves into the history, science, and philosophy of a paradoxical pursuit: the century-old quest to design natural places and create wild species.Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.Restoration has been a touchstone of US environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

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A New York Times bestseller! It’s never too late to unearth your hidden passions, rewrite your story, and live with a renewed purpose. Former Today show host Kathie Lee Gifford shares stories from her remarkable life in a beautiful reminder that God is still dreaming big for our years ahead.When Kathie Lee Gifford stepped down as cohost of the fourth hour of the Today show with Hoda Kotb, you might have thought her best days were behind her...but it turns out that she was just getting started. As Kathie Lee says, “I’m not retiring; I’m refiring!”Taking us from her Chesapeake Bay childhood when she first heard God’s calling, to her skyrocketing fame with Regis, to her decision to leave television for Nashville, Kathie Lee inspires us to pursue what really matters. Because it’s never too late to forgive, to dance the cha-cha, or to make a difference in the world.God placed His dreams in your heart for a reason. And like Kathie Lee, you might just discover that the best is yet to come. Whether you’re an empty nester, newly single, navigating a career change, or just eager for any change, Kathie Lee helps you hear God’s loving calling. It’s Never Too Late includes: Touchstone moments in Kathie Lee’s life that have led her to where she is now Inspiration and motivation to live out what’s next and rewrite your story Encouragement to pursue what really matters in life Is it time for you to rewrite your story, unearth your hidden passions, and live with a renewed purpose? It’s never too late.

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The story of Kurt Vonnegut and his beloved masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel born in the destruction of Dresden in World War II and written during the tumultuous days of Vietnam During the Vietnam War, Kurt Vonnegut, after surviving the horrors of Dresden as a POW during World War II, would lose his temper while watching the nightly news, point at the screen and shout, “The liars!” According to his family and friends, Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut’s attempt to exorcize his demons. “He was writing to save his own life,” his daughter Nanette has said, “and in doing it I think he has saved a lot of lives.” Tom Roston’s The Writer’s Crusade is a book about how books save lives. Two decades after World War II had ended, Vonnegut’s sixth book became a significant part of a vital storytelling tradition that has eased the trauma of war for both the writer and the reader. Although Slaughterhouse-Five was championed by the anti-war movement, it became a bulwark for veterans who found in its pages a voice that spoke to them with an intimate, shared understanding of wartime PTSD. Mixing together the story of Vonnegut’s life, the writing and publishing of his most enduring work, and forays into the experiences of soldiers and writers today—people who have made the novel a touchstone in their lives—The Writer’s Crusade is built on research into Vonnegut’s life, from papers and interviews with his children, scholars, psychologists, and writers, including Tim O’Brien, Kevin Powers, and Karl Marlantes. This will be a captivating book for fans of Vonnegut and anyone touched by war and its aftermath.

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In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award–winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson’s, tells how he became one of Paris’s most influential food critics Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket éclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in the France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

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In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderfully suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535 from the neighborhood of ruined Carthage in North Africa, Richard Helgerson examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Along with his friend Juan Boscán, Garcilaso was one of the great pioneers of that poetry, radically reforming Spanish verse in imitation of modern Italian and ancient Roman models. As the century progressed, similar projects were undertaken in France by Ronsard and du Bellay, in Portugal by Camões, and in England by Sidney and Spenser. And wherever the new poetry emerged, it was prompted by a sense that imperial ambition—the quest to be in the present what Rome had been in the past—required a vernacular poetry comparable to the poetry of Rome. But, as Helgerson shows, the new poetry had other commitments than to empire. Though imperial ambition looms large in Garcilaso's sonnet and others, by the end of the poem Garcilaso identifies not with Rome but with the Carthaginian queen Dido, one of empire's legendary victims. And with this startling shift, which has its counterpart in poems from all over Europe, comes one of the most important departures the poem makes from its apparent imperial agenda. Addressing these rival concerns as they arise in a single sonnet, Richard Helgerson provides a masterful and multifaceted image of one of the most vital episodes in European literary history.

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With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.

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Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees, transforming the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals into siblings. Encompassing political fraternity, sister languages, racial discourse on brotherhood, evolutionary sibling species, and intense, often incestuously inclined brother-sister bonds in literature, siblinghood stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. In all such systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein explores the pervasive significance of sibling structures and their essential role in the modern organization of knowledge and identity. Sibling Action argues that this relational paradigm came to structure the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Engelstein considers theoretical constructions of subjectivity through Sophocles' Antigone; fraternal equality and its exclusion of sisters in political rhetoric; the intertwining of economic and kinship theory by Friedrich Engels and Claude Levi-Strauss; Darwin and his contemporaries' accounts of speciation; anthropological and philological depictions of Muslims and Jews at the margins of Europe; and evolutionary psychology's theorizing around the incest taboo. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

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