Search results for ""university of chicago press""
The University of Chicago Press Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality
The fact that men and women continue to receive unequal treatment at work is a point of contention among politicians, the media, and scholars. Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. "Just One of the Guys?" sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men - people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male - on the job. Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance - and even privileges - by becoming 'just one of the guys', that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, "Just One of the Guys?" lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.
£26.96
The University of Chicago Press The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Adrian Daub’s The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family’s conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture. Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of the literature, sciences, and history of ideas into the twentieth century. As early modernism discovered a standpoint from which to critique the nuclear family, remnants of dynastic ideology kept their hold variously on Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, Stefan George, and Sigmund Freud. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.
£86.80
The University of Chicago Press The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet
In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. This book unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet. Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage. Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.
£19.71
The University of Chicago Press One Summer Evening at the Falls
The poems in this collection capture the fantastic feeling of falling in love, all while keeping eyes on its lifecycles of crashing aftermaths, lingering regrets, guilt, and renewal. Peter Campion brings us to a series of scenes—on the damp patio, in the darkroom, and along the interstate—where we find familiar characters, lovers, and strangers. In the title poem, he takes us to the falls, where people and passions mix amid the sticky hanging mists: That charge of summer nights, that edge, like everyone’s checking everyone out. Lingering a moment in the crowd gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist drift upward to our faces, I’m here: the future feels open again. Even alone tonight—still: open. Campion’s poems introduce us to a range of people, all of whom are rendered with distinctiveness and intimacy. Their voices proliferate through the collection, with lyric folding into speech, autobiography becoming dramatic monologue, and casual storytelling taking on a ritualistic intensity. The poems in One Summer Evening at the Falls show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are. In narrative and lyric, in formal verse and free, Campion brings contemporary playfulness together with his classical talent to create this far-reaching and tender collection.
£17.53
The University of Chicago Press Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex
For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States, parents aim above all for family cohesiveness, often permitting young couples to sleep together and providing them with contraceptives. Drawing on extensive interviews with parents and teens, "Not Under My Roof" offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in both countries negotiate love, lust, and growing up. Tracing the roots of the parents' divergent attitudes, Amy Schalet reveals how they grow out of their respective conceptions of the self, relationships, gender, autonomy, and authority. She provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships. Avoiding caricatures of permissive Europeans and puritanical Americans, Schalet shows that the Dutch require self-control from teens and parents, while Americans guide their children toward autonomous adulthood at the expense of the family bond.
£28.78
The University of Chicago Press The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty
'The king is dead. Long live the king'! In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign - and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains", Eric L. Santner argues that this carnal dimension of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it has migrated to a new location - the life of the people - where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and, usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious - which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways - are really the uncanny second life of these royal remains, now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, "The Royal Remains" locates much of modernity-from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments - in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.
£102.00
The University of Chicago Press Truth and Existence
Truth and Existence, written in response to Martin Heidegger's Essence of Truth, is a product of the years when Sartre was reaching full stature as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist. This concise and engaging text not only presents Sartre's ontology of truth but also addresses the key moral questions of freedom, action, and bad faith. Truth and Existence is introduced by an extended biographical, historical, and analytical essay by Ronald Aronson. "Truth and Existence is another important element in the recently published links between Sartre's existentialist ontology and his later ethical, political, and literary concerns...The excellent introduction by Aronson will help readers not experienced in reading Sartre."--Choice "Accompanied by an excellent introduction, this dense, lucidly translated treatise reveals Sartre as a characteristically 20th-century figure."--Publishers Weekly
£17.90
The University of Chicago Press Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account
Offers a philosophical history of bridges—both literal bridges and their symbolic counterparts—and the acts of cultural connection they embody. “Always,” wrote Philip Larkin, “it is by bridges that we live.” Bridges represent our aspirations to connect, to soar across divides. And it is the unfinished business of these aspirations that makes bridges such stirring sights, especially when they are marvels of ingenuity. A rich compendium of myths, superstitions, and literary and ideological figurations, Of Bridges organizes a poetic and philosophical history of bridges into nine thematic clusters. Leaping in lucid prose between distant times and places, Thomas Harrison questions why bridges are built and where they lead. He probes links forged by religion between life’s transience and eternity as well as the consolidating ties of music, illustrated by the case of the blues. He investigates bridges in poetry, as flash points in war, and the megabridges of our globalized world. He illuminates real and symbolic crossings facing migrants each day and the affective connections that make persons and societies cohere. In readings of literature, film, philosophy, and art, Harrison engages in a profound reflection on how bridges form and transform cultural communities. Of Bridges is a mesmerizing, vertiginous tale of bridges both visible and invisible, both lived and imagined.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press The Crime of Galileo
"In the gallery of what might be called the martyrs of thought, the image of Galileo recanting before the Italian Inquisition stirs the minds of educated modern men second only to the picture of Socrates drinking the Hemlock. That image of Galileo is out of focus . . . because it has been distorted by three centuries of rationalist prejudice and clerical polemics. To refocus it clearly, within the logic of its own time . . . de Santillana has written The Crime of Galileo, a masterly intellectual whodunit which traces not the life but the mental footsteps of Galileo on his road to personal tragedy."—Time
£36.04
The University of Chicago Press On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig
This text puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzwig in the service of re-imagining ethical and political life. It expl ores the theological aspects of Freud's writings and reveals the psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzwig's work, "The Star of Redemption". Santner makes an argument for understanding theological notions of revelation in theraputic terms and offers a look at how this understanding suggests ways of re-conceiving political community. Revelation itself becomes redefined as an openess towards what is singular, enigmatic, even uncanny about the "Other", thereby linking a theory of drives and desire to a critical account of sociality. By bringing Freud and Rosenzwig together, Santner clarifies the connections between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and illuminates what it means to be open to another person or culture and to share the responsibility for one's implication in the dilemmas of difference.
£24.24
The University of Chicago Press Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community
The most Jewish of gospels in its contents and yet the most anti-Jewish in its polemics, the Gospel of Matthew has been said to mark the emergence of Christianity from Judaism. This text overturns the interpretation by showing us how Matthew, far from proclaiming the replacement of Israel by the Christian church, wrote from within Jewish tradition to a distinctly Jewish audience. Recent research reveals that among both Jews and Christians of the first century, many groups believed in Jesus while remaining close to Judaism. Saldarini argues that the author of the Gospel of Matthew belonged to such a group, supporting his claim with an informed reading of Matthew's text and historical context. Matthew emerges as a Jewish teacher competing for the commitment of his people after the catastrophic loss of the Temple in 70 C.E., his polemics aimed not at all Jews but at those who oppose him. Saldarini shows that Matthew's teaching about Jesus fits into first-century Jewish thought, with its tradition of God-sent leaders and heavenly mediators. In Saldarini's account, Matthew's Christian-Jewish community is a Jewish group, albeit one that deviated from the larger Jewish community.
£27.87
The University of Chicago Press Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland
Althought the death of the small town has been predicted for decades, during the 1990s the population of rural America actually increased by more than three million people. On this book, Sonya Salamon explores these rural migrants and the impact they have on the social relationships, public spaces and community resources of small town America. Salamon draws on richly detailed ethnographic studies of six small towns in central Illinois, including a town with upscale subdivisions that lured wealthy professionals as well as towns whose agribusinesses drew working-class Mexican immigrants. She finds that regardless of the class or ethnicity of the newcomers, if their status (or social status) differs relative to that of oldtimers their effect on a town has been the same: suburbanization that erodes the close-knit small town communities, with especially severe consequences for small town youth. To successfully combat the homogenization of the heartland, Salamon argues, newcomers must work with oldtimers so that together they sustain the vital aspects of community life that first drew them to small towns.
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art
In an ancient account of painting’s origins, a woman traces the shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions. Exploring these artists’ work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.
£27.87
The University of Chicago Press Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination
Known for his curly red hair, day-old stubble, and uncannily preserved two-thousand-year-old physique, Grauballe Man - a mummified body discovered in 1950s Denmark - was an instant archaeological sensation. But he was not the first of his kind: recent history has resurrected from northern Europe's bogs several men, women, and children who were deposited there as sacrifices in the early Iron Age and kept startlingly intact by the chemical properties of peat. In this remarkable account of their modern afterlives, Karin Sanders argues that the discovery of bog bodies began an extraordinary - and ongoing - cultural journey. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sanders shows, these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Exploring this intellectual spectrum, Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archaeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past. By restoring them to the roster of cultural phenomena that force us to confront our ethical and aesthetic boundaries, "Bodies in the Bog" excavates anew the question of what it means to be human.
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922
When it comes to the production and distribution of mass culture, no country in modern times has come close to rivaling the success of America. From blue jeans in central Europe to Elvis Presley's face on a Republic of Chad postage stamp, the reach of American mass culture extends into every corner of the globe. Most believe this is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but here Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes prove that its roots are far deeper. Buffalo Bill in Bologna reveals that the process of globalizing American mass culture began as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, by the end of World War I, the United States already boasted an advanced network of culture industries that served to promote American values overseas. Rydell and Kroes narrate how the circuses, amusement parks, vaudeville, mail-order catalogs, dime novels, and movies developed after the Civil War - tools central to hastening the reconstruction of the country - actually doubled as agents of American cultural diplomacy abroad. As symbols of America's version of the "good life," cultural products became a primary means for people around the world, especially in Europe, to reimagine both America and themselves in the context of America's growing global sphere of influence. Paying special attention to the role of the world's fairs, the exporting of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show to Europe, the release of The Birth of a Nation, and Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Committee on Public Information, Rydell and Kroes offer an absorbing tour through America's cultural expansion at the turn of the century.
£39.66
The University of Chicago Press All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916
Robert W. Rydell contends that America's early world's fairs actually served to legitimate racial exploitation at home and the creation of an empire abroad. He looks in particular to the "ethnological" displays of nonwhites—set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists—which lent scientific credibility to popular racial attitudes and helped build public support for domestic and foreign policies. Rydell's lively and thought-provoking study draws on archival records, newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, popular novels, and oral histories.
£28.78
The University of Chicago Press World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions
In the depths of the Great Depression, when America's future seemed bleak, nearly 100 million people visited expositions celebrating the "century of progress." These fairs fired the national imagination and served as cultural icons on which Americans fixed their hopes for prosperity and power. In "All the World's a Fair", Robert W. Rydell described how Victorian-era world's fairs helped create a blueprint for modern America. Now, with "World of Fairs", he shows how the interwar exhibitions heralded the arrival of modern America - a new empire of abundance built on old foundations of inequality. Rydell demonstrates how the fairs reached their height of popularity following the crash of 1929 by offering a vision of recovery from the Depression through the united powers of science and industry. Beneath the surface, however, lay persistent themes of imperialism and racism as government officials, industrial leaders, and intellectuals alike used the fairs to reinforce their own authority and the established social order. Rydell revisits several fairs, highlighting the 1926 Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exposition, the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, the 1935-36 San Diego California Pacific Exposition, the 1936 Dallas Texas Centennial Exposition, the 1937 Cleveland Great Lakes and International Exposition, the 1939-40 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934
In this account of mass media images, David Ruth looks at Al Capone and other "invented" gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s. The subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, novels and Hollywood movies, the gangster was a compelling figure for Americans preoccupied with crime and the social turmoil it symbolized. Ruth shows that the media gangster was less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns and ideas about what would sell. We see efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of the emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging critique of modern culture.
£27.87
The University of Chicago Press Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City
Sun Ra (1914-93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra's Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth--specifically to the city's South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and launched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism where Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold "dream-book bibles," and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where styles circulated and mashed together in clubs and community dancehalls. Sun Ra drew from a vast array of locally available intellectual and musical sources--from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, rhythm and blues, Latin dance music and the latest pop exotica--to put together a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra's Chicago contends that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city--and that by excavating postwar black experience from inside Sun Ra's South Side milieu we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
£86.80
The University of Chicago Press A Desired Past – A Short History of Same–Sex Love in America
This text introduces Mary Hammon and Sara Norman, who were found guilty in 17th-century Massachusetts of "lewd behavior each with the other upon a bed". The reader also meets Ozaw-wen-dib, a male Chippewa who, in the 1820s, lived as a woman and had many husbands. We find Addie Brown, a freeborn black domestic servant, assuring African-American schoolteacher Rebecca Primus that "no kisses is like youres" in the 1860s. The reader also becomes acquainted with ACT-UP, Queer Nation and the "tasty and dramatic" Lesbian Avengers. The book, as these examples suggest, is the tale of men desiring men and women loving women through nearly four centuries of American history. Leila Rupp combines an array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into a story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries. She shows what it means to say that sexuality has a history by pointing to experiences of love and desire that were understood in radically different ways across time, and often in radically different ways by different groups at the same time. She translates the concepts that are central to cutting-edge theories of sexuality into a narrative that explains these concepts in practice.
£27.87
The University of Chicago Press Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform
The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman history of the earth, Martin J. S. Rudwick's "Worlds Before Adam" picks up where his celebrated "Bursting the Limits of Time" leaves off. Rudwick takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain's Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries geologists made during the period. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary theory.
£40.56
The University of Chicago Press Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela
From Tibetan Buddhists at Jokang to Muslims at Mecca for the hajj, pilgrims across faiths and cultures travel thousands of miles - often by foot - to reach holy sites. Such journeys are considered proof of ultimate devotion, the most important act of an individual's life. The intense mystical and physical aspects of pilgrimages have recently sparked a modern revival, leading travelers in search of spiritual growth and physical challenge to embark on these sacred adventures. Pilgrimage to the End of the World takes the reader, via Conrad Rudolph's able eyes and feet, to the holy site of Santiago de Compostela, believed to be the burial place of the apostle James. Discovered around AD 812, it became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for Westerners (after Rome and Jerusalem) and has recently received an influx of renewed attention since being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today it is the second most popular Catholic pilgrimage center, having been visited by Francis of Assisi and Pope John Paul II, among others. Rudolph made this passage himself, traveling the two and a half months and one thousand miles along the ancient pilgrimage route from Le Puy, in south-central France, to Santiago, Spain. Offering his perspective as a medieval art historian as well as a veteran traveler, Rudolph melds the ancient and the contemporary, the spiritual and the physical, in a chronicle of his travels to this captivating place. From anecdotes to travel tips for "the wise pilgrim" (routes to take, physical training required, what to eat, where to stay, what to bring, and even recommendations of other publications), this book is at once travel guide, literary work, historical study, and memoir. Sincerely and engagingly written, it will appeal to travelers, religious scholars, and historians - and will have you wanting to embark for Spain as you close it.
£18.81
The University of Chicago Press The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists
"Arguably the best work to date in the history of geology."—David R. Oldroyd, Science"After a superficial first glance, most readers of good will and broad knowledge might dismiss [this book] as being too much about too little. They would be making one of the biggest mistakes in their intellectual lives. . . . [It] could become one of our century's key documents in understanding science and its history."—Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books"Surely one of the most important studies in the history of science of recent years, and arguably the best work to date in the history of geology."—David R. Oldroyd, Science
£43.27
The University of Chicago Press One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko
Mike Royko wrote a daily column for nearly 35 years - at first for the "Chicago Daily News", then the "Sun-Times", and finally the "Tribune" - and his Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary was syndicated in more than 600 newspapers nationwide. Pretension and hypocrisy were his targets, and his well-aimed salvos, delivered with blunt honesty and penetrating wit, w on him fans and foes alike. This text collects the best of Royko's columns from his career. Culled from 7500 columns and spanning four decades, from his early days to his last dispatch, the writings in this collection reflect a radically changing America as seen by a man whose sense of justice and humour never faltered. Included in this volume are columns such as: the stories of his childhood as recollected by himself and his pal, "Slats" Grobnik; his modern-day Christmas parable of Mary and Joseph looking for a room in Chicago; "A Faceless Man's Plea," the tale of woe that in one day had Richard Nixon publicly reversing the Veterans Administration; his account of Frank Sinatra's threat to punch him in the eye; the column he wrote about how his feet had always disappointed him; his pieces on racism; and his amusing attacks on political correctness. Putting each decade into perspective are introductions by Lois Wille, Royko's friend and colleague at all three Chicago dailies.
£14.39
The University of Chicago Press Hooked
How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeling captivated by works of art? In Hooked, Rita Felski challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is a part of modern intellectuals' self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read as Felski's book, The Limits of Critique. Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that being hooked is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and paintingfrom Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and LouiseFelski brings the langu
£76.00
The University of Chicago Press Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries
John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them. Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.
£86.80
The University of Chicago Press Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness
The most accurate and comprehensive picture of homelessness to date, this study offers a powerful explanation of its causes, proposes short- and long-term solutions, and documents the striking contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the contemporary homeless population, which is younger and contains more women, children, and blacks.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press May '68 and Its Afterlives
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
£27.87
The University of Chicago Press The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America
In the wake of the Great Recession, American cities from Philadelphia to San Diego saw an upsurge in hyperlocal placemaking--small-scale interventions aimed at encouraging greater equity and community engagement in growth and renewal. But the projects that were the most successful at achieving these lofty ambitions weren't usually established by politicians, urban planners, or real estate developers; they were initiated by community activists, artists, and neighbors. In order to figure out why, The City Creative mounts a comprehensive study of placemaking in urban America, tracing its intellectual history and contrasting it with the efforts of people making positive change in their communities today. Spanning the 1950s to the post-recession 2010s, The City Creative highlights the roles of such prominent individuals and organizations as Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Richard Sennett, Project for Public Spaces, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the development of urban placemaking, both in the abstract and on the ground. But that's only half the story. Bringing the narrative to the present, Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol also detail placemaking interventions at more than 200 sites in more than 40 cities, combining archival research, interviews, participant observation, and Schalliol's powerful documentary photography. Carriere and Schalliol find that while these formal and informal placemaking interventions can bridge local community development and regional economic plans, more often than not, they push the boundaries of mainstream placemaking. Rather than simply stressing sociability or market-driven economic development, these initiatives offer an alternative model of community-led progress with the potential to redistribute valuable resources while producing tangible and intangible benefits for their communities. The City Creative provides a kaleidoscopic overview of how these initiatives grow, and sometimes collapse, illustrating the centrality of placemaking in the evolution of the American city and how it can be reoriented to meet demands for a more equitable future.
£31.68
The University of Chicago Press The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age
This study uses the celebrated American trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881, to explore attitudes towards insanity and criminal responsibility in the the late-19th century. The author reconstructs the courtroom battle waged by 24 expert witnesses who represented the two major schools of psychiatric thought of the generation immediately preceding Freud. Although the role of genetics in behaviour was widely accepted, these psychiatrists debated whether heredity had predisposed Guiteau to assassinate Garfield. Rosenberg's account allows the reader to consider one of the earliest cases in the controversy over the criminal responsibility of the insane, a debate that has continued through to modern times.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866
Cholera was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as the plague had been for the fourteenth. Its defeat was a reflection not only of progress in medical knowledge but of enduring changes in American social thought. Rosenberg has focused his study on New York City, the most highly developed center of this new society. Carefully documented, full of descriptive detail, yet written with an urgent sense of the drama of the epidemic years, this narrative is as absorbing for general audiences as it is for the medical historian. In a new Afterword, Rosenberg discusses changes in historical method and concerns since the original publication of The Cholera Years."A major work of interpretation of medical and social thought . . . this volume is also to be commended for its skillful, absorbing presentation of the background and the effects of this dread disease."—I.B. Cohen, New York Times"The Cholera Years is a masterful analysis of the moral and social interest attached to epidemic disease, providing generally applicable insights into how the connections between social change, changes in knowledge and changes in technical practice may be conceived."—Steven Shapin, Times Literary Supplement"In a way that is all too rarely done, Rosenberg has skillfully interwoven medical, social, and intellectual history to show how medicine and society interacted and changed during the 19th century. The history of medicine here takes its rightful place in the tapestry of human history."—John B. Blake, Science
£22.43
The University of Chicago Press Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition
The esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has brought global cinema to American audiences for the last four decades. His incisive writings on individual filmmakers define film culture as a diverse and ever-evolving practice, unpredictable yet subject to analyses just as diversified as his own discriminating tastes. For Rosenbaum, there is no high or low cinema, only more interesting or less interesting films, and the pieces collected here, from an appreciation of Marilyn Monroe's intelligence to a classic discussion on and with Jean-Luc Godard, amply testify to his broad intellect and multifaceted talent. "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" gathers together over fifty examples of Rosenbaum's criticism from the past four decades, each of which demonstrates his passion for the way we view movies, as well as how we write about them. Charting our changing concerns with the interconnected issues that surround video, DVDs, the Internet, and new media, the writings collected here also highlight Rosenbaum's polemics concerning the digital age. From the rediscovery and recirculation of classic films, to the social and aesthetic impact of technological changes, Rosenbaum doesn't disappoint in assembling a magisterial cast of little-known filmmakers as well as the familiar faces and iconic names that have helped to define our era. As we move into this new decade of moviegoing - one in which Hollywood will continue to feel the shockwaves of the digital age - Jonathan Rosenbaum remains a valuable guide. "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" is a consummate collection of his work, not simply for fans of this seminal critic, but for all those open to the wide variety of films he embraces and helps us understand.
£25.16
The University of Chicago Press Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition
The esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has brought global cinema to American audiences for the last four decades. His incisive writings on individual filmmakers define film culture as a diverse and ever-evolving practice, unpredictable yet subject to analyses just as diversified as his own discriminating tastes. For Rosenbaum, there is no high or low cinema, only more interesting or less interesting films, and the pieces collected here, from an appreciation of Marilyn Monroe's intelligence to a classic discussion on and with Jean-Luc Godard, amply testify to his broad intellect and multifaceted talent. "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" gathers together over fifty examples of Rosenbaum's criticism from the past four decades, each of which demonstrates his passion for the way we view movies, as well as how we write about them. Charting our changing concerns with the interconnected issues that surround video, DVDs, the Internet, and new media, the writings collected here also highlight Rosenbaum's polemics concerning the digital age. From the rediscovery and recirculation of classic films, to the social and aesthetic impact of technological changes, Rosenbaum doesn't disappoint in assembling a magisterial cast of little-known filmmakers as well as the familiar faces and iconic names that have helped to define our era. As we move into this new decade of moviegoing - one in which Hollywood will continue to feel the shockwaves of the digital age - Jonathan Rosenbaum remains a valuable guide. "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia" is a consummate collection of his work, not simply for fans of this seminal critic, but for all those open to the wide variety of films he embraces and helps us understand.
£86.80
The University of Chicago Press Image and Reality: Kekul, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination
Chemists in the nineteenth century were faced with a particular problem: how to depict the atoms and molecules beyond the direct reach of our bodily senses. In visualizing this microworld, these scientists were the first to move beyond high-level philosophical speculations regarding the unseen. In "Image and Reality", Alan J. Rocke focuses on the community of organic chemists in Germany to provide the basis for a fuller understanding of the nature of scientific creativity. Arguing that visual mental images assisted many of these scientists in thinking through old problems and new possibilities, Rocke uses a variety of sources, including private correspondence, diagrams and illustrations, scientific papers, and public statements to investigate their ability to not only imagine the invisibly tiny atoms and molecules upon which they operated daily, but to build detailed and empirically based pictures of them. These portrayals of 'chemical structures' gradually became an accepted part of science and are now regarded as one of the defining features of chemistry. In telling this fascinating story, Rocke also suggests that imagistic thinking is often at the heart of creative thinking in all fields.
£50.00
The University of Chicago Press Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel
The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description—what Virginia Woolf called “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.” As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. Strange Likeness will enliven conversations around narrative theory, affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy.
£86.80
The University of Chicago Press Upsold: Real Estate Agents, Prices, and Neighborhood Inequality
What do you want for yourself in the next five, ten years? Do your plans involve marriage, kids, a new job? These are the questions a real estate agent might ask in an attempt to unearth information they can employ to complete a sale, which as Upsold shows, often results in upselling. In this book, sociologist Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers’ ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality. Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation. Upsold shows how the interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price. Employing revealing ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris outlines precisely how social influences come together during the sales process. In Upsold, we get a deep dive into the role that the interactions with sales agents play in buyers’ decision-making and how neighborhoods are differentiated, valorized, and deemed to be worthy of a certain price.
£26.96
The University of Chicago Press Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927
In the decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how, in these debates, French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War. In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity. Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, non-traditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism
Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty. But under their calm surface lurks the legacy of a nineteenth-century conflict that pitted industrial progress against natural conservation - and helped launch the environmental movement as we know it. Purchased by the city of Manchester in the 1870s, Thirlmere was dammed and converted into a reservoir, its water piped one hundred miles south to the burgeoning industrial city and its workforce. This feat of civil engineering - and of natural resource diversion - inspired one of the first environmental struggles of modern times. "The Dawn of Green" re-creates the battle for Thirlmere and the clashes between conservationists who wished to preserve the lake and developers eager to supply the needs of a growing urban population. Bringing to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, noted historian Harriet Ritvo revisits notions of the natural promulgated by romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent - and continuing - environmental struggles.
£19.71
The University of Chicago Press Textual Sources for the Study of Islam
"[This collection] is distinguished by its wide range and the care which has clearly gone into the selection of texts for inclusion. . . . Attention has understandably been focused on what might be called the religious aspects of Islam, such as scripture, theology, sects, law, ritual and mysticism, but within those limits the texts chosen are marked by substantially of content, by geographical, chronological and social diversity, and by an intelligent use of less well known authors. . . . An excellent starting point for a systematic and analytical examination of Islam."—G. R. Hawting, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
£28.78
The University of Chicago Press Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition
The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry; his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose. The first translation of the poet's complete works when it was published in 1966, "Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters" introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius - among them the Doors's lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who "don't read French that easily." Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud's complete poetic works. Thoroughly revising Fowlie's edition, Seth Whidden has made changes on virtually every page, correcting errors, reordering poems, adding previously omitted versions of poems and some letters, and updating the text to reflect current scholarship; left in place are Fowlie's literal and respectful translations of Rimbaud's complex and nontraditional verse. Whidden also provides a foreword that considers the heritage of Fowlie's edition and adds a bibliography that acknowledges relevant books that have appeared since the original publication. On its fortieth anniversary, "Rimbaud" remains the most authoritative - and now, completely up-to-date - edition of the young master's entire poetic oeuvre.
£18.33
The University of Chicago Press Romey's Order
From "Chord": come the marrow-hours when he couldn't sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds - "Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records - and tries to order - the objects, inscape, injuries, and idiom of his 'blood-home' and childhood world. Sounding out the nerves and nodes of language to transform 'every burn-mark and blemish', to 'bind our river-wrack and leavings', Romey seeks to forge finally (if even for a moment) a chord in which he might live. Intently visceral, aural, oral, Atsuro Riley's poems bristle with musical and imaginative pleasures, with storytelling and picture-making of a new and wholly unexpected kind.
£16.08
The University of Chicago Press Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets
Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs. Drawing upon her ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese derivatives market, Riles explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. How collateral operates, Riles suggests, is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think about how markets should work and be governed. Riles seeks to democratize our understanding of legal techniques and demonstrate how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce more effective forms of market regulation.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci
One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has left an indelible mark on philosophy and critical theory. His innovative work on history, society, power, and the state has influenced several generations of readers and political activists, and even shaped important developments in postcolonial thought. But Gramsci’s thinking is scattered across the thousands of notebook pages he wrote while he was imprisoned by Italy’s fascist government from 1926 until shortly before his death. To guide readers through Gramsci’s life and works, historian Jean-Yves Frétigné offers To Live Is to Resist, an accessible, compelling, and deeply researched portrait of an extraordinary figure. Throughout the book, Frétigné emphasizes Gramsci’s quiet heroism and his unwavering commitment to political practice and resistance. Most powerfully, he shows how Gramsci never surrendered, even in conditions that stripped him of all power—except, of course, the power to think.
£28.00
The University of Chicago Press Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey Through the AIDS Crisis
In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten had the dubious distinction of signing more death certificates in the city of Chicago--and, by inference, the state of Illinois--than any other physician. As a family physician, he trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were close friends, colleagues, and former lovers, who were shunned by most of the medical community because of their sexual orientation and HIV-positive status. Slotten wasn't an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in the maelstrom of one of the greatest epidemics in modern human history. In Plague Years, Slotten offers a unique first-person account of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, drawing from private journals and notes from his thirty-plus years of practice. Spanning not just the city of Chicago, but four continents as well, Plague Years provides a comprehensive portrait of the epidemic, from its mystery-riddled early years through the reckless governmental responses of the United States and other nations that led to legions of senseless deaths and ruined lives to the discoveries of life-saving drug cocktails that transformed the disease into something potentially manageable. Unlike most other books on the subject, Slotten's story extends to the present day, when prevention of infection for those at risk and successful treatment of those already infected offer a ray of hope that HIV/AIDS can be stopped in its tracks. Alternating between Slotten's reactions to the crisis as a gay man and the demanding toll the disease took on his career and the world around him, Plague Years sheds light on some of the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in a way that no previous medical memoir has.
£17.53
The University of Chicago Press Value, Conflict, and Order: Berlin, Hampshire, Williams, and the Realist Revival in Political Theory
Is the purpose of political philosophy to articulate the moral values that political regimes would realize in a virtually perfect world and show what that implies for the way we should behave toward one another? That model of political philosophy, driven by an effort to draw a picture of an ideal political society, is familiar from the approach of John Rawls and others. Or is political philosophy more useful if it takes the world as it is, acknowledging the existence of various morally non-ideal political realities, and asks how people can live together nonetheless? The latter approach is advocated by "realist" thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. In Value, Conflict, and Order, Edward Hall builds on the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in order to establish a political realist's theory of politics for the twenty-first century. The realist approach, Hall argues, helps us make sense of the nature of moral and political conflict, the ethics of compromising with adversaries and opponents, and the character of political legitimacy. In an era when democratic political systems all over the world are riven by conflict over values and interests, Hall's conception is bracing and timely.
£100.00
The University of Chicago Press Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395-1436
These works by Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni offer an intimate portrait of the women who inhabited the venetian convent of Corpus Domini, where they shared a religious life bounded physically by the convent walls and organized temporally by the rhythms of work and worship. At the same time, they show how this cloistered community vibrated with news of the great ecclesiastical events of the day, such as the Great Western Schism and the Council of Constance. While the chronicle recounts the history of the nuns' collective life, the necrology provides highly individualized biographies of nearly 50 women who died in the convent between 1395 and 1436. We follow the fascinating stories that led these women, from adolescent girls to elderly widows, to join the convent; and we learn of their cultural backgrounds and intellectual accomplishments, their ascetic practices and mystical visions, their charity and devotion to each other, and their fortitude in the face of illness and death. FDEThe personal and social meaning of religious devotion comes alive in these texts, the first of their kind to be translated into English.
£25.16
The University of Chicago Press The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes
The Decision Between Us combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that "decision" is as much an aesthetic as it is an ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of "unbecoming community" in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, The Decision Between Us opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published Writing Degree Zero, then moves to 1980 and the "neutral mourning" of Barthes' Camera Lucida, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, The Decision Between Us is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning.
£42.00
The University of Chicago Press I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy
A major figure in American blues and folk music, Big Bill Broonzy (1903-58) left his Arkansas Delta home after World War I, headed north, and became the leading Chicago blues-man of the 1930s. His success came as he fused traditional rural blues with the electrified sound that was beginning to emerge in Chicago. This, however, was just one step in his remarkable journey: Big Bill was constantly reinventing himself, both in reality and in his retellings of it. Bob Riesman's groundbreaking biography tells the compelling life story of a lost figure from the annals of music history. "I Feel So Good" traces Big Bill's career from his rise as a nationally prominent blues star, including his historic 1938 appearance at Carnegie Hall, to his influential role in the post-World War II folk revival, when he sang about racial injustice alongside Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel. Riesman's account brings the reader into the jazz clubs and concert halls of Europe, as Big Bill's overseas tours in the 1950s ignited the British blues-rock explosion of the 1960s. Interviews with Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and Ray Davies reveal Broonzy's profound impact on the British rockers who would follow him and change the course of popular music. Along the way, Riesman details Big Bill's complicated and poignant personal saga: he was married three times and became a father at the very end of his life to a child half a world away. He also brings to light Big Bill's final years, when he lost first his voice, then his life, to cancer, just as his international reputation was reaching its peak. Featuring many rarely seen photos, "I Feel So Good" will be the definitive account of Big Bill Broonzy's life and music.
£25.16