Search results for ""Syracuse University Press""

Twenty percent of Palestinians—1.57 million Israeli citizens and over seven hundred thousand exiles and immigrants around the world—live in Europe and the Americas, participating daily in languages and cultures other than Arabic. The dispersion of Palestinians and the consequent diversity of experiences running through three generations since the Nabka of 1948 have significantly dispelled a sense of cultural homogeneity. This cultural diversification is powerfully reflected in literature as an increasing number of Palestinians are writing in Hebrew, English, Spanish, Italian, and Danish, among other languages.In Being There, Being Here, Ebileeni calls for a renewed definition of Palestinian writing, one that includes Anglophone, Nordic, Latinate, and Hebrew language literary works into the national canon. The relevance of studying Palestinian writings composed in languages other than Arabic is grounded in the tension between the idea of remaining loyal to a more-or-less fixed national narrative and the desire to understand the ongoing lingual and cultural proliferations of the Palestinian story.The concept of "homeland" remains inextricable to Palestinian experiences notwithstanding generation and location, but, it may not necessarily connote to the notion of home for those who were born and raised in the West. Although most of the works discussed here are steeped in the historic injustices committed against Palestinians, Ebileeni’s intention is to unsettle this foundation for the purpose of yielding a richer and fuller understanding of Palestinian literary texts.

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Harriet Tubman's social activism as well as her efforts as a soldier, nurse, and spy have been retold in countless books and films and have justly elevated her to iconic status in American history. Given her fame and contributions, it is surprising how little is known of her later years and her continued efforts for social justice, women's rights, and care for the elderly. Tubman housed and cared for her extended family, parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews, as well as many other African Americans seeking refuge. Ultimately her house just outside of Auburn, New York, would become a focal point of Tubman's expanded efforts to provide care to those who came to her seeking shelter and support, in the form of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged.In this book, Armstrong reconstructs and interprets Tubman's public and private life in freedom through integrating his archaeological findings with historical research. The material record Tubman left behind sheds vital light on her life and the ways in which she interacted with local and national communities, giving readers a fuller understanding of her impact on the lives of African Americans. Armstrong's research is part of a wider effort to enhance public interpretation and engagement with the Harriet Tubman Home.

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Since the eighteenth century, landscape has played complex psychological and political roles in the narrative of Irishness, entailing questions of memory, family, home, exile, and forgiveness. In Stepping through Origins, Holdridge explores the interplay of these concepts in literature. For Irish writers from Swift to Heaney, the Irish landscape has remained not only a reflection of Irish troubles but, much like aesthetic experience, a space in which the bitterness of family or national life can be understood, if not entirely overcome. Through deft analysis of works by leading Irish writers including Lady Morgan, Yeats, Joyce, Louis MacNeice, and Elizabeth Bowen, Holdridge expands and enriches our understanding of how landscape has served as a palimpsest for both family and country, connecting personal with collective memory, localized places with their regions, and individual with national identity.

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People's Peace lays a solid foundation for the argument that global peace is possible because ordinary people are its architects. Saikia and Haines offer a unique and imaginative perspective on people’s daily lives across the world as they struggle to create peace despite escalating political violence. The volume’s focus on local and ordinary efforts highlights peace as a lived experience that goes beyond national and international peace efforts. In addition, the contributors’ emphasis on the role of religion as a catalyst for peace moves away from the usual depiction of religion as a source of divisiveness and conflict.Spanning a range of humanities disciplines, the essays in this volume provide case studies of individuals defying authority or overcoming cultural stigmas to create peaceful relations in their communities. From investigating how ancient Jews established communal justice to exploring how black and white citizens in Ferguson, Missouri, are working to achieve racial harmony, the contributors find that people are acting independently of governments and institutions to identify everyday methods of coexisting with others. In putting these various approaches in dialogue with each other, this volume produces a theoretical intervention that shifts the study of peace away from national and international organizations and institutions toward locating successful peaceful efforts in the everyday lives of individuals.

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The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, devastated Palestinian lives and shattered Palestinian society, culture, and economy. It also nipped in the bud a nascent grassroots, binational alliance between Arab and Jewish citrus growers.This significant and unprecedented partnership was virtually erased from the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians when the Nakba decimated villages and populations in a matter of months. In The Lost Orchard, Kabha and Karlinsky tell the story of the Palestinian citrus industry from its inception until 1950, tracing the shifting relationship between Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Using rich archival and primary sources, as well as on a variety of theoretical approaches, Kabha and Karlinsky portray the industry's social fabric and stratification, detail its economic history, and analyze the conditions that enabled the formation of the unique binational organization that managed the country's industry from late 1940 until April 1948.

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The 1979 revolution fundamentally altered Iran’s political landscape as a generation of inexperienced clerics who did not hail from the ranks of the upper class—and were not tainted by association with the old regime—came to power. The actions and intentions of these truculent new leaders and their lay allies caused major international concern. Meanwhile, Iran’s domestic and foreign policy and its nuclear program have loomed large in daily news coverage. Despite global consternation, however, our knowledge about Iran’s political elite remains skeletal. Nearly four decades after the clergy became the state elite par excellence, there has been no empirical study of the recruitment, composition, and circulation of the Iranian ruling members after 1979.Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook provides the most comprehensive collection of data on political life in postrevolutionary Iran, including coverage of 36 national elections, more than 400 legal and outlawed political organizations, and family ties among the elite. It provides biographical sketches of more than 2,300 political personalities ranging from cabinet ministers and parliament deputies to clerical, judicial, and military leaders, much of this information previously unavailable in English.Providing a cartography of the complex structure of power in postrevolutionary Iran, this volume offers a window not only into the immediate years before and after the Iranian Revolution but also into what has happened during the last four turbulent decades. This volume and the data it contains will be invaluable to policymakers, researchers, and scholars of the Middle East alike.

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The early modern Ottoman poet Mihrî Hatun (1460–1515) succeeded in drawing an admiring audience and considerable renown during a time when few women were accepted into the male-dominated intellectual circles. Her poetry collection is among the earliest bodies of women’s writing in the Middle East and Islamicate literature, providing an exceptional vantage point on intellectual history. With this volume, Havliog?lu not only gives readers access to this rare text but also investigates the factors that allowed Hatun to survive and thrive despite her clear departure from the cultural norms of the time. Placing the poet in the context of her era and environment, Havliog?lu finds that the poet’s dramatic, masterful performance and subversiveness are the very reasons for her endurance and acclaim in intellectual history. Hatun performed in a way that embraced her marginal position as a woman and leveraged it to her advantage. Havliog?lu’s astute and nuanced portrait gives readers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman poet in a highly gendered society and suggests that women have been part of intellectual history long before the modern period.

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At the heart of this volume is the translation of a fourteenth-century Turkish version of the Joseph story, better known to Western readers from the version in Genesis, first book of the Hebrew Bible. Hickman provides us with a new lens: we see the drama of the Old Testament prophet Joseph, son of Jacob, through Muslim eyes. The poem’s author, Sheyyad Hamza, lived in Anatolia during the early days of the Ottoman Empire. Hamza’s composition is rooted in the recondite and little-studied tradition of oral performance—a unique corner of Turkish verbal arts, situated between minstrelsy and the ""divan"" tradition—combining the roles of preacher and storyteller. A cultural document as well as a literary text that reflects the prevailing values of the time, Hamza’s play reveals a picture of Ottoman sensibility, both aesthetic and religious, at the level of popular culture in premodern Turkey. To supplement and contextualise the story, Hickman includes an introduction, a historical-literary afterword, and notes to the translation, all ably assisting an unfamiliar reader’s entry into this world.

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The Road to the Spring is the first book publication of Mary Austin's (1868-1934) poems. Best known for her prose book The Land of Little Rain (1903), Austin was in fact a poet from the beginning of her career to the end, even though she never published a volume dedicated to her own original poetry. Instead, Austin's work came to light in collections of poetry and in prestigious journals such as Poetry, the Nation, the Forum, Harper's, and Saturday Review of Literature, among many others. The Road to the Spring contains more than 200 poems, most of which can only be found in out-of-print books, magazines, and periodicals, and her unpublished manuscripts archived at the Huntington Library. This singular publication includes her original work, poems she claimed to have written with her grammar school pupils at the end of the nineteenth century, and her translations and ""re-expressions"" of Native American songs, which often diverge greatly from any other known sources. Warren includes an introduction, laying out Austin's place in American literature and situating her writings in feminist, environmentalist, regionalist, and Native American contexts. He also includes notes for those new to Austin's work, glossing Native terms, geographical names, and the ethnological sources of the Native songs she re-creates.

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Becoming Turkish seeks to provide a better understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post-Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective in the field that stresses the social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations that occurred during the leadership of Mustafa Kemal.

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In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholarship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in different places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and historiographies of both “home” and “away.” Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants “remember” a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs? In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of “memory practices,” ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinctive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gathering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts.

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A woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will; for a room without that right becomes a prison cell. The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional ""right"" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries. Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.

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Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr presents a thorough the introduction to recent history of one of the greatest dramatic and theatrical traditions in Western culture. Originally published in 1988, this updated edition provides extensive new material, charting the path of modern and contemporary Irish drama from its roots in the Celtic Revival to its flowering in world theater. The lives and careers of more than fifty modern Irish playwrights are discussed along with summaries of their major plays and recommendations for further reading. Most significantly, Sternlicht treats the major themes of modern Irish drama: the struggle for independence; the suffering caused by extreme poverty and the resulting emigration; the decline of Anglo-Irish ascen­dency; the epic longing for and love of the land; the falling power of the clergy; generational conflicts; problems of the post-colonial transition; and the impact of feminism on a patriarchal society. Sternilicht brings well-deserved attention to such playwriters as Conor McPherson, Robert Massey, Ursala Rani Sarma, and Sean McLoughlin, among others. Including a selected bibliography and filmography, Modern Irish Drama is an indispensible resource for students of drama studies and production companies alike.

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At the close of the nineteenth century, modern ideas of democracy and equality were slowly beginning to take hold in Iran. Exposed to European ideas about law, equality, and education, upper- and middle-class men and women increasingly questioned traditional ideas about the role of women and their place in society. In apparent response to this emerging independence of women, an anonymous author penned The Education of Women, a small booklet published in 1889. This guide, aimed at husbands as much as wives, instructed women on how to behave toward their husbands, counseling them on proper dress, intimacy, and subservience. One woman, Bibi Khanom Astarabadi, took up the author’s chal­lenge and wrote a refutation of his arguments. An outspoken mother of seven, Astarabadi established the first school for girls in Tehran and often advocated for the rights of women. In The Vices of Men she details the flaws of men, offering a scathing diatribe on the nature of men’s behavior toward women. Astarabadi mixes the traditional florid style of the time with street Persian, slang words, and bawdy language. This new edition faith­fully preserves the style and irreverent tone of the essays. The two texts, together with an introduction and afterword situating both within the customs, language, and social life of Iran, offer a rare candid dialogue between men and women in late nineteenth-century Persia.

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In ""Militant Women of a Fragile Nation"", Malek Abisaab takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly. Challenging the prevailing assumptions about culturally inscribed roles for Middle Eastern women, the book highlights traditions of public activism and militancy among rural women that are in turn adapted to the spaces of the factory. Women employed distinct strategies involving kinship, sectarian, gender, and class ties to enhance their work conditions and social benefits. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data, the author convincingly argues that the condition of women can only be explained by exploring the shifting relationship between culture, societal arrangements, and economic settings. Abisaab's richly detailed work illuminates the impact of class and gender in the transformation of modern Lebanon.

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This timely volume offers a compilation of twenty-four articles covering a wide spectrum of topics in Iroquoian archaeology. Culled from leading publications, these essays collectively represent the current state of knowledge and research in the field. A comprehensive research bibliography with more than 500 entries will be a key resource for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Both text and bibliography are structured in five sections: Origins; Precolumbian Dynamics; Postcolumbian Dynamics; Material Culture Studies; and Contemporary Iroquois Perspectives, Repatriation, and Collaborative Archaeology. Along with seminal essays by major figures in regional archaeology, the book includes responses by Haudenosaunee writers to the political context of contemporary archaeological work.

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At the age of twenty-three, Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was one of the founding fathers of the Abbey Theatre. His contribution to the development of Irish drama continued until his voluntary exile to America in 1914. His play, Broken Soil (1903), was the first commercial success at the Abbey, and it established the long-lived tradition of the peasant play on the Irish stage. This collection comprises the three major forms of his dramatic art: The Land (1905); Betrayal (1912); and two of his five Noh plays (a five-play cycle containing poetry and prose following the Yeats and Japanese Model), Glendalough (based on the career of Charles Stewart Parnell), and Monasterboice (based on the early life of Colum’s lifelong friend, James Joyce).

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In the first collection of a Native American orator's speeches, Granville Ganter presents the complete speeches of Red Jacket or Sagoyewatha (Shay-go-ye-watha), a formidable diplomat and one of the most famous Native American orators of the nineteenth century. As a representative of the Seneca and the Six Nations, Red Jacket negotiated with American presidents from George Washington to Andrew Jackson, establishing a legacy that continues to influence discussions of native sovereignty and cultural identity. In speeches spanning over forty years, he eloquently voiced the rights of Native Americans, opposing the encroachment of white man's religion and culture and the sale of native lands. Presenting more than fifty speeches of Red Jacket, some previously unpublished and others revised using modern standards of textual editing, this volume encourages a wider readership of Red Jacket's work. Ganter's accompanying essays offer a detailed historical framework, presenting archival research about the interpreters and the circumstances of each speech. The great majority of Red Jacket's speeches were interpreted by reliable translators who were often chosen by the Senecas for their accuracy. This edition spans Red Jacket's political career from 1790 to 1830 and includes major addresses to Presidents Washington, Adams, and Monroe. Additionally, it contains original versions of his speeches to evangelical missionaries and land speculators, which circulated for nearly 150 years after Red Jacket's death. This book will stand as the definitive critical edition of Red Jacket's speeches and as a remarkable record of Native American political history. It will be of crucial interest to historians and literary scholars of Native American studies.

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Tells the remarkable story of six young men and the organizations they founded between 1939 and 1948 that would set the stage for the militant Zionist activism of today. During and shortly after the Second World War, six young men - emissaries of the revisionist-Zionist ""Irgun"" military movement in Palestine - revolutionized the American-Jewish and Zionist scene. Judith Tydor Baumel provides the complete story of the role the Bergson group played in raising American public consciousness of Jewish and Zionist concerns. After founding a series of pro-Zionist and rescue organizations, they initiated a new form of fundraising that used the media to turn the spotlight on their activities, gaining adherents and supporters from both ends of the political and social spectrum. Long before the protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s, members of this group learned the art of courting the media in order to bring word of their existence to every part of the United States. Having energized politicians, gangsters, Hollywood moguls, and ultra-Orthodox rabbis, the handful of young men taught other Zionist and American-Jewish groups not only how the media was the message but how it could and should be used. A guiding force behind the creation of the War Refugee Board, the group served as a beacon for contemporary Zionist militancy while ultimately laying the groundwork for other organizations to utilize the media in future political campaigns.

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Featuring twenty-five writers in all, this book includes Howard P. Segal's acclaimed work on utopian visionaries.

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This book challenges prevailing assumptions about family, courts of law, and the nature of modernity in Muslim societies against the backdrop of Haifa and Jaffa during ""the long nineteenth century"". The popular image of the family and the court of law in Muslim societies is one of traditional, unchanging social frameworks. Iris Agmon suggests an entirely different view, grounded in a detailed study of nineteenth-century Ottoman court records from the flourishing Palestinian port cities of Haifa and Jaffa. She depicts the Sharia Muslim court of law as a dynamic institution, capable of adapting to rapid and profound social changes - indeed, of playing an active role in generating these changes. Court and family interact and transform themselves, each other, and the society of which they form part. Agmon's book is a significant contribution to scholarship on both family history and legal culture in the social history of the Middle East.

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The compelling and wide-ranging tale that examines the moral choices made by blacks and whites of New York State to aid the newly freed slaves to secure the promise of freedom. The North Star was both an astronomical reference guiding slaves north to freedom, and a symbol of the moral enterprise that sought to end slavery. This crusade for freedom in the north was born of the religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s in central and western New York - known as the ""Burned-Over District,"" which lit the fires that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett begins with a history of slavery in upstate New York and ends with John Brown's execution and burial in the Adirondacks. He includes great abolitionists - among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Lougen, and Samuel May - and many lesset-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom.

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This work covers the story of an important antebellum reform movement: ecclesiastical abolitionism. It covers the struggle among the most radical religions to purge their churches and society of sin, especially slavery, and their uncompromising efforts to force morality into political discourse.

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The second, revised edition of a classic, 19th-century work which captures the pleasures of camping and canoeing in the Adirondacks. The letters of George Washington Sears should interest not only the wilderness lover, but also the boater and craftsman who longs to own the perfect canoe.

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The one-word titles of Jules Gibbs’s Snakes and Babies are potentialities of immense expansion. These poems are incapable of being singular, inert, quiet. They are manifold, animated, agitated by energies of politics, dreams, and desires—systems of menace and pleasure. She obeys Celan’s advice to "speak, but keep yes and no unsplit," but in all other ways is disobedient to "love’s old patterns." The weather is rain. The ecology is woman. The time is violence. The angels are emus, flightless, and endangered. The voice talks back to our alienation and annihilation. In Gibbs’s hands, poems are a "voodoo that eats through paper," an alternate history that wounds as it cures.

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In Hassouna Mosbahi’s engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual. A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunis is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul. Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves. On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage. Yunus’s identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval. He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives. Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi’s elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

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From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past.One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov’s characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.

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For over fifty years, Hazo’s poetry has meditated on themes of mortality and love, passion and art, and courage and grace in a style that is unmistakably his own. In this new collection, he offers his most candid reflections on the passage of time and the tenderness of the present moment.By turns convivial and introspective, these poems explore the complex synchronicity between life and art, and the connections between the personal and the political. With sharp clarity and deep emotion, Hazo continues his pursuitof wisdom and discovery through the act of expression.

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Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Tall’s From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places—and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape that circumstance had brought her—the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people—from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed and were inspired by a spiritual resonance here. This edition includes an introduction by William Kittredge and a foreword by Stephen Kuusisto, both highlighting the book’s significance and Tall’s exquisite skill in tracing the relationship between homelands and storytelling.

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Described by theater critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime’s effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater - throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49) - maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members.Zuskin Perelman’s fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period’s most influential cultural icons.

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Over 100 colour photographs vividly portray the people and places of the southeastern Adirondacks as seen by a Glens Falls family physician who has spent over twenty years practicing rural medicine in such places as Bolton Landing, Warrensburg, North Creek, Indian Lake, Long Lake, Wells, and Speculator. The book is a breathtaking collection of Adirondack landscapes taken along Dr. Daniel Way's travels.

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Hussein’s starkly beautiful novel Beyond Love plunges us into the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. Huda, the young woman at the center of the story, experiences the deprivation and humiliation of life in sanctioned Iraq, working in the satirically named al-Amal factory (factory of hope) making men’s underwear. While surveillance and fear permeate daily life, Huda dares to vote ""no"" in the referendum for Saddam Hussein. This courageous act could have cost her her life had she not fled to the closest border, Jordan, where the novel begins. Huda is not alone: Iraqi exiles are legion there, all waiting to be relocated and start new lives. Unable to go home and to feel settled in a foreign city, she struggles to overcome her grief and haunting memories of the war and the Shi’ite uprising. In letters, diaries, and oral stories, Hussein’s characters viscerally portray the pain of war and the alienation of exile. Originally published in Arabic in 2003, Beyond Love introduces English-language readers to one of the leading voices in Iraqi fiction today.

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In Western thought, suicide has evolved from sin to sin-and-crime, to crime, to mental illness, and to semilegal act. A legal act is one we are free to think and speak about and plan and perform, without penalty by agents of the state.While dying voluntarily is ostensibly legal, suicide attempts and even suicidal thoughts are routinely punished by incarceration in a psychiatric institution. Although many people believe the prevention of suicide is one of the duties the modern state owes its citizens, Szasz argues that suicide is a basic human right and that the lengths to which the medical industry goes to prevent it represent a deprivation of that right.Drawing on his general theory of the myth of mental illness, Szasz makes a compelling case that the voluntary termination of one’s own life is the result of a decision, not a disease. He presents an in-depth examination and critique of contemporary antisuicide policies, which are based on the notion that voluntary death is a mental health problem, and systematically lays out the dehumanizing consequences of psychiatrizing suicide prevention.If suicide be deemed a problem, it is not a medical problem. Managing it as if it were a disease, or the result of a disease, will succeed only in debasing medicine and corrupting the law. Pretending to be the pride of medicine, psychiatry is its shame.

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In this provocative collection, Kim Jensen gives voice to the struggle of those who seek love in a world saturated with brutality and aggression. The concise lyrics in ""Bread Alone"" condemn the violence in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, while exploring the intimate consequences of these and other injustices. Darkly humorous, grotesque, sorrowful, outraged, and sometimes poignantly hopeful, Jensen's poems possess a strange beauty and remind us of the key purposes of poetry - to warn and to revive our sense of conscience and connection.

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This enlightening volume presents minibiographies of key British and American poets who at one time or another worked as journalists. Poets covered range from the famous to the obscure: Whittier to Whitman, Kipling to Bryant, Coleridge to Crane. Writing in a direct, unadorned style, W. Dale Nelson tells each writer's story, often relating how the poet in question felt about the journalistic experience and its impact upon creative work. Archibald MacLeish wrote ""young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast."" On the other hand, Leonard Woolf suggests that Hemingway's strong spare prose often ""bears the mark of good journalism."" The author raises compelling issues about developments in poetic form, effects of printing and communication on poetry, and the relationship of poetry and locales. He also looks at how poetic diction has been influenced by the language of reportage and the basic difference in the purpose of journalism versus that of poetry.

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Hamdi Abu Golayyel offers a striking portrait of a marginalized Egyptian community, bringing to life the absurd and tragic characters who occupy the margins of society while paying tribute to a historical Cairene neighborhood. By turns comic, reverential, beautiful, and tawdry, the novel reveals a social climate where ruthlessness and goodness seem almost indistinguishable and humanity is on display in all its rich variety. The novelist's distinctive vision of Egypt's various postmonarchy political regimes and ideologies shapes this dark comedy of human relations and underground pursuits in late twentieth-century Egypt. Through intricate levels of allegory, puns, and double meanings, Abu Golayyel effectively plays on the rhetoric associated with the nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, including the post-Nasser turn toward international capitalism with its a consumer-oriented economy - and movement away from the workers' rights orientation of the 1960s. This novel represents a new voice and a new stage in contemporary Arabic literature, as it criticizes official ideologies, whether socialist, capitalist, or Islamist. Abu Golayyel's cast of memorable characters embodies the arbitrariness of life and the search for purpose and dignity and in a social milieu that offers little of either. Marilyn Booth's translation fluently renders the novel's delicate levels of diction and rhythm, offering this brilliant Egyptian novel to a much-deserved wider audience.

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Evelyn Shakir crafts tales that are rich in history and cultural detail, setting her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present and carrying us back, on occasion, to the turn of the twentieth century. Each in their own way, Shakir's first- and second-generation women work either to reclaim their Lebanese heritage or to leave it behind. In ""The Story of Young Ali"", a teenage girl resists her beloved father's traditional tales of honor and self sacrifice. The matriarch of ""House Calls,"" on the other hand, is so wedded to the past that she returns from the grave to harangue her Americanized family. In ""Oh, Lebanon,"" a young woman who has fled Lebanon's civil war and refuses to cover her hair with a scarf finds that turning her back on her past leads her in unexpected directions. With agile humor and emotional truth, Shakir offers multiple perspectives on the experience of Lebanese women in the United States. Her stories dismantle stereotypes and remind us that women of Lebanese background have been a part of the American narrative for over a century.

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A rare and vivid narrative of a Buddhist nun's training and spiritual awakening. In this engagingly written account, Martine Batchelor relays the challenges a new ordinand faces in adapting to Buddhist monastic life: the spicy food, the rigorous daily schedule, the distinctive clothes and undergarments, and the cultural misunderstandings inevitable between a French woman and her Korean colleagues. She reveals as well the genuine pleasures that derive from solitude, meditative training, and communion with the deeply religious - whom the Buddhists call ""good friends."" Batchelor has also recorded the oral history/autobiography of her teacher, the eminent nun Son'gyong Sunim, leader of the Zen meditation hall at Naewonsa. It is a profoundly moving, often light-hearted story that offers insight into the challenges facing a woman on the path to enlightenment at the beginning of the twentieth century. Original English translations of eleven of Son'gyong Sunim's poems on Buddhist themes make a graceful and thought-provoking coda to the two women's narratives. Western readers only familiar with Buddhist ideas of female inferiority will be surprised by the degree of spiritual equality and authority enjoyed by nuns in Korea. While American writings on Buddhism increasingly emphasize the therapeutic, self-help, and comforting aspects of Buddhist thought, Batchelor's text offers a bracing and timely reminder of the strict discipline required in traditional Buddhism.

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Set in Geneva, Switzerland, around the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, this intricately plotted novel probes the emotional misfortunes of Arab men and women fleeing the horror of war only to find their ways of life constantly challenged by their foreign surroundings. The author's scalding critique of the Lebanese situation resonates with strong sociopolitical issues. Here are telling portraits of class oppression and the role of women in Arab society, the treatments of war and sexuality, of immigration, of cultural assimilation and nationalism. With supreme artistry and insight - and in modern Arab literary fashion - Ghada Samman skillfully blends realism with fantasy into a highly stylized, thematically multilayered tale. It is at once a Gothic romance and a suspenseful whodunit with engaging characters. At the same time it is a gripping study of social injustice and the consequences of wartime upheaval. Far from home and out of harm's way, Samman's Lebanese exiles repeat and replay the very same conflicts that torment them in their own land even as it is under siege. Night of the First Billion is an eloquent reminder that the only genuine security in the most profound and human sense of the word is to be found in the courageous willingness to confront, challenge, and finally to ease suffering.

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Few incidents in crime history have been as notorious - yet mundane - as the 1927 murder of Queens suburbanite Albert Snyder by his wife and her lover. Resonant of the foot-loose Jazz Age, it made persistent headlines, led to a sensational trial, spawned a 1920s Broadway play, and two classic film noirs of the 1940s: ""Double Indemnity"" and ""The Postman Always Rings Twice"". This book assesses the entire case, from grisly slaying and shabby cover-up to sharp police work and aftermath. Moreover, it explores sociocultural questions that beg to be answered: what effect does news reportage exert upon high profile cases, and why did such a transparent crime earn such an enduring place in the popular psyche. Landis MacKellar lives in Vienna and Paris. His interest in the Snyder-Gray murder began when he taught in Queens College in New York City.

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Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the ""sport"" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers. Ultimately escaping the camp, Haft's experience left him an embittered and pugnacious young man. Determined to find freedom, Haft traveled to America and began a career as a professional boxer, quickly finding success using his sharp instincts and fierce confidence. In a historic battle, Haft fights in a match with Rocky Marciano, the future undefeated heavy-weight champion of the world. Haft's boxing career takes him into the world of such boxing legends as Rocky Graziano, Roland La Starza, and Artie Levine, and he reveals new details about the rampant corruption at all levels of the sport. In sharp contrast to Elie Wiesel's scholarly, pious protagonist in ""Night"", Harry Haft is an embattled survivor, challenging the reader's capacity to understand suffering and find compassion for an antihero whose will to survive threatens his own humanity. Haft's account, at once dispassionate and deeply absorbing, is an extraordinary story and an invaluable contribution to Holocaust literature.

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Over 100 color photographs vividly portray the people and places of the southeastern Adirondacks as seen by a Glens Falls family physician who has spent over twenty years practicing rural medicine in such places as Bolton Landing, Warrensburg, North Greek, Indian Lake, Long Lake, Wells, and Speculator. The book is a breathtaking collection of Adirondack landscapes taken along Dr. Daniel Way's travels, mingled with portraits of his patients taken in their homes and the many stories that reveal the full spectrum of humor, sorrow, wonder and stress that constitutes the doctor-patient relationship. The book's patient population includes trappers, war heroes, matriarchs, lumbermen, Great Camp residents, and transplanted ""flatlanders,"" and their stories will leave the reader enriched while enjoying views of Adirondack rivers, mountains, lakes, and forests.

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Henry M. Beach was a prolific and accomplished upstate New York photographer who documented the North Country during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although much less known and celebrated, Beach's work is as important to the twentieth-century Adirondacks as Seneca Ray Stoddard's is to the nineteenth century. Illustrated with over 250 examples of his work including ten panoramic foldouts, this book covers the range of Beach's subject matter. Robert Bogdan's lively and accessible approach to the photographer's work encourages the reader to explore the North Country's people and places through Beach's photography and life. Although Beach's postcard pictures and other photographs were taken to sell in bulk to hotel managers, tourist shop owners, and other retail merchants, they are not just mass-produced, stylized, pretty pictures. Beside the bubbling brooks and shady woodland paths are factory boomtowns and paper mills belching pollution. As the rails brought increasing numbers of middle-class tourists to the Adirondacks, the wealthy created their own exclusive wilderness playground. Beach photographed dandy visitors at play as well as manual laborers sweating in the forest, logging camps, factories, mines, and construction sites. Images of ""great camps"" sit next to modest abodes, small stores, and family-owned resorts. Pictures of trains in scenic surroundings give way to mangled wrecks after tragic railroad accidents. In addition to standard view cards, he produced montages and advertisement postcardsserious visual commentary as well as lighthearted picture play. Beach's best works stir the heart and provoke the imagination, and his whimsical, down-to-earth approach to photography produced images that are a treat to the eye.

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The Erie Canal was dying. Adirondack sawmills were falling silent. And in the final years of the nineteenth century, the upstate New York town of Forestport was struggling just to survive. Then the canal levees started breaking, and the boom times returned. The Forestport saloons flourished, the town's gamblers rollicked, and the politically connected canal contractors were flush once more. It was all very convenient until Governor Theodore Roosevelt's administration grew suspicious and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency began investigating. They found what a lawman called one of the most gigantic conspiracies ever hatched in New York. In The Forestport Breaks, Michael Doyle illuminates a fresh and fascinating chapter in the colorful history of the Erie Canal. This is the canal's shadowy side, a world of political rot and plotting men, and it extended well beyond one rough and tumble town. The Forestport breaks marked the only time New York officials charged men with conspiring to destroy canal property, but they were also illustrative of the widespread rascality surrounding the canal. For Doyle, there is a story with a personal dimension behind the drama of the canal's historical events. As he uncovered the rise and fall of Forestport, he was also discovering that the trail of culpability led to members in his own family tree.

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In Of Lodz and Love, Chava Rosenfarb revisits her themes of the the shtetl and pre-Holocaust Poland, of economic and political oppression, and of the upheavals that would herald a new Jewish national and political awakening. The story takes Yacov, son of Hindele, and Binele, the daughter of the chalk vendor Yossele Abedale, to the industrial town of Lodz during the first years of Poland's independence, both before and after the country entered the war with the Bolsheviks.The would-be young lovers evolve separately against the backdrop of the city's own struggle for economic survival. In sometimes tragic turns, they make their way in the strange urban culture, rapidly acquiring the skills to survive. Translated from the original Yiddish, this book serves as prologue and as counterpoint to the urbanization of Jewish life in Poland. In its elegance and subtle wit, and overwhelming human dignity, it is not only the testimony of a vanished world, but a powerful love story.

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Traditional Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Chippewa) knowledge, like the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples around the world, has long been collected and presented by researchers who were not a part of the culture they observed. The result is a colonized version of the knowledge, one that is distorted and trivialized by an ill-suited Eurocentric paradigm of scientific investigation and classification. In Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive, Wendy Makoons Geniusz contrasts the way in which Anishinaabe botanical knowledge is presented in the academic record with how it is preserved in Anishinaabe culture. In doing so she seeks to open a dialogue between the two communities to discuss methods for decolonizing existing texts and to develop innovative approaches for conducting more culturally meaningful research in the future.As an Anishinaabe who grew up in a household practicing traditional medicine and who went on to become a scholar of American Indian studies and the Ojibwe language, Geniusz possesses the authority of someone with a foot firmly planted in each world. Her unique ability to navigate both indigenous and scientific perspectives makes this book an invaluable contribution to the field of Native American studies and enriches our understanding of the Anishinaabe and other native communities.

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