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The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore known for dragging unwary toddlers to their deaths in rivers: a scaly, child-sized creature, looking something like a frog, but with a sharp, pointed beak and an oval-shaped saucer on top of its head, which hardens with age. Akutagawa's Kappa is narrated by Patient No. 23, a madman in a lunatic asylum: he recounts how, while out hiking in Kamikochi, he spots a Kappa. He decides to chase it and, like Alice pursuing the White Rabbit, he tumbles down a hole, out of the human world and into the realm of the Kappas. There he is well looked after, in fact almost made a pet of: as a human, he is a novelty. He makes friends and spends his time learning about their world, exploring the seemingly ridiculous ways of the Kappa, but noting many--not always flattering--parallels to Japanese mores regarding morality, legal justice, economics, and sex. Alas, when the patient eventually returns to the human world, he becomes disgusted by humanity and, like Gulliver missing the Houyhnhnms, he begins to pine for his old friends the Kappas, rather as if he has been forced to take leave of Toad of Toad Hall...
A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams's scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams's cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance. Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer's stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams's music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams's deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.
In Supreme Bias, Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand present for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Drawing on their deep knowledge of the confirmation hearings, as well as rich new qualitative and quantitative evidence, the authors highlight how the women and people of color who have sat before the Committee have faced a significantly different confirmation process than their white male colleagues. Despite being among the most qualified and well-credentialed lawyers of their respective generations, female nominees and nominees of color face more skepticism of their professional competence, are subjected to stereotype-based questioning, are more frequently interrupted, and are described in less-positive terms by senators. In addition to revealing the disturbing extent to which race and gender bias exist even at the highest echelon of U.S. legal power, this book also provides concrete suggestions for how that bias can be reduced in the future.
AN INSTANT WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER A guide for how to not only dream big, but also win--both in business and in life--from one of the most celebrated and successful women in America. For the first time ever, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Forbes' Richest Self-Made Woman Liz Elting shares her story on how she co-founded and grew TransPerfect, the billion-dollar translation and language solutions company that began as a dream in an NYU dorm room. In Dream Big and Win, Elting divulges practical and inspiring tips you can implement immediately, teaching why success is not solely about attaining and wielding power. Elting shows you that fulfilling your highest potential will require you to look beyond yourself. In her honest and often humorous narrative, Elting illustrates why actions are more important than mantras and why doing will always eclipse dreaming. This book is for anyone who has ever dreamed of translating their passion into purpose and creating something bigger than themselves.
John Gardner was one of the most prolific, widely read, and influential scholars working in philosophy of law. This book celebrates, explores, and develops themes of his work during his sixteen years as Professor of Jurisprudence at University of Oxford. Written by a team of contributors whose own work has been influenced by Gardner's and with whom he has worked closely, this book engages with many of the concepts, themes, and issues that were central to his philosophical work and outlook. It expands on his arguments, offers original rebuttals to some, and draws connections with parallel and emerging fields that have been influenced by his work. This is the first book-length treatment covering the entire range of his scholarship, and will serve as a handbook of sorts, for those scholars seeking to engage Gardner's work and make connections across the wide range of topics on which he has written. In particular, the volume comprises discussions of duties to try and succeed in relation to Hume's maxim that 'ought implies can'; the role of continuity, conservatism, and corrective justice in private law, the interrelations between wrongdoing, blame, punishment, and the justification of criminal law, justifications, excuses, and responsibility, the distinctiveness of the wrongs of rape and discrimination, as well as general jurisprudence and how it may, or may not, illuminate the questions of normativity and the nature of constitutions. The volume also engages with further concepts and questions addressed through the prism of Gardner's work, include Indigenous rights and law, Equity, corporate responsibility and the possibility of state crimes, and the nature, structure, and phenomenology of virtue. Together, the papers collected in this volume pay homage to the breadth of John Gardner's legal philosophy. The conversations begun, or continued, in this volume will continue to inform the contributors' future work, and thus increase the likelihood that John's body of work will have an ever greater influence on the future of legal philosophy.
A captivating biography of the remarkable young Scotswoman whose bold decision to help "Bonnie" Prince Charlie--the Stuart claimant to the British throne--evade capture and flee the country has become the stuff of legend. After his decisive defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Prince Charles Edward Stuart was a man on the run. Seeking refuge in the Outer Hebrides, hoping to escape to France, he found an unlikely ally in Flora MacDonald, a young woman in her early twenties, loyal to the Stuarts. Disguising the prince as an Irish maid, petticoats and all, Flora conveyed Charles by boat to Skye, where they lodged safely with her family, until the prince's inexpert handling of feminine attire caused concern, and he was persuaded to forgo the ruse before fleeing the area undetected. Flora never saw him again. This famous incident led to Flora's enduring appeal as a courageous Scottish heroine, inspiring and influencing countless novels, poems, and songs--most notably, the classic ballad "Skye Boat Song" adapted from a traditional tune in the late nineteenth century. But her remarkable life didn't come to a close with her clandestine mission to Skye. Faced with a confession from one of the boatmen, Flora was arrested and taken to London on charges of treason, where under interrogation, she wittily deflected questions and staunchly defended her motives. She was eventually released under the 1747 Act of Indemnity, but disaster would befall her yet again: in 1774, Flora and her husband, Allan MacDonald, fled the impoverished highlands for a brighter future in Cross Creek, North Carolina--utterly unaware of the burgeoning revolution that would upend their lives there, with Allan imprisoned and Flora fleeing, penniless, back home to the Hebrides. In this probing, evocative portrait of a tumultuous life, master historian Flora Fraser peels away the layers of misinformation, legend, and myth to reveal Flora MacDonald in full. Fraser presents a fascinating picture of this headstrong and irrepressible woman. As Samuel Johnson declared upon visiting her in Scotland, her name was "a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honor."
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war--and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated. Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault--on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament--the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable. Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia's idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post-Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.
*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice* Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size. A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors - notably English, Russian and American - attracted the talented, rich and famous as well as those who wanted to be. For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Often frivolous, it was also a potent cultural matrix that inspired the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Coco Chanel, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Catherine Mansfield, Sartre and Stravinsky. In Once Upon a Time World, Jonathan Miles presents the remarkable story of the small strip of French coast that lured the world to its shores. It is a wild and unforgettable tale that follows the Riviera's transformation from paradise and wilderness to a pollution imperiled concrete jungle.
"This book addressees a timely and fundamental problematic: the gap between the aims that people attempt to realize democratically and the law and administrative practices that actually result. The chapters explain realities that administration poses for democratic theory. Topics include the political value of accountability, the antinomic character of political values, the relation between ultimate ends and the intermediate ends that are sought by constitutions, and a reconsideration of the meaning of the rule of law itself. The essays are inspired by the demystifying realism of Max Weber and Hans Kelsen, including explications of their views on law, constitutions, and the rule of law. The book will be of interest to social and political theorists, philosophers of law and legal theorists, and for discussions of democratic theory, the administrative state, constitutionalism, and justice, as well as to readers of Weber and Kelsen"-- Provided by publisher.
"On being expelled from Paradise, young Samuel Abba pull a crafty trick, managing to arrive on earth with his memory intact. He quickly begins regaling the humans around him with mischievous stories of a Paradise far from their expectations; a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs, and the same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece, and the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers. Written in the midst of rising anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe, its raucous blend of sacred and profane is a slyly profound reflection of the author's turbulent times." -- Back cover.
Appearing together in English for the first time, three politically charged sci-fi graphic novellas by a pioneering French comics artist. Dark, smart, and indomitably cool, the '70s and '80s dystopian visions of Chantal Montellier still unsettle. Visitors to an underground mall must recreate civilization after a nuclear strike may have wiped out the rest of humanity. Newlyweds find themselves implicated in a government eugenics program. A disembodied authority reprimands a man for stepping out of view of a security camera. In this collection of three novellas-Wonder City,Shelter, and1996-published together in English for the first time, Montellier's blend of dark humor, gripping storytelling, and consistent focus on the perils of totalitarianism shows her to be a master of both comics and science fiction. Social Fiction includes a Q&A between Chantal Montellier and Geoffrey Brock.
Key is one of the simplest building blocks of music and is among the foundational properties of a work's musical identity--so why isn't it a standard parameter in discussing film music? Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film is the first book to investigate film soundtracks--including original scoring, preexisting music, and sound effects--through the lens of large-scale tonality. Exploring compelling analytical examples from numerous popular films, Táhirih Motazedian shows how key and pitch analysis of film music can reveal hidden layers of narrative meaning, giving readers exciting new ways to engage with their favorite films and soundtracks.
The second collection by "one of the most significant literary figures in the Caribbean" (The Globe and Mail). Assured but chance-inflected, ever rooted in the local but always world-aware, Console reconsiders languages, geographies, and memories as luminous soundscapes. With lyric dexterity, Colin Channer jolts old notions of New England, cross-fading from the Berkshires to Anguilla, from Connecticut to Senegal. A dissolve to the poet's childhood in Jamaica occurs after glimpsing an old record player in Providence, leading to the title poem's meditations on reggae, religion, marriage, justice, and transgressions in the home. With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of "the walk," Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out. Includes 8 black-and-white photographs
The New York Times bestselling author of the book club classics The Kitchen House and Glory Over Everything returns with a sweeping and "richly detailed story of a woman caught between two cultures" (Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author) inspired by the real life of Crow Mary--an Indigenous woman in 19th-century North America. In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend in a Métis named Jeannie; makes a lifelong enemy in a wolfer named Stiller; and despite learning a dark secret of Farwell's past, falls in love with her husband. The winter trading season passes peacefully. Then, on the eve of their return to Montana, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters forty Nakota--despite Farwell's efforts to stop them. Mary, hiding from the hail of bullets, sees the murderers, including Stiller, take five Nakota women back to their fort. She begs Farwell to save them, and when he refuses, Mary takes two guns, creeps into the fort, and saves the women from certain death. Thus, she sets off a whirlwind of colliding cultures that brings out the worst and best in the cast of unforgettable characters and pushes the love between Farwell and Crow Mary to the breaking point. From "a tremendously gifted storyteller" (Jim Fergus, author of The Vengeance of Mothers), Crow Mary is a "tender, compelling, and profoundly educational and satisfying read" (Sadeqa Johnson, author of The Yellow Wife) that sweeps across decades, showcasing the beauty of the natural world, while at the same time probing the intimacies of a marriage and one woman's heart.
An "extraordinary, ambitious" (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world--from the award-winning author of Open City New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * "Cole's mind is so agile that it's easy to follow him anywhere."--The New Yorker A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling. A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis. We're invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life. Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles," but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR * A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships -- Tessa Hadley is "one of the greatest stylists alive" (Ron Charles, Washington Post). "Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley . . . sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys."--Claire Messud, New York Times best-selling author of The Burning Girl "Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph."--Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise's father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie's own age--everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend's death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend's wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley's celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as "Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive."
In this book, Philip Arnold utilizes a collaborative method, derived from the "Two-Row Wampum" (1613) and his 40 year relationship with the Haudenosaunee, in exploring the urgent need to understand Indigenous values, support Indigenous Peoples, and to offer a way toward humanity's survival in the face of ecological and environmental catastrophe. Indigenous values connect human beings with the living natural world through ceremonial exchange practices with non-human beings who co-inhabit the homelands. Arnold outlines Indigenous traditions of habitation and ceremonial gift economies and contrasts those with settler-colonial values of commodification where the land and all aspects of material life belongs to human beings and are reduced to monetary use-value. Through an examination of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, a series of fifteenth-century documents that used religious decrees to justify the subjugation and annihilation of Indigenous Peoples, Arnold shows how issues such as environmental devastation, social justice concerns, land theft, and forced conversion practices have their origins in settler-colonial relationships with the sacred--that persists today. Designed to initiate a conversation in the classroom, in the academy, and in various communities about what is essential to the category of Indigeneity, this book offers a way of understanding value systems of Indigenous peoples. By pairing the concepts of Indigeneity and religion around competing values systems, Arnold transforms our understanding of both categories.
Named a Top 10 Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly * a national bestseller * a New York Times Editor's Choice pick "A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty." --The Washington Post "Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting." --Wall Street Journal From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
The instant New York Times bestseller. Named a Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story--and who gets to be believed It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper--and cousin by marriage--of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also skeptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The "Tichborne Trial"--wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title--captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . . Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of "other people."
Authored by Hip-Hop legend LL COOL J with Vikki Tobak and Alec Banks, this momentous volume celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the influential culture, sound, and preeminent voices of American Hip-Hop music. LL COOL J Presents The Streets Win commemorates the birth, rise, and progression of Hip-Hop's culture and its indisputable impact on American music over the past fifty years. LL COOL J presents the journey of this music genre through rarely seen photographs of Hip-Hop from its inception, from block party performances to street shots, parties, sessions at recording studios, and more. The imagery is accompanied by first-person recollections from Hip-Hop's MCs, B-Boys, graffiti artists, and DJs who share how they fell in love with Hip-Hop, broke into the business, their artistic and personal style inspiration, and their views on Hip-Hop's culture and music. Stories are told by icons DJ Kool Herc, Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte, KRS-One, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Grandmaster Flash, Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Slick Rick, Public Enemy, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane, Fat Joe, DJ Khaled and more. Each page features a treasure trove of images by celebrated Hip-Hop photographers including Joe Conzo Jr., Ernie "Brother Ernie" Paniccioli, Jonathan Mannion, J, Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Slick Rick, Public Enemy, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane, Fat Joe, DJ Khaled and more. Each page features a treasure trove of images by celebrated Hip-Hop photographers including Joe Conzo Jr., Ernie "Brother Ernie" Paniccioli, Jonathan Mannion, Janette Beckman, Estevan Oriol, Jamel Shabazz, Mike Miller, Clay Patrick McBride, and others who documented the growth; ephemera such as album covers, notebook drawings, and lyrics; party announcements; street scenes; clothing; and graffiti art. This definitive volume of the most important origin stories from the last fifty years of Hip-Hop is the perfect gift for music and photography fans. , Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Slick Rick, Public Enemy, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane, Fat Joe, DJ Khaled and more. Each page features a treasure trove of images by celebrated Hip-Hop photographers including Joe Conzo Jr., Ernie "Brother Ernie" Paniccioli, Jonathan Mannion, Janette Beckman, Estevan Oriol, Jamel Shabazz, Mike Miller, Clay Patrick McBride, and others who documented the growth; ephemera such as album covers, notebook drawings, and lyrics; party announcements; street scenes; clothing; and graffiti art. This definitive volume of the most important origin stories from the last fifty years of Hip-Hop is the perfect gift for music and photography fans.ast fifty years of Hip-Hop is the perfect gift for music and photography fans.
A definitive new biography of the Byzantine emperor Justinian Justinian is a radical reassessment of an emperor and his times. In the sixth century CE, the emperor Justinian presided over nearly four decades of remarkable change, in an era of geopolitical threats, climate change, and plague. From the eastern Roman--or Byzantine--capital of Constantinople, Justinian's armies reconquered lost territory in Africa, Italy, and Spain. But these military exploits, historian Peter Sarris shows, were just one part of a larger program of imperial renewal. From his dramatic overhaul of Roman law, to his lavish building projects, to his fierce persecution of dissenters from Orthodox Christianity, Justinian's vigorous statecraft--and his energetic efforts at self-glorification--not only set the course of Byzantium but also laid the foundations for the world of the Middle Ages. Even as Justinian sought to recapture Rome's past greatness, he paved the way for what would follow.
The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech. Over time, the freedom to speak has grown, the ways in which we communicate have evolved due to technology, and our ideas about speech protection have been challenged as a result. Now more than ever, we are living in a free speech paradox: powerful speakers weaponize their rights in order to silence those less-powerful speakers who oppose them. By understanding how this situation has developed, we can stand up to these threats to the freedom of speech.
To understand racial disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths, we must first understand how they are linked to racial inequality. In the United States, the material advantages afforded by whiteness lead to lower rates of infections and deaths from COVID-19 when compared to the rates among Black, Latino, and Native American populations. Most experts point to differences in population density, underlying health conditions, and proportions of essential workers as the primary determinants in the levels of COVID-19 deaths. The national response to the pandemic has laid bare the fundamentals of a racialized social structure. Assembled by a prestigious group of sociologists, this volume examines how particularly during the first year of COVID-19, the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic led to different and poorer outcomes for Black, Latino, and Native American populations. While color-blindness shaped national discussions on essential workers, charity, and differential mortality, minorities were overwhelmingly affected. The essays in this collection provide a mix of critical examination of the progress and direction of our COVID-19 response, personal accounts of the stark difference in care and outcomes for minorities throughout the United States, and offer recommendations to create a foundation for future response and research during the critical early days.
This dynamic new text for ethics and philosophy of race courses brings together subjects philosophers have generally kept separate--ethics and race. But every issue concerning race is an ethical issue, and it's time we studied them as such. Naomi Zack introduces students to historical and contemporary issues of race and racism and provides an ethical foundation for students to critically engage with these issues in the classroom and in their lives. The chapters discuss affirmative action and diversity, current protests from across the political spectrum, police killings, the relevance of race to the effects of disasters and climate change, white privilege as a cause for political impasse, racial identity (including mixed race identities), race and gender, and media representations of race. While treating issues of race as moral subjects with suggested moral foundations, Zack does not lead the student to specific conclusions. Rather, through thought, discussion, and writing questions, students learn to construct their own chains of reasonings based on explicit moral foundations. The book features: * Up-to-date social and biological scientific findings * Hot-button current issues * discussion questions and writing prompts * further reading lists and video resources * a comprehensive glossary * international examples to supplement US-based discussion
Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of 'voice' in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is grounded in the author's eighteen years of making theatre with Different Light Theatre company in Christchurch, New Zealand, and includes contributions from the artists themselves. This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts are grounded in the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning-disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis. This is a vital and valuable book for anyone involved in making theatre with people with intellectual disabilities, either as a performer, director, dramaturg or critic.
'Is it possible to be both a judge and a feminist?' Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions answers that question in the affirmative by re-writing seminal opinions that implicate critical dimensions of criminal law jurisprudence, from the sexual assault law to provocation to cultural defences to the death penalty. Right now, one in three Americans has a criminal record, mass incarceration and over-criminalization are the norm, and our jails cycle through about ten million people each year. At the same time, sexual assaults are rarely prosecuted at all, domestic violence remains pervasive, and the distribution of punishment, and by extension justice, seems not only raced and classed, but also gendered. We have had #MeToo campaigns and #SayHerName campaigns, and yet not enough has changed. How might all of justice look different through a feminist lens. This book answers that question.
From facial recognition-capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents-to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. By understanding the trajectory of data-where it has been and where it might yet go-Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.
The never-before-told story of how the makers of The First Folio created Shakespeare as we know him today. 2023 marks the 400-year anniversary of the publication of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and Macbeth, but these are just some of the plays that were only preserved thanks to the astounding labor of love that was the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. When the First Folio hit the bookstalls in 1623, nearly eight years after the dramatist's death, it provided eighteen previously unpublished plays, and significantly revised versions of close to a dozen other dramatic works, many of which may not have survived without the efforts of those who backed, financed, curated, and crafted what is arguably one of the most important conservation projects in literary history. Without the First Folio Shakespeare is unlikely to have acquired the towering international stature he now enjoys across the arts, the pedagogical arena, and popular culture. Its lasting impact on English national heritage, as well as its circulation across cultures, languages, and media, makes the First Folio the world's most influential secular book. But who were the personalities behind the project and did Shakespeare himself play a role in its inception? Shakespeare's Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare charts, for the first time, the manufacture of the First Folio against a turbulent backdrop of seismic political events and international tensions which intersected with the lives of its creators and which left their indelible marks on this ambitious publication-project. This story uncovers the friendships, bonds, social ties, and professional networks that facilitated the production of Shakespeare's book--as well as the personal challenges, tragedies and dangers that threw obstacles in the path of its chief backers. It reveals how Shakespeare himself, before his death, may have influenced the ways in which his own public identity would come to be enshrined in the First Folio, shaping his legacy to future generations and determining how the world would remember him: "not of an age, but for all time." Shakespeare's Book tells the true story of how the makers of the First Folio created "Shakespeare" as we know him today.
A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and dysfunctions. Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities. In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident. Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?
The first complete translation of the collected works of Enheduana, the earliest known author in the history of world literature Enheduana was a high priestess and royal princess who lived in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, about 2300 BCE. Not only does Enheduana have the distinction of being the first author whose name we know, but the poems attributed to her are hymns of great power. They are a rare flash of the female voice in the often male-dominated ancient world, treating themes that are as relevant today as they were four thousand years ago: exile, social disruption, the power of storytelling, gender-bending identities, the devastation of war, and the terrifying forces of nature. This book is the first complete translation of her poems from the original Sumerian. Sophus Helle's translations replicate the intensity and imagery of the original hymns--literary time bombs that have lain buried for millennia. In addition to his translations, Helle provides background on the historical context in which Enheduana's poems were composed and circulated, the works' literary structure and themes, and their reception in both the ancient and the modern world. Unjustly forgotten for millennia, Enheduana's poems are essential reading for anyone interested in the literary history of women, religion, the environment, gender, motherhood, authorship, and empire.
The biography of one of the most famous abortionists of the nineteenth century--and a story that has unmistakable parallels to the current war on reproductive rights For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, "Madame Restell," the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. "Restellism" became the term her detractors used to indict her. Restell began practicing when abortion was largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But as a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work, greater sexual freedoms, changing views of the roles of motherhood and childhood, and fewer children being born to white, married, middle-class women, Restell came to stand for everything that threatened the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put Restell in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed--until she didn't. A story that is all too relevant to the current attempts to criminalize abortion in our own age, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women whose fundamental rights are under siege.
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries--"a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic" (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier. "With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell's fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason's bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that's on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders."--San Francisco Chronicle New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave--only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we're gone?
A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller-about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo "This is one of the best books I have read in years . . . gripping, full of colorful characters, and strange plot twists." -Fareed Zakaria, CNN host It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium-one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo's new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling "the Congo crisis." Dag Hammarskjold, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization's biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help-an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin- Lumumba had to go. Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjold, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo's rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960-61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
When a dissertation crosses my desk, I usually want to grab it by its metaphorical lapels and give it a good shake. "You know something!" I would say if it could hear me. "Now tell it to us in language we can understand!" Since its publication in 2005, From Dissertation to Book has helped thousands of young academic authors get their books beyond the thesis committee and into the hands of interested publishers and general readers. Now revised and updated to reflect the evolution of scholarly publishing, this edition includes a new chapter arguing that the future of academic writing is in the hands of young scholars who must create work that meets the broader expectations of readers rather than the narrow requirements of academic committees. At the heart of From Dissertation to Book is the idea that revising the dissertation is fundamentally a process of shifting its focus from the concerns of a narrow audience--a committee or advisors--to those of a broader scholarly audience that wants writing to be both informative and engaging. William Germano offers clear guidance on how to do this, with advice on such topics as rethinking the table of contents, taming runaway footnotes, shaping chapter length, and confronting the limitations of jargon, alongside helpful timetables for light or heavy revision. Germano draws on his years of experience in both academia and publishing to show writers how to turn a dissertation into a book that an audience will actually enjoy, whether reading on a page or a screen. Germano also acknowledges that not all dissertations can or even should become books and explores other, often overlooked, options, such as turning them into journal articles or chapters in an edited work. With clear directions, engaging examples, and an eye for the idiosyncrasies of academic writing, From Dissertation to Book reveals to recent PhDs the secrets of careful and thoughtful revision--a skill that will be truly invaluable as they add "author" to their curriculum vitae.
For decades, social perspectives, and even academic studies of language, have considered clichés as a hackneyed, tired, lazy, unthinking and uninspiring form of communication. Authored by two established scholars in the fields of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Discourse Studies and Pragmatics, this cutting-edge book comprehensively explores the perception and use of clichés in language from these complementary perspectives. It draws data from a variety of both written and spoken sources, to re-interrogate and re-imagine the nature, role and usage of clichés, identifying the innovative and creative ways in which the concepts are utilised in communication, interaction, and in self-presentation. Observing a rich, complex layering of usage, the authors deconstruct the many and varied ways in which clichés operate and are interdependently constructed; from the role they play in discourse in general, to their functions as argumentative strategies, as constructs of social cognition, as politeness strategies, and finally as markers of identity.
There are over 400 CHD risk factors that need to be evaluated, prevented, and treated. It is crucial that we have tests for early identification, prevention and treatment of CHD and MI. CHD remains the number one cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States. This book discusses not only older traditional risk factors of heart disease, but new considerations including updated genetic material which is state of the art. This book provides a new and detailed explanation of the causes of CHD and MI based on genetics, blood tests, urine tests. vascular tests and cardiac tests. Once this information is understood and applied to the patient the control of CHD risk factors, cardiovascular complications such as MI and heart failure will be improved with fewer adverse effects and lower cost. No other heart book on the market has this updated and extensive data based on published trials and the experience of the author. Chapters are written in an easy- to -understand format and all medical terms are defined for the reader. Tables and figures are provided each chapter to better illustrate what is described in the text, provide concise, understandable, and valuable information. All references are numbered in the text and then listed at the end of each chapter - the references provide additional medical information. Summaries and Key Take Away Points are provided at the end of each chapter. A sources section is listed at the end of the book which lists contact information for the best nutritional supplement companies, lab, and testing companies, as well as other important sources mentioned in the text of the book.
The 1925 trial of John Scopes in tiny Dayton, Tennessee, remains a defining moment in American history. This "trial of the century"--a "media event" before the term was coined--addressed issues that still affect our society today, such as control of the school curriculum, the ongoing tensions between science and faith in public schools, and the ramifications of teaching evolution and human origins. This book is the first encyclopedic treatment of the Scopes Trial. The text draws on media reports, family interviews, and Scopes' personal correspondence, providing new information and perspectives. The book includes previously unseen photos and information about Scopes and his relatives, as well as insights about the trial's instigators, participants, and issues, all organized in a concise and easily accessible format.
An unflinching exposé of how the family, juvenile, and criminal justice systems monetize the communities they purport to serve and trap them in crushing poverty Injustice, Inc. exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations. Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and the 2023 Nero Book Award for Fiction Winner of the 2023 An Post Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year Finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction A Top 10 Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads of 2023. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, New York Public Library, BBC, and more From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart. The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he's on the brink of running away. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda's wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man? The Bee Sting, Paul Murray's exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this urgent book from historian Felicia Kornbluh reveals two movement victories in New York that forever changed the politics of reproductive rights nationally Before there was a "Jane Roe," the most important champions of reproductive rights were ordinary people working in their local communities. In A Woman's Life Isa Human Life, historian Felicia Kornbluh delivers the untold story of everyday activists who defined those rights and achieved them, in the years immediately before and after Roev. Wade made abortion legal under federal law. A Woman's Life Is a Human Life is the story of two movements in New York that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the fight against sterilization abuse, which happened disproportionately in communities of color and was central to an activism that was about the right to bear children, as well as not to. Each initiative won key victories that relied on people power and not on the federal courts. Their histories cast new light on Roe and constitutional rights, on the difficulty and importance of achieving a truly inclusive feminism, and on reproductive politics today. This is a book full of drama. From dissident Democrats who were the first to try reforming abortion laws and members of a rising feminist movement who refashioned them, to the nation's largest abortion referral service established by progressive Christian and Jewish clergy, to Puerto Rican activists who demanded community accountability in healthcare and introduced sterilization abuse to the movement's agenda, and Black women who took the cause global, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life documents the diverse ways activists changed the law and worked to create a world that would support all people's reproductive choices. The first in-depth study of a winning campaign against a state's abortion law and the first to chronicle the sterilization abuse fight side-by-side with the one for abortion rights, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life is rich with firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources--including those from Kornbluh's mother, who wrote the first draft of New York's law decriminalizing abortion, and their across-the-hall neighbor,Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, a Puerto Ricandoctor who cofounded the movement against sterilization abuse. In this dynamic, surprising,and highly readable history, Felicia Kornbluh corrects the record to show how grassroots action overcame the odds to create policy change--and how it might work today.
"Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College--Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky. Now the real training begins, and Violet's already wondering how she'll get through. It's not just that it's grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it's designed to stretch the riders' capacity for pain beyond endurance. It's the new vice commandant, who's made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is--unless she betrays the man she loves. Although Violet's body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else's, she still has her wits--and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules. But a determination to survive won't be enough this year. Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College--and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end"-- Provided by publisher.
An instant bestseller in Korea and the follow up to the international bestseller, Please Look After Mom; centering on a woman's efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets. Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father only appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter. Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father's past and reconstructs her own family history. Consumed with her own grief, Hon had been blind to her father's vulnerability and her family's fragility. Unraveling secret after secret and thanks to conversations with loving family and friends, Hon grows closer to her father, who proves to be more complex than she ever gave him credit for. After living through one of the most tumultuous times in Korean history, her father's life was once vibrant and ambitious, but spiraled during the postwar years. Now, after years of emotional isolation, Hon learns the whole truth, from her father's affair and involvement in a religious sect, to the dynamic lives of her own siblings, to her family's financial hardships. What Hon uncovers about her father builds towards her understanding of the great scope of his sacrifice and heroism, and of his generation as a whole. More than just the portrait of a single man, I Went to See My Father opens a window onto humankind, family, loss, and war. With this long-awaited follow-up to Please Look After Mom--flawlessly rendered by award-winning translator Anton Hur--Kyung-Sook Shin has crafted an ambitious, global, epic, and lasting novel.
A powerful, pocket-sized citizen's guide on how to fight back against the disinformation campaigns that are imperiling American democracy, from the bestselling author of Post-Truth and How to Talk to a Science Denier. The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth. McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today's "reality denial" follows the same flawed blueprint of the "five steps of science denial" used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens-from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media-as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take. Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.
Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people. Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater's generative power to enact performances of "double liminality" and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.
An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson One of the most acclaimed and internationally bestselling "unforgettable" (New York Times) debuts of the 2021, Caleb Azumah Nelson's London-set love story Open Water took the US by storm and introduced the world to a salient and insightful new voice in fiction. Now, with his second novel Small Worlds, the prodigious Azumah Nelson brings another set of enduring characters to brilliant life in his signature rhythmic, melodic prose. Set over the course of three summers, Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain path--a university degree, a move out of home--but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fractures in ways he didn't foresee. Now Stephen must find a path and peace for himself: a space he can feel beautiful, a space he can feel free. Moving from London, England to Accra, Ghana and back again, Small Worlds is an exquisite and intimate new novel about the people and places we hold close, from one of the most "elegant, poetic" (CNN) and important voices of a generation.
A deeply researched, shattering new account of Nelson Mandela's relationship with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that "does justice both to the couple's political heroism and to the betrayals and the secrets that hounded their union" (The New Yorker). Drawing on never-before-seen material, Steinberg--one of South Africa's foremost nonfiction writers--reveals the fractures and stubborn bonds at the heart of a volatile and groundbreaking union, a very modern political marriage that played out on the world stage. "Powerful, intimate." --The Washington Post One of the most celebrated political leaders of a century, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. During his years in prison, Nelson grew ever more in love with an idealized version of his wife, courting her in his letters as if they were young lovers frozen in time. But Winnie, every bit his political equal, found herself increasingly estranged from her jailed husband's politics. Behind his back, she was trying to orchestrate an armed seizure of power, a path he feared would lead to an endless civil war. Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage--its longings, its obsessions, its deceits--making South African history a page-turning political biography. Winnie and Nelson is a modern epic in which trauma doesn't affect just the couple at its center, but an entire nation. It is also a Shakespearean drama in which bonds of love and commitment mingle with timeless questions of revolution, such as whether to seek retribution or a negotiated peace. Steinberg reveals, with power and tender emotional insight, how far these forever-entwined leaders would go for each other and where they drew the line. For in the end, both knew theirs was not simply a marriage, but a contest to decide how apartheid should be fought.
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel--set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival "[A] powerful book." --Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead * "Emotionally propulsive" - Oprah Daily * "Showcases Ayana Mathis's grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read." - Jesmyn Ward, author of Let Us Descend From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tongued, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America's most fiercely talented storytellers.
How American symbols inspired enslaved people and their allies to fight for true freedom In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence?s assertion ?that all men are created equal,? Patrick Henry?s cry of ?Give me liberty, or give me death!,? and Francis Scott Key?s ?star-spangled banner? waving over ?the land of the free and the home of the brave,? were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to ?life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? was universal, natural, and inalienable. For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic?s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery. Symbols of Freedom is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic?s promise by waging war against slavery. In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue them.
A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores the weight of the devil's bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom. Hugo Contreras's world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo's debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo. One day, Hugo's nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo's debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there's one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn't believe in spirits. Hugo plans to do what he's done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo's old tricks don't work. Memories of his past--his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy--collide with Alexi's demons in an explosive climax. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe--to ourselves, our families, and our histories.
* "Supple, superb." --The Boston Globe * "A deft mash of lonesomeness and wit." --Chicago Tribune * "Her best in more than two decades." --The New York Times * Award-winning short story writer Ann Beattie returns with a "sophisticated, idiosyncratic, and witty" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) collection of linked stories set in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a moment of unrest. Onlookers is collection of extraordinary stories about people living in the same Southern town whose lives intersect in surprising ways. Peaceful Charlottesville, Virginia, drew national attention when white nationalists held a rally there in 2017, a horrific event whose repercussions are still felt today. Confederate monuments such as General Robert E. Lee atop his horse were then still standing. The statues are a constant presence and a metaphoric refrain throughout this collection, though they represent different things to different characters. Some landmarks may have faded from consciousness but provoke fresh outrage when viewed through newly opened eyes. In "Nearby," an elderly man and his younger wife watch from their penthouse as protestors gather to oppose the once "heroic" explorers Lewis and Clark depicted towering over their native guide, Sacagawea. A lawyer in "In the Great Southern Tradition" deals with a crisis on Richmond's Monument Avenue, while his sister and nephew plant tulip bulbs at her stately home. These are stories of unexpected relationships that affirm the value of friendship, even when it requires difficult compromises or unexpected risks. Ann Beattie explores questions about the nature of community, and "proves her herself up to the task of pinpointing America's contradictions" (Publishers Weekly).
In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease causing sensory damage, nerve loss, and, in most cases, death. Neffy, a disgraced and desperately indebted twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, registers for an experimental vaccine trial in London--perhaps humanity's last hope for a cure. Though isolated from the chaos outside, she and the other volunteers--Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper--cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there. As London descends into chaos outside the hospital windows, Neffy befriends Leon, who before the pandemic had been working on a controversial technology that allows users to revisit their memories. She withdraws into projections of her past--a childhood bisected by divorce, a recent love affair, her obsessive research with octopuses, and the one mistake that ended her career. The lines between past, present, and future begin to blur, and Neffy is left with defining questions: Who can she trust? Why can't she forgive herself? How should she live, if she survives? Claire Fuller's The Memory of Animals is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival and suspense, grief and hope, consequences and connectedness that asks what truly defines us--and to what lengths we will go to rescue ourselves and those we love.
A thrilling narrative history of how one rap battle in New York transformed American culture forever. July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000--and their reputations--on the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best? In Harlem World, journalist Jonathan Mael chronicles this fateful night of hip hop rivalry and shares a new look at how Harlem helped ignite a musical revolution. Since hip hop first emerged in New York in the early 1970s, artists like Theodore Livingston (DJ Grand Wizzard Theodore) and Curtis Brown (Grandmaster Caz) sought to elevate this uniquely American musical genre by pushing the limits of record-playing techniques and lyricism. The two crews they assembled put on the best shows in a world where hip hop was still a strictly live art form. Even as acts like the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow became commercially successful, New York's top two crews strove to claim the ultimate spot atop the city's hip hop scene. The battle blew the roof off Harlem World that night, and bootlegged cassette tapes of the match-up sent aftershocks around the city as more fans listened to the legendary performances. Set in the New York of the 1970s and '80s, this book shares dozens of new, exclusive interviews and a treasure trove of previously unpublished archival material to tell the story of Cold Crush and Fantastic's rivalry, documenting one of the most important stories in hip hop history. This is the first book of its kind to focus on 1979-1983 and the legendary battles at Harlem World while connecting the genre's formative years to its massive role in American society today.
A groundbreaking look at the history of transgender representation in TV and film, by an of-the-moment and in-demand culture reporter. WE SEE EACH OTHER is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation. The films and television shows that Tre'vell covers include- Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Psycho, Holiday Heart, Boy's Don't Cry, America's Next Top Model, Some Like It Hot, Survivor, Tangerine, Pose, RuPaul's Drag Race and much more. Though there have been trans memoirs and histories, there has never been a book quite like this, nor is anyone more suited to write it than Tre'vell. "I don't remember exactly when I was taught to hate myself," says Tre'vell Anderson in We See Each Other's introduction. As the narrative unfolds, Tre'vell knits together the history of trans people on screen with stories of their life growing up and their formative experiences as a Black, trans journalist.
Providing examples of successful approaches to unsettling Western archival paradigms from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, this book showcases vital community archival work that will illuminate decolonial archival practices for archivists, curators, heritage practitioners, and others responsible for the stewardship of materials by and about Indigenous communities.
"Reeling from a breakup, a young Danish woman recovers her sense of self through conversations with parents, friends, and strangers. A sweet and quirky debut about heartbreak, memory, and the endless potential of language." ―Kirkus Reviews The narrator's long-term girlfriend has just broken things off, forcing her to move back in with her father, a Pink Floyd-loving priest. While she desperately tries to convince her girlfriend to reconsider, the rest of the world bombards her with advice: from her childhood friend Mulle to her kindly therapist to her overbearing mother and card-playing father. Bumbling through the fog of disillusionment, the narrator gives herself permission to grieve, philosophize, and be generally outrageous until at last she sees a light at the end of the tunnel. My Mother Says is a compendium of conversations between people who talk past one another in a universe of misplaced good intentions. In this whirlwind of memories, confessions, temper tantrums, and declarations of love Pilgaard's sheer affection for her characters turns the pain of a broken heart into a heartwarming comedy of errors.
"These are new Cubans. Twenty-first-century Marielitos. Balseros, as the bartender had referred to them. I know, because my mom tells me that these are the kinds of Cubans I need to stay away from." In eight captivating stories, In This World of Ultraviolet Light--winner of the 2021 Don Belton Prize--navigates tensions between Cubans, Cuban Americans, and the larger Latinx community. Though these stories span many locations--from a mulch manufacturing facility on the edge of Big Cypress National Preserve to the borderlands between Georgia and the Carolinas--they are overshadowed by an obsession with Miami as a place that exists in the popular imagination. Beyond beaches and palm trees, Raul Palma goes off the beaten path to portray everyday people clinging to their city and struggling to find cultural grounding. As Anjali Sachdeva writes, "This is fiction to steal the breath of any reader, from any background." Boldly interrogating identity, the discomfort of connection, and the entanglement of love and cruelty, In This World of Ultraviolet Light is a nuanced collection of stories that won't let you go.
Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to Sao Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days--the fruit of years of study--Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.
"A hair-raising, head-banging, meet-the-Devil epic tale of love, youth, and rock 'n' roll." --Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less Is Lost Kip, Leslie, and Kira are outliers--even in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another. Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida's swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they've found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal. On a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, in the middle of a show, she simply vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined. In his most absorbing and ambitious novel yet, John Wray dives deep into the wild, funhouse world of heavy metal and death cults in the 1980s and '90s. Gone to the Wolves lays bare the intensity, tumult, and thrill of friendship in adolescence--a time when music can often feel like life or death.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart. "A stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time--it's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page." --NPR When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria. For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.
The contributors to Transnational French Studies situate this disciplinary subfield of Modern Languages in actively transnational frameworks. The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book considers the transnational dimensions of being human in the world by focusing on four key practices which constitute the object of study for students of French: language and multilingualism; the construction of transcultural places and the corresponding sense of space; the experience of time; and transnational subjectivities. The underlying premise of the volume is that the transnational is present (and has long been present) throughout what we define as French history and culture. Chapters address instances and phenomena associated with the transnational, from prehistory to the present, opening up the geopolitical map of French studies beyond France and including sites where communities identified as French have formed.
Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites. This volume introduces readers to eastern North America's Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)--sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation. In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection. This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.
"Tender and poignant, Washington's latest hits the spot." - PEOPLE Magazine From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time? When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel . . . Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing." --Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review "We all need--we all deserve--this vibrant, love-affirming novel that bounds over any difference that claims to separate us." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe's theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community--heaven and earth--that sustain us. Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * Instant New York Times Bestseller * From Jesmyn Ward--the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow--comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. "'Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" --Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land--the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward's most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.
A New York Times Editors' Choice * Named a Fall 2023 Must-Read by Outside, Sierra, and Kirkus Reviews * A Boston Globe Book We're Excited to Read This Fall An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager. Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they're practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat. Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California's mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania's car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities. Today, as our planet's road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world--and how we can create a better future for all living beings.
From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America's most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding. In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns. For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate--a mysterious process in its own right. With The Mysteries, Watterson and Kascht share the fascinating genesis of their extraordinary collaboration in a video that can be viewed on Andrews McMeel Publishing's YouTube page.
Some of the most raucous evenings in the history of theater are chronicled in this lively discussion of occasions when theater-makers changed the course of theatrical, and sometimes world, history. Covering a wide range of events from the inauspicious opening of Oedipus Rex in Athens, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., to the violence-riddled performance of Halla Bol in New Delhi, this book offers detailed and studied observations of specific minutes, hours, and days on the stage. For each staging covered, the author examines the reactions of critics and the public and tells the inside story, identifies the key players, and examines why these events still resound today.
Between Sahara and Sea: Africa in the Roman Empire challenges orthodox views of the story of Africa under Roman domination. It presents a new framework for understanding this and other territories incorporated in the Roman Empire. Based on decades of research in North Africa, David Mattingly's book is a cleverly constructed and innovative account of the history and archaeology of ancient North Africa (roughly equivalent to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) from the first century BCE to the third century CE. He charts a new path toward a bottom-up understanding of North African archaeology, exploring in turn the differing material cultures and experiences of the Roman communities of the military and the urban and rural areas. Regional and societal differences emerge as significant and of long duration in the fascinating story of one of the most important sectors of the Roman Empire. This important book is the most comprehensive in English on Roman North Africa. It is remarkably rich, with up-to-date references and a host of new ideas and perspectives. Well written and illustrated, with a plethora of maps, it will be required reading for anyone interested in the subject. Rather than emphasizing the role of external actors, as studies of "Roman Africa" have traditionally done, Between Sahara and Sea focuses on local contributions to the making of Africa in the Roman Empire. The author demonstrates that the multiple populations encountered by Rome were not an indistinct bloc, but had different identities and cultures.
Do you want to talk about the linguistic research that you think is important but you don't know where to start? Language is a topic that is relevant to everyone, and linguists are often asked to speak publicly about their research, to a range of lay audiences in the media, politics, festivals and fairs, schools, museums and public libraries. However, relaying this vital information in an engaging way can often feel like an insurmountable task. This accessible guide offers practical advice on how to talk about language to a range of non-academic audiences. It draws on the linguistics behind effective communication to help you have cooperative conversations, and to organize your information for a diverse range of people. It is illustrated with a wealth of examples from real-life scenarios, and includes chapter-by-chapter worksheets, enabling you to make your own fun and interesting language science activities to share with others.
A new novel from the Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, the celebrated author of The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living. At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson--former child prodigy, now in her thirties--walks off the stage in Vienna, midperformance. Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history. So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy's August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.
A searingly honest and resonant debut from a Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist, exploring what love and freedom cost in a society steeped in homophobia The inaugural title from the most buzzed-about new imprint in years, And Then He Sang a Lullaby is a powerful, luminous debut that establishes its young author as a masterful talent. August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It's his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends and doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There's only one problem: he can't stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé. Segun carries his own burdens and has been wounded in too many ways. When he meets August, their connection is undeniable, but Segun is reluctant to open himself up to August. He wants to love and be loved by a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who will see and hold and love Segun, exactly as he is. Despite their differences, August and Segun forge a tender intimacy that defies the violence around them. But there is only so long Segun can stand being loved behind closed doors, while August lives a life beyond the world they've created together. And when a new, sweeping anti-gay law is passed, August and Segun must find a way for their love to survive in a Nigeria that was always determined to eradicate them. A tale of rare bravery and profound beauty, And Then He Sang a Lullaby is an extraordinary debut that marks Ani Kayode Somtochukwu as a voice to watch.
While tap dancers Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Eleanor Powell were major Hollywood stars, and the rhythms of Black male performers such as the Nicholas Brothers and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were appreciated in their time, Black female tap dancers seldom achieved similar recognition. Who were these women? The author sought them out, interviewed them, and documented their stories for this book. Here are the personal stories of many Black women tap dancers who were hailed by their male counterparts, performed on the most prominent American stages, and were pioneers in the field of Black tap.
Milestones in Musical Theatre tracks ten of the most significant moments in musical theatre history, from some of its earliest incarnations, especially those crafted by Black creators, to its rise as a global phenomenon. Designed for weekly use in musical theatre courses, these ten chosen snapshots chart the development of this unique art form and move through its history chronologically, tracking the earliest operettas through the mid-century Golden Age classics, as well as the creative explosion in directing talent which reshaped the form, and moves toward inclusivity which have recast its creators. Each chapter explores how the musical and its history have been deeply influenced by a variety of factors, including race, gender and nationality, and examines how each milestone represents a significant turning point for this beloved art form. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political and artistic development of foundational subject areas. This book is ideal for diverse and inclusive undergraduate musical theatre history courses.
Can a tiny vehicle provide the space to rebuild a life? A beautiful, fearless memoir of uncertainty, self-discovery--and van life. 'It was believed lightning would not strike a house that held a thunderstone. And so these fossils were placed on top of clocks, under floorboards, over stable doors . . . But there are some storms that thunderstones cannot prevent.' In the wake of a traumatic lockdown, Nancy Campbell buys an old caravan and drives it into a strip of neglected woodland between a canal and railway. It is the first home she has ever owned. It will not move again. As summer begins, Nancy embraces the challenge of how to live well in a space in which possessions and emotions often threaten to tumble. She masters the van's mysterious mechanics, but as empty passenger trains rumble past inches from the windows, rain and grief threaten to flood in. Yet soon, Nancy's encounters with the community of boaters moored nearby, and their lessons in survival off-grid, prove fundamental. The wasteland burgeons into a place of wild beauty, as Nancy works to clear industrial junk and create a forest garden. And as illness and uncertainty loom once more, it is these unconventional relationships, this anchored van, that will bring her solace and hope. An intimate journal across the span of a defining summer,Thunderstone is a celebration of transformation; an invitation to approach life with imagination and to embrace change bravely.
Sounds Irish, Acts Global critically examines both the history of Ireland's popular music industry as well as the current music scene in the country. By placing recent industry developments in the context of that history, the authors present a new way of examining any nation state's music industry - to understand the industry, the local scene must be examined. This approach highlights the multiple and changing ways by which the local scene prepares artists for both domestic and international success. In Ireland's case the scene, with its supportive network of friends, families and fans, has developed the artists who then sign with the major transnational music firms. This book is of interest to business students as well as popular music scholars in addition to non-academic readers.
Tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century. In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law. Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.
Playwriting in many forms flourished during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Shorter theatrical genres in particular offered playwrights opportunities for experimentation with both dramatic form and social critique. Despite their originality and wit, these short plays have been overshadowed by the lengthy masterpieces of the southern drama tradition. A Topsy-Turvy World presents English translations of shorter sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century plays, spotlighting a lesser-known side of Chinese drama. Satirical and often earthy, these mostly one-act plays depict deceit, dissembling, reversed gender roles, and sudden upending of fortunes. With zest and humor, they portray henpecked husbands, supercilious and lustful monks, all-too-human sage kings, disgruntled officials, and overreaching young scholars. These plays provide a glimpse of Chinese daily life and mores even as they question or subvert the boundaries of social, moral, and political order. Each translation is preceded by a short introduction that describes the play's author, context, formal qualities, and textual history. A Topsy-Turvy World offers a new view of a significant period in the development of the Chinese theatrical tradition and provides insight into the role of drama as cultural critique.
This book analyzes the ways in which politicians communicate with each other, the media, and the electorate, and discusses the implications of this on the democratic process as a whole. It is a fascinating resource for students and academics in psychology, politics, and communication.
The Renaissance was a highly mobile, turbulent era in Europe, when war, poverty, and persecution pushed many people onto the roads in search of a living or a safe place to settle. In the same period, the expansion of European states overseas opened up new avenues of long-distance migration, while also fuelling the global traffic in slaves. The accelerating movement of people stimulated commercial, political, religious, and artistic exchanges, while also prompting the establishment of new structures of control and surveillance. This Element illuminates the material and social mechanisms that enacted mobility in the Renaissance and thereby offers a new way to understand the period's dynamism, creativity, and conflict. Spurred by recent 'mobilities' studies, it highlights the experiences of a wide range of mobile populations, paying particular attention to the concrete, practical dimensions of moving around at this time, whether on a local or a global scale.
The first major book to deal with the dual crises of democracy and climate change as one interrelated threat to the human future and to identify a path forward. Democracy in a Hotter Time calls for reforming democratic institutions as a prerequisite for avoiding climate chaos and adapting governance to how Earth works as a physical system. To survive in the "long emergency" ahead, we must reform and strengthen democratic institutions, making them assets rather than liabilities. Edited by David W. Orr, this vital collection of essays proposes a new political order that will not only help humanity survive but also enable us to thrive in the transition to a post-fossil fuel world. Orr gathers leading scholars, public intellectuals, and political leaders to address the many problems confronting our current political systems. Few other books have taken a systems view of the effects of a rapidly destabilizing climate on our laws and governance or offered such a diversity of solutions. These thoughtful and incisive essays cover subjects from Constitutional reform to participatory urban design to education; together, they aim to invigorate the conversation about the human future in practical ways that will improve the effectiveness of democratic institutions and lay the foundation for a more durable and just democracy. Contributors William J. Barber III, JD, William S. Becker, Holly Jean Buck, Stan Cox, Michael M. Crow, William B. Dabars, Ann Florini, David H. Guston, Katrina Kuh, Gordon LaForge, Hel ne Landemore, Frances Moore Lappe, Daniel Lindvall, Richard Louv, James R. May, Frederick W. Mayer, Bill McKibben, Michael Oppenheimer, David W. Orr, Wellington Reiter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Anne-Marie Slaughter
Reading Rousseau as a republican thinker might seem almost too obvious a proposition. All the same, the Genevan is often struck from accounts of modern republicanism given by those associated with the revival of republican thought. At the root of this omission is perhaps the greatest puzzle of Rousseau's republicanism is that it demands his readers untangle the omission. In bringing the republic's sovereign power into the Enlightenment, Rousseau pairs it both with the premise of natural liberty and equality and also with an account of man singularly unsuited to realizing the rightful consequences of this shared nature. Looking to both major works and lesser-known writings, this book demonstrates that, in the face of human finitude and the formidable demands of right, Rousseau crafts a robust yet judicious account of the republic. Through comparison with various republican lineages, its chapters explore Rousseau's engagement with leading moral and political problems that have defined and redefined republicanism: attaining virtue, preserving liberty, sustaining the social order, orienting persons toward the common good, and having the law rule over men. The goods of civil association are always precarious, yet Rousseau nonetheless recognizes in human community an answer to the great problems of his thought--those of inequality, unhappiness, and unfreedom.
