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Showing 1341 - 1360 of 4017 items
By H. L. Mencken. 1949
"This Wonderful Sequel to the best-selling A Mencken Chrestomathy of nearly half a century ago is full of the iconoclastic…
common sense that marked H. L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist. " All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America. "--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights ReservedBy Orhan Pamuk. 2010
From the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, an inspired, thoughtful, and deeply personal book about reading and writing novels. In this fascinating…
set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive and provocative theory of the novel and the experience of reading. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller's famous distinction between "naïve" writers--those who write spontaneously--and "sentimental" writers--those who are reflective and aware--Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word. He takes us through his own literary journey and the beloved novels of his youth to describe the singular experience of reading. Unique, nuanced, and passionate, this book will be beloved by readers and writers alike.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Simon Schama. 2010
The New York Times has hailed renowned historian and social commentator Simon Schama as a writer who "entwine[s] past and…
present into a meaningful, continuous whole." His deeply thoughtful and vastly knowledgeable books such as The Power of Art, The American Future, and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Rough Crossings have won acclaim for their intellectually rich and entertaining studies of the individuals and influences that have shaped the human condition, from the French Revolution to the political past and future of America, from the power of art to the role of nature in Western civilization. Now, in this passionate and provocative collection, this brilliant observer brings his keen critical sensibility to a wide range of topics, both broad and intimate. Captivating and informative, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble offers a lighter, playful Simon Schama on a diverse range of subjects, from food and family to Winston Churchill, from Martin Scorsese and Richard Avedon to Rubens and Rembrandt, from his travels in Brazil and Amsterdam to New Orleans and Katrina. This selection of essays-originally published in magazines and newspapers including the New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian-is a treasure trove of surprises that highlight Schama's sense of humor, curiosity, and idiosyncrasies. Never predictable, always stimulating, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble allows us to view the world, in all its diversity, through the eyes of one of its most intelligent, witty, and original inhabitants.By J. R. Miller. 2004
Canadians greeted the disruptions in Native-newcomer relations that occasionally erupted during the 1990s with incomprehension. Politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens…
understood neither how nor why the crisis of the moment had arisen, much less how its deep historical roots made it resistant to solutions. J.R. Miller believes that it takes a historical understanding of public policy affecting Canadian Natives to truly comprehend the issues and their ramifications. An expert on indigenous-newcomer relations, Miller uses his extensive research from conventional and Native sources to explore and explain the controversial issues facing Canadian Natives today. In five sections this book covers topics such as Native identity, self-government, treaties, attitudes to land and ownership, and assimilation. Miller acknowledges the fact that there are no easy solutions, but argues that greater understanding is the foundation for building successful relations between Natives and non-Natives in Canada.By Charles Mann. 2009
A companion book to Mann's groundbreaking bestseller "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," this is a fascinating journey…
that presents the Americas as young readers have never seen them before. [This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 9-10 at http://www.corestandards.org.]By Meg Cabot, Megan Crane, Julie Kenner, Beth Kendrick, Melissa Senate, Stephanie Lessing, Laura Caldwell, Cara Lockwood, Jennifer Oconnell, Stacey Ballis. 2007
"I wonder if Judy Blume really knows how many girls' lives she affected. I wonder if she knows that at…
least one of her books made a grown woman finally feel like she'd been a normal girl all along. . . ." -- FROM Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Whether laughing to tears reading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great or clamoring for more unmistakable "me too!" moments in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, girls all over the world have been touched by Judy Blume's poignant coming-of-age stories. Now, in this anthology of essays, twenty-four notable female authors write straight from the heart about the unforgettable novels that left an indelible mark on their childhoods and still influence them today. After growing up from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing into Smart Women, these writers pay tribute, through their reflections and most cherished memories, to one of the most beloved authors of all time.By Charles C. Mann. 2009
A companion book to Mann's groundbreaking bestseller "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus," this is a fascinating journey…
that presents the Americas as young readers have never seen them before. [This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 9-10 at http://www.corestandards.org.]By Shaylih Muehlmann. 2013
Living in the northwest of Mexico, the Cucapá people have relied on fishing as a means of subsistence for generations,…
but in the last several decades, that practice has been curtailed by water scarcity and government restrictions. The Colorado River once met the Gulf of California near the village where Shaylih Muehlmann conducted ethnographic research, but now, as a result of a treaty, 90 percent of the water from the Colorado is diverted before it reaches Mexico. The remaining water is increasingly directed to the manufacturing industry in Tijuana and Mexicali. Since 1993, the Mexican government has denied the Cucapá people fishing rights on environmental grounds. While the Cucapá have continued to fish in the Gulf of California, federal inspectors and the Mexican military are pressuring them to stop. The government maintains that the Cucapá are not sufficiently "indigenous" to warrant preferred fishing rights. Like many indigenous people in Mexico, most Cucapá people no longer speak their indigenous language; they are highly integrated into nonindigenous social networks. Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed.By Inge Bolin. 1998
"In the remoteness of their mountain retreat, the herders of Chillihuani, Peru, recognize that respect for others is the central…
and most significant element of all thought and action," observes Inge Bolin. "Without respect, no society, no civilization, can flourish for long. Without respect, humanity is doomed and so is the earth, sustainer of all life. " In this beautifully written ethnography, Bolin describes the rituals of respect that maintain harmonious relations among people, the natural world, and the realm of the gods in an isolated Andean community of llama and alpaca herders that reaches up to 16,500 feet. Bolin was the first foreigner to visit Chillihuani, and she was permitted to participate in private family rituals, as well as public ceremonies. In turn, she allows the villagers to explain the meaning of their rituals in their own words. From these first-hand experiences, Bolin offers an intimate portrait of an annual ritual cycle that dates back to Inca and pre-Inca times, including the ancient Pukllay; weddings; the Fiesta de Santiago, with its horse races on the top of the world; and Peru's Independence Day, when the Rituals of Respect for elders and young people alike are carried out within male and female hierarchies reminiscent of Inca times.By Janet Catherine Berlo, Margot Blum Schevill, Edward B. Dwyer. 1991
In this volume, anthropologists, art historians, fiber artists, and technologists come together to explore the meanings, uses, and fabrication of…
textiles in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Precolumbian times to the present. Originally published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, the book grew out of a 1987 symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit "Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America" at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.By Paul H. Gelles. 1996
Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huamán were runakuna, a Quechua word that means "people" and refers to the millions…
of indigenous inhabitants neglected, reviled, and silenced by the dominant society in Peru and other Andean countries. For Gregorio and Asunta, however, that silence was broken when Peruvian anthropologists Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez recorded their life stories. The resulting Spanish-Quechua narrative, published in the mid-1970s and since translated into many languages, has become a classic introduction to the lives and struggles of the "people" of the Andes. Andean Lives is the first English translation of this important book. Working directly from the Quechua, Paul H. Gelles and Gabriela Martínez Escobar have produced an English version that will be easily accessible to general readers and students, while retaining the poetic intensity of the original Quechua. It brings to vivid life the words of Gregorio and Asunta, giving readers fascinating and sometimes troubling glimpses of life among Cuzco's urban poor, with reflections on rural village life, factory work, haciendas, indigenous religion, and marriage and family relationships.By David Frye. 1986
The people of Mexquitic, a town in the state of San Luis Potosí in rural northeastern Mexico, have redefined their…
sense of identity from "Indian" to "Mexican" over the last two centuries. In this ethnographic and historical study of Mexquitic, David Frye explores why and how this transformation occurred, thereby increasing our understanding of the cultural creation of "Indianness" throughout the Americas.Frye focuses on the local embodiments of national and regional processes that have transformed rural "Indians" into modern "Mexicans": parish priests, who always arrive with personal agendas in addition to their common ideological baggage; local haciendas; and local and regional representatives of royal and later of national power and control. He looks especially at the people of Mexquitic themselves, letting their own words describe the struggles they have endured while constructing their particular corner of Mexican national identity.By Janet M. Chernela. 1993
The Wanano Indians of the northwest Amazon have a social system that differs from those of most tropical forest tribes.…
Neither stratified by wealth nor strictly egalitarian, Wanano society is "ranked" according to rigidly bound descent groups. In this pioneering ethnographic study, Janet M. Chernela decodes the structure of Wanano society.In Wanano culture, children can be "grandparents," while elders can be "grandchildren." This apparent contradiction springs from the fact that descent from ranked ancestors, rather than age or accumulated wealth, determines one's standing in Wanano society. But ranking's impulse is muted as senior clans, considered to be succulent (referring to both seniority and resource abundance), must be generous gift-givers. In this way, resources are distributed throughout the society.By Alex D. Krieger. 2002
Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition…
sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City.By Judith St. George, Tim Foley. 2014
When Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the "Corp of Discovery" left St. Louis, Missouri, on May 21, 1804, their mission…
was to explore the vast, unknown territory acquired a year earlier in the Louisiana Purchase. The travelers hoped to find a waterway that crossed the western half of the United States. They didn't. However, young readers will love this true-life adventure tale of the two-year journey that finally brought the explorers to the Pacific Ocean.By Lydia Davis. 2011
Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany…
and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.The Cows is a close study of the three much-loved cows that live across the road from her. The piece, written with understated humor and empathy, is a series of detailed observations of the cows on different days and in different positions, moods, and times of the day. It could be compared to some sections of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or to Claude Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral.Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos in a high falsetto before the note descends abruptly, or she moos in a falsetto that does not descend. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.By Christine Shearer. 2011
"This story is a tragedy, and not just because of what's happening to the people of Kivalina. It's a tragedy…
because it's unnecessary, the product, as the author shows, of calculation, deception, manipulation, and greed in some of the biggest and richest companies on earth."-Bill McKibben, author Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet"Christine Shearer's Kivalina: A Climate Change Story is a fast and bumpy ride that begins with the history of outrageous corporate deceptions through public relations and legal campaigns, continuing with building of the coal-and-oil empire to fuel progress in the United States, leading to the horrendous politics of climate crisis, and finally arriving at its destination, a ground-zero of climate refugee, Kivalina-an Inupiat community along the Chukchi Sea coast of arctic Alaska. I was angry when I turned the last page. I urge you to get a copy, read it, share the story, and join the new global climate justice movement."-Subhankar Banerjee, photographer, writer, activist, and author of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and LandWhile corporate funded scientists continue their effort to spread doubt about global climate change, for one native village in Alaska, the price of further denial could be the complete devastation of their homes and culture. Kivalina must be relocated to survive, but neither the oil giants nor the government have proven willing to take responsibility.Christine Shearer is a writer, journalist, activist, and academic. She is the environment and ecology editor of Economy Watch, and managing editor of the online progressive magazine Conducive. She is also a contributor to Coalswarm, part of the online corporate watch website SourceWatch.By Editors of Readers Digest. 2014
Alive! is a heart-stopping collection of survival stories from the archives of Reader's Digest's 'Drama in Real Life' series. Editors…
have mined the Reader's Digest archives to bring readers Alive! Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary People Who Survived Deadly Tornadoes, Avalanches, Shipwrecks and More. In "Super Storm," Rick Gregory, an off-duty patrolman watches an F3 tornado ravage his small Tennessee town where split-second decisions make the difference between life and death. In "Avalanche!" Luke Edgar, a young father and backcountry snowboarder goes out with a buddy for a fun day on Mt. Rainier and gets buried alive in an avalanche. "Swarm," tells the story of the Walker family, out for a day trip in the Florida marsh when they get entangled in a yellow-jacket nest. The mother, Debbie, fighting anaphylactic shock must leave her injured husband and children in order to find help as time runs out. Adventure writer Tim Cahill recounts how he barely survives the extreme heat of Death Valley despite his experience as an outdoorsman in "Across the Valley of Fire"; and in "Pacific Cyclone," Tony Farrington tells the harrowing story of the crews of three sailboats who run into an unimaginable storm in the normally calm South Pacific. Readers will be on the edge of their seats as they are drawn into the dramatic tales of everyday people suddenly cast into life or death situations. Whether out on a planned adventure or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, the heroes of these stories are connected by their fierce desire to survive against all odds. Wildfires, blizzards, attacks by grizzlies, jet crashes in the jungle, are just some of the conditions people face in these stories of survival. Readers will be on the edge of their seats as they follow adventurers and laymen alike as they face down nature's fury in the most extreme circumstances, and find strength they didn't know they had, proving the depth and resilience of the human spirit. As Tim Cahill so elegantly puts it, "Then I knew, really knew, that there is a way to get from one extreme to the other, the peaks and valleys. And there is a beauty so fierce only savage emotions like fear and triumph allow us to see it."By Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, J. C. Hallman. 2013
In the second volume of The Story About the Story, editor J. C. Hallman continues to argue for an alternative…
to the staid five-paragraph-essay writing that has inoculated so many against the effects of good books. Writers have long approached writing about reading from an intensely personal perspective, incorporating their pasts and their passions into their process of interpretation. Never before collected in a single volume, the many essays Hallman has compiled build on the idea of a "creative criticism," and new possibilities for how to write about reading.The Story About the Story Vol. II documents not only an identifiable trend in writing about books that can and should be emulated, it also offers lessons from a remarkable range of celebrated authors that amount to an invaluable course on both how to write and how to read well. Whether they discuss a staple of the canon (Thomas Mann on Leo Tolstoy), the merits of a contemporary (Vivian Gornick on Grace Paley), a pillar of genre-writing (Jane Tompkins on Louis L'Amour), or, arguably, the funniest man on the planet (David Shields on Bill Murray), these essays are by turns poignant, smart, suggestive, intellectual, humorous, sassy, scathing, laudatory, wistful, and hopeful-and above all deeply engaged in a process of careful reading. The essays in The Story About the Story Vol. II chart a trajectory that digs deep into the past and aims toward a future in which literature can play a new and more profound role in how we think, read, live, and write.By Neil Strauss. 2011
Neil Strauss can uncover the naked truth like nobody else. With his groundbreaking book The Game, Strauss penetrated the secret…
society of pickup artists. Now, in Everyone Loves You When You're Dead, the Rolling Stone journalist collects the greatest moments from the most insane music interviews of all time. Join Neil Strauss, "The Mike Tyson of interviewers," (Dave Pirner, Soul Asylum), as he Makes Lady Gaga cry, tries to keep MÖtley CrÜe out of jail & is asked to smoke Kurt Cobain's ashes by Courtney Love Shoots guns with Ludacris, takes a ride with Neil Young & goes to church with Tom Cruise and his mother Spends the night with Trent Reznor, reads the mind of Britney Spears & finds religion with Stephen Colbert Gets picked on by Led Zeppelin, threatened by the mafia & serenaded by Leonard Cohen Picks up psychic clues with the CIA, diapers with Snoop Dog & prison survival tips from Rick James Goes drinking with Bruce Springsteen, dining with Gwen Stefani & hot tubbing with Marilyn Manson Talks glam with David Bowie, drugs with Madonna, death with Johnny Cash & sex with Chuck Berry Gets molested by the Strokes, in trouble with Prince & in bed with . . . you'll find out who inside. Enjoy many, many more awkward moments and accidental adventures with the world's number one stars in Everyone Love You When You're Dead.