One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky "in any language, and quite possibly forever."Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia. Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism.The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

    Magical feats, extrasensory perception, and psychic healing are commonplace in this land where the natural and the supernatural coexist and challenge our beliefs about reality. At once a scientific exploration and an imaginative adventure, Dr. Watson's astonishing and life-transforming journey becomes our own, challenging many of our fixed beliefs about the "real world."

    One day, Glenmae decides to weave Geraldine into a rug. First Geraldine is clipped. Then her wool is spun into fine, strong yarn. Finally, Glenmae weaves the wool on her loom. They reader learns, along with Geraldine, about the care and pride involved in the weaving of a Navajo rug -- and about cooperation between friends.

    Translated from the French by Norma Cole. The first English translation of this French poet, now an influence on many young American poets, who died at the age of 37 in 1978. Beverly Dahlen comments: "Collobert's dash is a materialization of the gap within speech and the rush to close even as one discloses it... the page bears the record of these bursts of language ...Collobert insists on being without a subject, ' as if being were radically different from, absolutely divided from its subject. And like an archeologist she preserves the fragments of this ruined subject against time, to reproduce the duration' ...appalling in the intensity of their imagination of the literal body transmuted into writing." Michael Palmer comments: "She enunciates the words for desire and for loss the other words with harrowing intensity. IT THEN explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."

    Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change. This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium.

    En route, they fell in love with the tiny mountain paradise of Coorg, whose landscapes and people form the focus of an entertaining diary.

    Thousands of samurai were left jobless when their feudal lords were overthrown. These masterless samurai, or ronin, wandered the country looking for work and adventure. The Samurai and the Long-Nosed Devils follows two ronin who find themselves employed as bodyguards for two Portuguese missionaries who are hated and feared by many Japanese. This wry and witty mystery examines two cultural points of view as they clash head on.

    

    

    The ways in which the African world perceives itself as a cultural entity, and the differences between its essential unity of experience and literary form and the sense of division pervading Western literature, are just some of the issues addressed. The centrality of ritual gives drama a prominent place in Soyinka's discussion, but he deals in equally illuminating ways with contemporary poetry and fiction. Above all, the fascinating insights in this book serve to highlight the importance of African criticism in addition to the literary and cultural achievements which are the subject of its penetrating analysis.

    

    Scott places the critical problem of the peasant household—subsistence—at the center of this study. The fear of food shortages, he argues persuasively, explains many otherwise puzzling technical, social, and moral arrangements in peasant society, such as resistance to innovation, the desire to own land even at some cost in terms of income, relationships with other people, and relationships with institutions, including the state.Once the centrality of the subsistence problem is recognized, its effects on notions of economic and political justice can also be seen. Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the peasants’ “moral economy” and created a situation of potential rebellion and revolution.Demonstrating keen insights into the behavior of people in other cultures and a rare ability to generalize soundly from case studies, Scott offers a different perspective on peasant behavior that will be of interest particularly to political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and Southeast Asianists.“The book is extraordinarily original and valuable and will have a very broad appeal. I think the central thesis is correct and compelling.”—Clifford Geertz “In this major work, … Scott views peasants as political and moral actors defending their values as well as their individual security, making his book vital to an understanding of peasant politics.”—Library Journal

    The Trouble They Seen departs from this approach to examine in their own words the lives of ordinary ex-slaves who had few skills and fewer opportunities. People are by now familiar with names like Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Robert Smalls, but they know little of the men and women of more modest distinction, less still of the anonymous millions whose lives have been recorded in letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and official documents. Editor Dorothy Sterling has drawn on these primary sources and with cogent commentary depicts the African American experience during Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877. The period unfolds with immediacy and drama in the voices of African Americans: the problems and promise of the first year; the role of the Freedmen's Bureau; anti-black violence; the initiation of political participation; the development of black colleges; the renaissance in the African American community, a time of unprecedented progress in the fields of politics, education, economics, and culture; and the inevitable tragic struggle by African Americans against southern white efforts to resume political power and to fetter black freedom with a thousand chains more durable than slavery.