Best of
Cultural

1984

How My Parents Learned to Eat


Ina R. Friedman - 1984
    An American sailor courts a young Japanese woman and each tries, in secret, to learn the other's way of eating.

The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood


Eugenie Fraser - 1984
    Brought up in Russia but taken on visits to Scotland, Eugenie Fraser marvelously evokes a child's reactions to two totally different environments, sets of customs, and family backgrounds. With the events of 1914 to 1920—the war with Germany, the Revolution, the murder of the Tsar, and the withdrawal of the Allied Intervention in the north—came the disintegration of Russia and of family life. The stark realities of hunger, deprivation, and fear are sharply contrasted with the adventures of childhood. The reader shares the family's suspense and concern about the fates of its members and relives with Eugenie her final escape to Scotland.

Sacred Tree: Reflections on Native American Spirituality


Judie Bopp - 1984
    This handbook is being used by the Four Worlds Development Project to eliminate widespread drug and alcohol abuse in tribal communities. It is now being shared for the first time with all members of the human family desiring personal growth.

Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy


Albert Race Sample - 1984
    Born in 1930, the mixed-race son of a hard-drinking black prostitute and a white cotton broker, Sample was raised in the Jim Crow South by an abusive mother who refused to let her son—who could pass for white—call her Mama. He watched for the police while she worked, whether as a prostitute, bootlegger, or running the best dice game in town. He loved his mother deeply but could no longer take her abuse and ran away from home at the age of twelve. In his early twenties, Sample was arrested for burglary, robbery, and robbery by assault and was sentenced to nearly twenty years in the Texas prison system in the 1950s and 60s. His light complexion made him stand out in the all-black prison plantation known as the “burnin’ hell,” where he and over four hundred prisoners picked cotton and worked the land while white shotgun-carrying guards followed on horseback. Sample earned the moniker “Racehoss” for his ability to hoe cotton faster than anyone else in his squad. A profound spiritual awakening in solitary confinement was a decisive moment for him, and he became determined to turn his life around. When he was finally released in 1972, he did just that. Though Sample was incarcerated in the twentieth century, his memoir reads like it came from the nineteenth. With new stories that had been edited out of the first edition, a foreword by Texas attorney and writer David R. Dow, and an afterword by Sample’s widow, Carol, this new edition of Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy offers a more complete picture of this extraordinary time in America’s recent past.

Playing Ball on Running Water: The Japanese Way to Building a Better Life


David K. Reynolds - 1984
    Gently used copy! Mild shelf and edge wear from normal handling. Satisfaction guaranteed!

The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time


Edward T. Hall - 1984
    Business readers will enjoy the cross-cultural comparison of American know-how with practices of compartmentalized German, centralized French, and ceremonious Japanese firms.”— Publishers WeeklyIn his pioneering work The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall spoke of different cultures’ concepts of space. The Dance of Life reveals the ways in which individuals in culture are tied together by invisible threads of rhythm and yet isolated from each other by hidden walls of time. Hall shows how time is an organizer of activities, a synthesizer and integrator, and a special language that reveals how we really feel about each other. Time plays a central role in the diversity of cultures such as the American and the Japanese, which Hall shows to be mirror images of each other. He also deals with how time influences relations among Western Europeans, Latin Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Native Americans.First published in 1983, this book studies how people are tied together and yet isolated by hidden threads of rhythm and walls of time.  Time is treated as a language, organizer, and message system revealing people's feelings about each other and reflecting differences between cultures.

Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol


Okot p'Bitek - 1984
    Song of Lawino is an African woman's lamentation over the cultural death of her western educated husband - Ocol. In Song of Ocol the husband tries to justify his cultural apostasy. The first was translated from Acholi by the author while the second was written in English.

The Trouble with Nigeria


Chinua Achebe - 1984
    In this famous book now reprinted, he professes that the only trouble with Nigeria is the failure of leadership, because with good leaders Nigeria could resolve its inherent problems such as tribalism; lack of patriotism; social injustice and the cult of mediocrity; indiscipline; and corruption.

Safari: The Last Adventure


Peter Hathaway Capstick - 1984
    Now, for all his readers who want to put their taste for adventure into practice, Capstick has written the first modern authoritative, comprehensive guide to African safari. Drawing on his years of experience as a professional hunter, Capstick explains everything a bwana needs to know: how to select and book a safari; where and when to go; fees and licenses; the guns, ammo, and personal equipment needed. Chapters on each of the Big Five (lion, Cape buffalo, elephant, leopard, and rhino-- the trophies most hunters want to take) describe the techniques, thrills, and dangers of hunting these clever and cunning animals. The other memorable delights of safari, like camp life, bird shooting, fishing, photography, and game viewing in wildlife parks, are also celebrated. A list of safari agencies, hunting companies and professional hunters, suggested equipment for a 21-day safari, and a trophy price list round out the most exhaustive guide to safari ever written.Packed with solid advice and nuggets of campfire lore and hunting yarns, illustrated with thirty-four black and white photographs and six line drawings, Safari: The Last Adventure is sure to become a classic work in its field, essential equipment for anyone going on safari or just dreaming of one...

Something Said


Gilbert Sorrentino - 1984
    Something Said collects in a single volume these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art. Featuring seventy-two pieces in all, this new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984, and demonstrates Sorrentino's concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.

A Play of Giants


Wole Soyinka - 1984
    

Melancholy


László F. Földényi - 1984
    His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.

Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown


Arnold Genthe - 1984
    Almost immediately, Genthe was attracted by Chinatown, or "Tangrenbu" — a teeming ten-block area of crowded buildings, narrow streets, and exotic sights and sounds in the shadow of Nob Hill.Fascinated by a living culture totally foreign to his experience, Genthe began to photograph Tangrenbu and its inhabitants. Today, these photographs (over 200 are known to exist) are the best visual documentary record of Chinatown at the turn of the century, offering priceless glimpses of the rich street life of the district before it was leveled by the great earthquake and fire of 1906.Rediscover the lost world of old Chinatown in serene and enduring images of cobbled streets and bustling shops, street vendors and merchants, fish and vegetable markets, Devil's Kitchen, the Street of the Gamblers, Portsmouth Square and more. But most of all, enjoy distinctive candid portraits of the people of old Chinatown: a pipe-bowl member, a paper gatherer, itinerant peddlers, toy merchants, boys playing shuttlecock, a fortune-teller, a sword dancer, women and children in ornate holiday finery, an aged opium smoker and many other unaffected and revealing images.Rich in detail and atmosphere, the photographs are complemented by historian John Tchen's informative and well-researched text, which outlines the turbulent history of Chinese-Americans in California, dispels numerous myths about Chinatown and its residents, and illuminates the role of Genthe's photographs in capturing the subtle flavor and texture of everyday life in the district before 1906.

Eternal Word and Changing Worlds: Theology, Anthropology, and Mission in Trialogue


Harvie M. Conn - 1984