Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control.In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is.In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers.Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris.Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

    Now, picking up where he left off, Fulghum turns our eyes to show-and-tell, weddings, his own ten commandments, and more insightful and unique observations on what our world is and was....

    But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind — strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.

    It includes the last formal conversation with him.Twenty-seven interviews reprinted here come from a variety of sources--newspapers, radio, journals, and review--and show this celebrated author in all his eloquence, anger, and perception of racial, social, and literary situations in America.Over the years Baldwin proved to be an easily accessible and cooperative subject for interviews, both in the United States and abroad. He frequently referred to himself as "a kind of transatlantic commuter." Whether candidly discussing his own ghetto origins, his literary mission and achievements, his role in the civil rights movement, or his views on world affairs, black-and-white relations, Vietnam, Christianity, and fellow writers, Baldwin was always both popular and controversial.This important collection contributes significantly to the clarification and expansion of the ideas in Baldwin's fiction, drama, essays, and poetry. It gives additional life to a stunning orator and major literary figure who considered himself a sojourner even in his own country. Yet early in his career Baldwin told Studs Terkel: "I am an American writer. This country is my subject."

    Reflections on writing and writers, freedom of speech and censorship, pornography, violence against women, and the politics of our time.

    He has selected the best and most representative passages and arranged them in an order that gives sense to the whole and aids in the understanding of each excerpt. Pieper's reputation rests on his remarkable ability to restate traditional wisdom in terms of contemporary problems. He is a philosopher who writes in the language of common sense, presenting involved issues in a clear, lucid and simple manner. Among his many well-known works included in this anthology are selections from Leisure: The Basis of Culture, The Four Cardinal Virtues, About Love, Belief and Faith, Happiness and Contemplation, and Scholasticism.

    The essays collected in this book reflect some of the commitments and changes during the period that saw the women's movement shift into feminism and the development of feminism's involvement with the politics of representation, psychoanalytic film theory and avant-garde aesthetics.

    Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

    Included are two previously published articles in addition to commentaries written originally for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered".

    To celebrate, this book covers his amazing writing career, spanning over four decades and more than 400

    Now, share their adventures, pleasures, and frustrations: the joys and occasional hazards of wining and dining in France, taking part in goat races, attending a Pavorotti concert under the stars -- and much more. Meet Provence's unique characters: a wary truffle hunter, a gourmet in a track suit, the wise and crafty Massot -- and many more. Funny, touching, endearing -- Peter Mayle's Provence proves the adage that while you may not be able to escape from it all, you sure can have fun trying.

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is--just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    Twelve essays exploring aspects of literacy and art criticism, retrospective sociology and the effects of relativism on moral behavior.

    A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.

    This collection maintains a conversational charm while taking the contemporary personal essay to a new level of complexity and candor.

    Journalist, essayist, reviewer, playwright, and novelist, Robertson Davies has not only been a leading figure in Canadian literature since World War II, but, since the publication of Fifth Business in 1970, he has become known throughout the world.Conversations with Robertson Davies will be of interest both to the student of Canadian literature and culture and to the scholar examining Davies's plays and novels as well as to the general reader who would like to know more about the awesome man behind the Salterton and Deptford trilogies, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus.A majority of this anthology of twenty-eight interviews has never before appeared in print. Along with these previously unpublished interviews, the reader finds a selection of the best print interviews: Tom Harpur of the Toronto Star proves Davies's spiritual beliefs, Ann Saddlemyer looks into his dreams, and author Terence M. Green questions Davies on the supernatural.

    New & Expanded Edition. "In 'Eco-logic in Writing,' one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, 'Seeing the the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one's living make?' What more crucial question for those concered not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It's in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called 'the rim of occurring.' 'Writing on rim' is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino's Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one's times, 'altering oneself and altering negative social formation,' is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: 'The future creates the past'"—Joan Retallack.

    In contrast to most scholarly works which become outdated and current philosophical opuses which become stale, Coomaraswamy's works possess a timeliness that flows from their being rooted in the eternal present. It is therefore with joy that one can welcome a new collection of essays of this formidable metaphysician and scholar."

    The fact-packed history of Columbia Pictures is filled with more than 1,200 full-color and black-and-white photographs and fascinating filmographies for all 2,000-plus films produced by the studio since its inception in 1922.

    Johnson, Bookseller in St. Paul’s Church-YardLetters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and DenmarkLettersMaria; or The Wrongs of WomanMary: A FictionMoral Conversations and StoriesOn Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature

    His essays, written from the 1950s to the 1980s and collected here for the first time, show a poet deeply touched by and in touch with the concerns of his post-war generation. His spare prose illuminates many important literary and artistic figures—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, John Chamberlain, and others—capturing the essence of their distinctively American achievements.

    Hoffman recounts his growing involvement in the student movement as it rose to national prominence, giving behind-the-scenes details about the historic protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and subsequent Chicago conspiracy trial, his "levitation" of the Pentagon, and his friendships with other movement leaders. This new edition includes a selection of photographs documenting his continuing activism in the 1980s and a new Afterword by leading historian Howard Zinn about Hoffman's enduring legacy. "This book is a document . . . the autobiography of a bona fide American revolutionary." -- Norman Mailer, from his Introduction

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    In this, his sixth and possibly his funniest collection, he on, he takes on televangelists, Avon ladies, and elevator etiquette with customary verve.

    --William F. Buckley, Jr.

    to the present decade is the most imaginative single-volume guide to the French literary tradition available in English.Conceived for the general reader, this volume presents French literature not as a simple inventory of authors or titles, but rather as a historical and cultural field viewed from a wide array of contemporary critical perspectives. The book consists of 164 essays by American and European scholars, and covers the history of French literature from 842 to 1989.

    This is a compilation of the best works by Nik Cohn, one of the great British feature writers on pop music.

    Presenting ideas that spark imaginations, these books help students to gain background knowledge on great literature useful for papers and exams. The goal of each study is to encourage creative thinking by presenting engaging information about each work and its author. This approach allows students to arrive at sound analyses of their own, based on in-depth studies of popular literature.Each volume:-- Illuminates themes and concepts of a classic text-- Uses clear, conversational language-- Is an accessible, manageable length from 140 to 170 pages-- Includes a chronology of the author's life and era-- Provides an overview of the historical context-- Offers a summary of its critical reception-- Lists primary and secondary sources and index

    The job begins on a whim-he decides to move one from his woods for the sheer pleasure of seeing it from the house-and as the wall progresses, the physical occupation leads Jerome to philosophical preoccupation. Thus Stone Work, first published in 1989, becomes a discourse on the meaning of craft, the stolidness of work, the gifts of the seasons, and the complexities of being male and fifty-five. Jerome finds something pure in the lugging and the struggling with the stones, a clarity that leads him to insights into family ties, the tenuousness of nature's beauty, and his ongoing quest for fixity in a world of flux. "Maybe gravity is all the alignment one ever gets," he thinks as he pushes a stone into place, "and therefore all I ought to need. What more could one want, anyway, than the sure sense-right there, at any given moment for the noticing-of a straight line pointing toward the center of the earth?" While his wall isn't a masterwork-isn't even finished-his hands-on labor allows Jerome to grasp some elemental truths; with him we come to see the "riches, riches, everywhere, just for the paying of attention."

    Instead he found out - from the streets - what the Berliners were doing under Honecker. He observed the 'elections’; interviewed the local party members and talked into the night with an actor ('Dr Faust') who also worked for the State Security Service. He wrote about what he saw - in German - and the authorities protested. When he tried to return to East Berlin, he was turned back. He went to Poland and wrote a history of Solidarity. It was translated into Polish and became an underground bestseller. He was blacklisted at the frontier. He went to Prague to attend a Charter 77 meeting, but was met instead by the secret police. His reputation now seems to arrive before him. Ten years ago Timothy Garton Ash began to discover Central Europe. 'The Uses of Adversity' records what he found.

    

    In 1912, Americaís great naturalist, John Burroughs, was asked by a preacher to talk to his people on the ìgospel of Nature.î In this response, Burroughs focused on what gave him solace and strength.

    The essays, some never before published, examine such issues as silence, violence, and eroticism in the works of Sinclair Ross, Malcolm Lowry, Margaret Lawrence, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, and Willa Cather. They also deal with the long poem in relation to the uncertainty of the modern storytelling impulse, the criticism of Northrop Frye, the Canadian writer and the American literary tradition, women in Prairie fiction, nationalism and literature, and Canadian literary strategies.

    Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit." -- Gilles Ivain, Formula for a New City, 1958These essays, original texts, photographs, comics, film stills, and color plates document the rich agit-art legacy of the Situationist International, a group of European artists and writers who emerged from such avant-garde movements as COBRA, Lettrisme, and the Imaginary Bauhaus and from the breakup of Surrealism to launch a strategy of art as cultural critique. The Situationist's attempt to transform everyday life through paintings, films and manifestos, posters and pamphlets, acts and agitations, as well as the journal Internationale Situationiste, culminated in the 1968 student uprising in Paris and shifted the Situationist focus from aesthetic concerns to political instigation.In her contribution, Elisabeth Sussman describes the significance of the SI exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art in the context of American museums. Mark Francis's introduction explains the background of the SI and is followed by a documentary section that includes translations of emblematic pre-situationist and situationist texts. The SI, prominent Situationist artists, and their techniques are then examined and critiqued in five insightful essays. Peter Wollen looks at the SI in light of its paradigmatic attempt to marry art and politics. He evaluates the traditions that led to and from this moment of fusion and to its successes and its failures. Greil Marcus examines "Memoires," a collaborative book project by the painter Asger Jorn and the writer and theorist Guy Debord. Marcus's close reading of the book's construction in which a series of clips or "appropriations" from mass media sources were splattered with paint, shows that it literally demonstrates the situationist technique of "detournement" the dislocation or "turning" of the everyday.Tom Levin focuses on the films of Guy Debord and on their relation to the Lettrist cinema and the American avant-garde cinema of the early 1960s. Two brief essays by Troels Andersen and Mirella Bandini respectively take up Asger Jorn's relationship to the SI and the 1956 Congress at Alba that laid the foundations for the formation of the SI.

    J. Liebling’s coverage of the Second World War for the New Yorker gives us a fresh and unexpected view of the war—stories told in the words of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought it, the civilians who endured it, and the correspondents who covered it. The hero of the title story is a private in the Ninth Army division known as Mollie, short for Molotov, so called by his fellow G.I.s because of his radical views and Russian origins. Mollie was famous for his outlandish dress (long blonde hair, riding boots, feathered beret, field glasses, and red cape), his disregard for army discipline, his knack for acquiring prized souvenirs, his tales of being a Broadway big shot, and his absolute fearlessness in battle. Killed in combat on Good Friday, 1943, Mollie (real name: Karl Warner) was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Intrigued by the legend and fascinated by the man behind it, Liebling searched out Mollie’s old New York haunts and associates and found behind the layers of myth a cocky former busboy from Hell’s Kitchen who loved the good life.Other stories take Liebling through air battles in Tunisia, across the channel with the D-Day invasion fleet, and through a liberated Paris celebrating de Gaulle and freedom. Liebling’s war was a vast human-interest story, told with a heart for the feelings of the people involved and the deepest respect for those who played their parts with heroism, however small or ordinary the stage.

    The distinguished contributors to Breaking the Sequence present women innovators from a variety of perspectives--feminist, poststructural, intertextual, and historical. The editors' introduction, tracing three generations of women experimental writers, proposes that the exemplary feminine discourse hypothesized by critics for over two decades can be found in women's experimental fiction: by exploding dominant forms, women experimental writers not only assail the social structure but also produce an alternate fictional space in which the feminine can be expressed. The rupturing of traditional forms is a political act, and thus the feminine narrative resulting from such rupture is allied with the feminist project.

    Tomkins's collection of his firsthand observations of the art world as he reported them for The New Yorker includes a piece on the importance of corporate collecting and offers a look behind the scenes at the gallery of Leo Castelli.

    His range extends from Matthew Arnold to Tom Wolfe, from George Santayana to S.J. Perelman.

    In a series of provocative original essays, a dozen leading scholars show how diverse Native Americans interacted with newcomers from Europe and Africa during the three hundred years of dramatic change beginning in the early sixteenth century.For this new and expanded edition, the original contributors have revisited their subjects to offer further insights based on years of additional scholarship. The book includes four new essays, on calumet ceremonialism, social diversity in French Louisiana, the gendered nature of Cherokee agriculture, and the ideology of race among Creek Indians. The result is a volume filled with detailed information and challenging, up-to-date reappraisals reflecting the latest interdisciplinary research, ranging from Indian mounds and map symbolism to diplomatic practices and social structure, written to interest fellow scholars and informed general readers.

    The essays are presented thematically and include pieces on southern history; significant but neglected historical figures; historiography; the connection between historical problems and contemporary issues; and the public role of the historian.Collectively these essays reveal Franklin as a man who has exhibited immense courage and intellectual independence in the face of cultural and social bias, a scholar who has set the tone and direction for twentieth-century African-American studies, and a writer whose insistence on balance and truth has inspired two generations of historians.

    "An important document in the history of Latin American literary criticism."--Alfred MacAdam, Review

    Dispatches from the ultimate war correspondent of World War II

    Where Joy Resides: A Christopher Isherwood Reader is a wide-ranging collection of fiction and nonfiction, this is the perfect introduction to the author's writings...

    

    This book - originally published in conjunction with the Freud Museum in London and a touring exhibition of the finest pieces in the collection - examines what the works meant to Freud and the connections he made between art, antiquities, archaeology and psychoanalysis. The illustrations include colour plates of almost 90 antiquities, as well as documentary pictures of Freud's life and home.

    Her writing is inimitable and incomparable. READS captures her spirit in a collection of reviews and essays spanning the whole period of her writing career."We read therefore we are. The idea is suggested to me by Brigid Brophy's essays, which constitute on the of the strongest proofs of personal identity I have ever come across. If a real person is not here, where is a person to be found. She writes therefore she is, and to receive such an impression, so clearly, is very uncommon indeed."John Bayley, London Review of Books"Where hesitation would be expected, in quite brisk persons, she has always had the gift of a most stirring sort of firmness. It is not the tone of a knowall, it is not remotely bossy; it is, I suppose, basically, the sound that logic makes. She is stunningly logical. But she can turn the pursuit of logical connection into a dance for which the music might well have been written by Mozart, whom she adores, and who also had the gift of being adamant."Edward Blishen, Time Educational Supplement

    

    essay, tr Jesse Browner

    Now, in Pieta, George Klein - biologist, writer, Holocaust survivor, and humanist - faces this question head on, in a series of meditations on subjects ranging from the misuses of science to the vital importance of art, music, and literature to surviving catastrophes like the Holocaust and AIDS. Pieta is a passionate book of scientific and personal ethics, inspired by tragic events that resonate in the consciousness of each of us.

    "A lively and controversial symposium ... thought-provoking"—The Sunday Times (Paperbacks of the Year, 1989)"The essays are all distinguished by their topicality and lucidity."—MuseumNews"A welcome addition to the library of Museology"—Art Monthly"The New Museology is essential reading for all those seeking to understand the current debate in museum ideologies."—International Journal of Museum Management and Scholarship

    The originator of philosophical pluralism, McKeon made extraordinary contributions to philosophy, to international relations, and to theory-formation in the communication arts, aesthetics, the organization of knowledge, and the practical sciences. This collection, which includes a philosophical autobiography as well as the out-of-print title essay "Freedom and History" and a previously unpublished essay on "Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry," is a testimony to the range and systematic power of McKeon's thinking for the social sciences and the humanities.

    Osho also exposes how the US is already orchestrating its own ultimate downfall. All in the context of his comments on Zen anecdotes and a dazzling selection of haikus.

    By telling it with such eloquence and learning in ‘Some Kind of Paradise,’ Mr. Derr has revealed the dark side of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous hypothesis: our national character was indeed shaped by the frontier. . . . [Derr] writes with a journalist’s eye for telling details and an antiquarian’s fondness for digression and quirky facts. . . . The state’s tortuous journey from one extreme to the other is [his] subject, and he tackles it with brilliance and bravado."--New York Times Book ReviewFor 500 years, visitors to Florida have discovered magic. In Some Kind of Paradise, an eloquent social and environmental history of the state, Mark Derr describes how this exotic land is fast becoming a victim of its own allure. He begins by examining the period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression, when wealthy capitalists led by Henry Flagler and Henry Plant opened the peninsula to a flood of development by building railroads and luxury hotels. Turning to the distant past, he describes the geologic origins of the state and early fossil finds. From archaeological data, he stitches together a portrait of the first human inhabitants and their distinct cultures, then follows the thread of time to the "discovery" of Florida in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, the fall of the indigenous people to European diseases and weapons, and the pattern of conquest and racial violence that continued into the 19th century as white Americans waged a campaign against the Seminole Indians. Derr keeps his gaze on the land and its people--wreckers and spongers in Key West, cowmen on the "palmetto prairie," speculators and builders from Miami Beach to Seaside, Cuban cigar makers who rolled tobacco while listening to readings from Shakespeare and Marx, and migrant fruit pickers, convict laborers, and the idle rich--the range of dreamers and schemers who have struggled to remake this abundant, fragile wonderland. Written with both tenderness and alarm, Derr’s book presents their competing views of Florida: a paradise to be protected and nurtured or a frontier to be exploited and conquered. Mark Derr moved to Florida with his family at age six; his interest in the state’s history and ecology dates back to the late 1960s, when he watched the landscape around Winter Park change with the construction of Walt Disney World. He is the author of two other critically acclaimed books, The Frontiersman and Dog’s Best Friend, and his articles have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Natural History, Audubon, and other publications. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, Gina Maranto.