Interjecting personal experiences into ethnographic writing it is "a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context."

    Seventeen-year-old Tlaloc, namesake of the Aztec god of fertility and destruction, has grown up among the migrant-worker communities that follow the seasons from Wyoming’s beet fields to the vineyards and packinghouses of the Central Valley. Bearing witness to a gritty landscape of wrenching contrasts, Loc narrates the bitter desires and crushed hopes of his friends and family: his father’s absence and his grandparents’ deaths, Zeta’s reckless abandon, Arturín’s path to prison, Norma’s tragic alienation, the farmworkers’ final tributes to Cesar Chavez, Talina’s choices and compromises. Even so he dares to dream, sensing that somewhere within the cruel beauty that surrounds him may lie his own redemption. Tim Z. Hernandez’s land of pain and plenty, his Catela, evokes the essence of the migrant underclass experience. But more, his stories take us there, into the streets and into the groves, into the back rooms of the carnicerias and the panaderias, onto the tracks, onto the thirsty highways, in scenes that unfold with graphic, breathtaking honesty.

    Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship.Lowery argues that "Indian" is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of "Indian blood" (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of "black blood" (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities. A project of First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies; published with the assistance of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for thinking about embodiment.Salamon suggests that the difference between transgendered and normatively gendered bodies is not, in the end, material. Rather, she argues that the production of gender itself relies on a disjunction between the "felt sense" of the body and an understanding of the body's corporeal contours, and that this process need not be viewed as pathological in nature. Examining the relationship between material and phantasmatic accounts of bodily being, Salamon emphasizes the productive tensions that make the body both present and absent in our consciousness and work to confirm and unsettle gendered certainties. She questions traditional theories that explain how the body comes to be--and comes to be made one's own--and she offers a new framework for thinking about what "counts" as a body. The result is a groundbreaking investigation into the phenomenological life of gender.

    But this book moves our understanding of the extreme into extraterrestrial dimensions and gives us an awe-inspiring sense of what our solar system at its utmost can do. Martian dust devils taller than Mount Everest. A hurricane that lasts over 340 years. Volcanoes with lava colder than Antarctica. Hail made of diamonds. Here, as the authors say, the WOW factor is restored to our understanding of scientific discovery, as we witness the grandeur and the weirdness that inspire researchers to dig deeper and go ever farther into the mysteries of the universe."The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System" combines a fascination with natural disasters and the mesmerizing allure of outer space to take readers on a journey that will forever change the way they view our solar system. Full of dazzling photographs from NASA s most recent observations, this book explores extreme regions on Earth and beyond giant turbulent storms, explosive volcanoes, and the possibility of life surviving in harsh conditions.More than a collection of facts, the book conveys the dynamism of science as a process of exploration and discovery. As they amuse and entertain, David Baker and Todd Ratcliff, two experts in planetary science, highlight recent developments and unresolved mysteries and strive, at every turn, to answer that important scientific question: Why?

    As the reader turns the pages, one becomes two and then three, as ten becomes nine and then eight. The numbers unfold and transform with breathtaking ingenuity. 10 is a beautiful book that belongs in all design and gift departments.

    "Superbly executed, part family history and part homage, Allison Joseph strings the frail human voices across the forceful lines of her verse to summon her absent father back from the dead." -- Maura Stanton

    Included in this group portrait are the famous: Roy Lichtenstein and his "Blam-Pow" comics panels, Andy Warhol, shy, shrewd and tough as nails, the power couple of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend; the infamous, such as the collector Robert Scull, who bought so heavily that his own dealer deemed him "vulgar"; and a variegated cast ranging from artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist to pioneering dealer Ivan Karp, controversial curator Henry Geldzahler, media guru Marshall McLuhan, author Tom Wolfe and many, many others. While shelves of books have been written about Pop art, The Pop Revolution is the first to approach it not only as an aesthetic upheaval, but also as a bellwether for the social, cultural, economic and political changes affecting America and Europe in the late twentieth century. As Marquis notes, the figures involved in creating and promoting the movement "set off the 'culture boom' of the 1960s, and were indispensable to the success, not only of Pop art, but of all the varied approaches to art that followed." Rich in historical insights and unpublished information, The Pop Revolution is an extremely readable account of one of art's liveliest chapters.Award-winning journalist and historian Alice Goldfarb Marquis, who died in 2009, was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego. Her previous books include Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern and The Art Biz.

    When the two sink into poverty, the young girl ends up with a cruel woman who takes her to the United States, changes her name to Grace, and puts her to work as a full-time domestic servant. Tree of Sighs is the story of Grace's journey to uncover her past as she straddles two cultures in the search for her own identity. After escaping servitude and imprisonment, Grace endures life on the streets and a succession of jobs, and she eventually lands in a comfortable marriage. But a phone call from a person in her past sets her on a journey to the border, where she meets a man who holds the key to her past, learns the truth about her grandmother, and ultimately finds herself.

    Over the years the philosophical landscape has changed, and in this new edition Zach Manis joins Evans in a thorough revamping of arguments and information, while maintaining the qualities of clarity and brevity that made the first edition so appreciated.New material on divine foreknowledge and human freedom has been added as well as on Reformed epistemology. The discussions on science now cover new developments from cognitive psychology and naturalism as well as on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. The chapter on faith and reason has been expanded to include consideration of evidentialism. The problem of evil now forms its own new chapter and adds a discussion of the problem of hell.The standard features remain: a survey of the field, an examination of classical arguments for God's existence, and an exploration of contemporary challenges to theism from the social sciences and philosophy as well as the natural sciences. The meaning and significance of personal religious experience, revelation and miracles--all within the realm of contemporary religious pluralism--are likewise investigated.A classic introduction thoroughly updated and refreshed for today's student.

    Anglo-American settlers were streaming illegally into their homelands east of the Mississippi River. Then, in 1830, the Indian Removal Act forced the Chickasaw Nation, along with other eastern tribes, to remove to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. This book provides the most detailed account to date of the Chickasaw removal, from their harrowing journey west to their first difficult years in an unfamiliar land.The Chickasaw removal began in 1837, a few years after the departures of the Choctaws and Creeks. In their gripping account of the Chickasaws’ forced trek, authors Amanda L. Paige, Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., describe the array of characters the Chickasaws came across, including missionaries, whiskey peddlers, profiteering government agents, and contractors, some of whom purchased and distributed rations they knew would go rancid before the removing parties passed by their way stations.Although several histories have spotlighted the politics and events of the Removal Era, this book is a unique illumination of the “whole business” of removal, including details of the places where the Chickasaws camped, bought supplies, sought medical attention, and buried their dead. The story continues into Indian Territory, where the Chickasaws faced a new set of obstacles but eventually persevered to become the strong and successful nation they are today.