An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science


Edward J. Larson - 2011
    Retold with added information, it's the first book to place the famed voyages of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, his British rivals Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and others in a larger scientific, social, and geopolitical context.Efficient, well prepared, and focused solely on the goal of getting to his destination and back, Amundsen has earned his place in history as the first to reach the South Pole. Scott, meanwhile, has been reduced in the public mind to a dashing incompetent who stands for little more than relentless perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. An Empire of Ice offers a new perspective on the Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth century by looking at the British efforts for what they actually were: massive scientific enterprises in which reaching the South Pole was but a spectacular sideshow. By focusing on the larger purpose, Edward Larson deepens our appreciation of the explorers' achievements, shares little-known stories, and shows what the Heroic Age of Antarctic discovery was really about.

Death: The Final Stage of Growth


Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - 1975
    But death is inevitable, and we must face the question of how to deal with it. Coming to terms with our own finiteness helps us discover life's true meaning.Why do we treat death as a taboo? What are the sources of our fears? How do we express our grief, and how do we accept the death of a person close to us? How can we prepare for our own death?Drawing on our own and other cultures' views of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross provides some illuminating answers to these and other questions. She offers a spectrum of viewpoints, including those of ministers, rabbis, doctors, nurses, and sociologists, and the personal accounts of those near death and of their survivors.Once we come to terms with death as a part of human development, the author shows, death can provide us with a key to the meaning of human existence.

Full Metal Jacket Diary


Matthew Modine - 2005
    Faced with the prospects of a career-defining role and mentorship by a cinematic great, the 24-year-old Hollywood actor arrived in London armed with a large-format Roliflex camera-inspired by Kubrick's early career as a "Look "photographer-and a notebook to record his own on-set reportage; preparation for his starring role as a Marine Corps journalist. But expectations eroded as a strange, creeping sickness pervaded the set, a horrific accident sidelined a principal, and an unexpected rivalry arose with a co-star. And as the months dragged on, take-by-take, Modine realized he was falling victim to a manipulative mind-game of the Grand Master himself. By the time his tour of duty ended a year and a half later, Modine had shot hundreds of photos and written countless entries. Only now-after two decades and the death of Kubrick-can Modine look back on his images and words. The result-a coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of a seminal Vietnam saga. A book like no other, Stanley Kubrick would have been the first in line to buy "Full Metal Jacket Diary."

Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers


Brian King - 1996
    He shows with comments and sequence the human delusions and viewpoints that preoccupied the minds of the individuals before, during and after the illegal, cruel, and terrible violent crimes. -- Herbert Mullin, a serial killer who murdered thirteen people in the Santa Cruz area of California between October 1972 and February 1973.A compilation of essays, short stories, memoirs, confessions, letters, manifestoes, poetry, drawings, photographs and other works created by serial killers, mass murderers, cannibals, necrophiles, sexual sadists, psychopaths and assassins."In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings. I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don't believe in Man, God nor devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself". -- Carl Panzram, murderer"I wish I could enact a law that would make a dull mind an infamous crime. I'm that embittered. They've done that much to me. Every time they waddle by with a filthy story created by a filthier mind, I wonder. There they go. Free. My potential executioners. Obese in mindand body. The men who perpetrate the world with social, cultural and historical lunacy. They get to kill me. Then I laugh. I know. The whole world has suddenly gone mad. Nothing matters". -- Charles Schmid, Jr., murderer

1939: The Lost World of the Fair


David Gelernter - 1995
    It was an event that transformed an entire generation with its vision of things to come. Millions of people came from every corner of the globe to gaze in awe at the Trylon and Perisphere, and to experience for an afternoon a thrilling yet humane utopia in which every citizen lived “the good life” that art, science, technology, and moral fervor had created. In 1939, David Gelernter gives us an intensely evocative picture of the World's Fair — and of a fleeting era of innocent expectation when the world looked forward in wonder rather than backward with regret.

Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies


Elaine G. Breslaw - 1995
    The uniquely multicultural nature of life on a seventeenth-century Barbadan sugar plantation--defined by a mixture of English, American Indian, and African ways and folklore--indelibly shaped the young Tituba's world and the mental images she brought with her to Massachusetts.Breslaw divides Tituba's story into two parts. The first focuses on Tituba's roots in Barbados, the second on her life in the New World. The author emphasizes the inextricably linked worlds of the Caribbean and the North American colonies, illustrating how the Puritan worldview was influenced by its perception of possessed Indians. Breslaw argues that Tituba's confession to practicing witchcraft clearly reveals her savvy and determined efforts to protect herself by actively manipulating Puritan fears. This confession, perceived as evidence of a diabolical conspiracy, was the central agent in the cataclysmic series of events that saw 19 people executed and over 150 imprisoned, including a young girl of 5.A landmark contribution to women's history and early American history, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem sheds new light on one of the most painful episodes in American history, through the eyes of its most crucial participant.

Of the Farm


John Updike - 1965
    For three days, a quartet of voices explores the air, making confessions, seeking alignments, quarreling, pleading, and pardoning. They are not entirely alone: ghosts (fathers, lovers, children) press upon them, as do phantoms from the near future (nurses, lawyers, land developers). Of the Farm concerns the places people choose to live their lives, and the strategies they use to stand their ground.

Flake


Matthew Dooley - 2020
    But when he notices a downturn in trade, he soon realises its cause: Tony Augustus, Howard’s half-brother, whose ice-cream empire is expanding all over the North-West…Flake, Matthew Dooley’s debut graphic novel, tells of how this epic battle turns out, and how Howard – helped by the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue team – overcomes every obstacle and triumphs in the end.

A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind


Roy Sorensen - 2003
     Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he wastold: Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that. A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at questions like that and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with suchthinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken towardthese puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor.

The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability


Jasbir K. Puar - 2017
    Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II


William Henry Chafe - 1985
    Considering both the paradoxes and the possibilities of postwar America, William H. Chafe portrays the significant cultural and political themes that have colored our country'spast and present, including issues of race, class, gender, foreign policy, and economic and social reform. He examines such subjects as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the origins and the end of the Cold War, the culture of the 1970s, the rise of the New Right, the Clinton presidency, the events of September 11th and their aftermath, the war in Iraq, the 2004 election, and the beginning of George W. Bush's second term.In this new edition, Chafe provides a nuanced yet unabashed assessment of George W. Bush's presidency, covering his reelection, the saga of the Iraq War, and the administration's response to the widespread devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Chafe also provides a detailed account of the state of thenation under the Bush administration, including the economic situation, the cultural polarization over such issues as stem cell research and gay marriage, the shifting public opinion of the Iraq War, and the widening gap between the poorest and the wealthiest citizens. Brilliantly written by aprize-winning historian, The Unfinished Journey, Sixth Edition, is an essential text for all students of recent American history.

The Great War, 1914 1918


Marc Ferro - 1969
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918


Ruth Rosen - 1982
    -- Times Literary Supplement

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens


Susan A. Clancy - 2005
    They're tall. They're gray. They're green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there's no evidence they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it? To answer these questions, psychologist Clancy interviewed & evaluated abductees--old & young, female & male, religious & agnostic. She listened to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, & how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion & hypnosis. She argues abductees are intelligent, sane people who've unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films & on TV) & a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. "Being abducted may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium", she writes. This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.

The Places in Between


Rory Stewart - 2004
    By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters--by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny--Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.