Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being


Harold Napoleon - 1991
    Afflicted by epidemics and their consequences from the 1770s until the 1940s, Alaska Natives are still feeling traumatic effects in the form of alcoholism, suicide and violence. The wholeness of a society that maintained health and vigor for thousands of years was broken by the Great Death and has not been repaired by anti-poverty programs, welfare, government-sponsored health and education programs, or prohibition laws. Through bitter experience, Napoleon, a Yupik Eskimo, has acquired clarity in understanding the roots and tenacity of these problems, articulating them clearly and powerfully. But more than this, he offers a message of hope pointing the way toward cultural revitalization that can begin now. The steps in the journey to reclaiming health and well-being depends on communicating the sorrow and loss and embracing a new way of thinking about the problem. While there is much work to be done, this work shows a way that individuals and villages can transform the Great Death into new life.Napoleon’s narrative is followed by commentaries from elders and academics concerned with understanding and overcoming the challenges that Alaska Natives face today.

Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador


Suzana Sawyer - 2004
    As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

Into the Darkness: The Harrowing True Story of the Titanic Disaster: Riveting First-Hand Accounts of Agony, Sacrifice and Survival


Alan J. Rockwell - 2017
    No human being who stood on her decks that fateful night was alive to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain. From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know, who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912―when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 706 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats. Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless operator,” relayed the story of the ship’s band. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while still we were working wireless when there was a ragtime tune for us. The last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing ‘Autumn.’ How they ever did it I cannot imagine.” There were stories of heroism―such as that of Edith Evans, who was waiting to board collapsible Lifeboat D, the last boat to leave Titanic, when she turned to Caroline Brown and said, “You go first. You have children waiting at home.” The sacrifice cost Evans her life, but as Mrs. Brown said later, “It was a heroic sacrifice, and as long as I live I shall hold her memory dear as my preserver, who preferred to die so that I might live.” There was mystery. There was bravery. There was suspense. There was cowardice. Most men who survived found themselves trying to explain how they survived when women and children had died. But mostly, there was loss. On her return to New York after picking up Titanic’s survivors, Carpathia had become known as a ship of widows. Rene Harris, who lost her husband, Broadway producer Henry Harris, in the disaster, later spoke of her loss when she said, “It was not a night to remember. It was a night to forget.” Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and diaries as well as interviews with survivors and family members, veteran author and writer Alan Rockwell brings to life the colorful voices and the harrowing experiences of many of those who lived to tell their story. More than 100 years after the RMS Titanic met its fatal end, the story of the tragic wreck continues to fascinate people worldwide. Though many survivors and their family members disappeared into obscurity or were hesitant to talk about what they went through, others were willing to share their experiences during the wreck and in its aftermath. This book recounts many of these first-hand accounts in graphic, compelling detail.

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio


Philippe Bourgois - 1995
    For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people--Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy--who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner city drug trade. Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). He is writing a book on homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco. 1/e hb ISBN (1996) 0-521-43518-8 1/e pb ISBN (1996) 0-521-57460-9

The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Family


Margery Wolf - 1960
    An account of the many aspects of village life in China.

Musical Theatre: A History


John Kenrick - 2008
    Musical Theatre: A History presents a comprehensive history of stage musicals from the earliest accounts of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom songs were common elements in staging, to Jacques Offenbach in Paris during the 1840s, to Gilbert and Sullivan in England, to the rise of music halls and vaudeville traditions in America, and eventually to "Broadway's Golden Age" with George M. Cohan, Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The 21st century has also brought a popular new wave of musicals to the Broadway stage, from The Producers to Spamalot, and Mamma Mia! to The Drowsy Chaperone. Musical Theatre: A History covers it all, from the opening number to the curtain call, offering readers the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of the art form. As informative as it is entertaining, Musical Theatre is richly illustrated with anecdotes of shows and show people. It is cause for celebration for those working in the theatre as well as its legion of devoted fans.

Brasil: Uma Biografia


Lilia Moritz Schwarcz - 2015
    The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.

Nightmare in Jonestown: Cult of Death (Singles Classic)


Time Inc. - 2016
    December 4, 1978.In an appalling demonstration of the way in which a charismatic leader can bend the minds of his followers with a devilish blend of professed altruism and psychological tyranny, some 900 members of the California-based Peoples Temple died in a self-imposed ritual of mass suicide and murder.The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily guarded colony at Jones-town. Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper cups and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened by purple Kool-Aid.This story is part of the TIME Classic Coverage Collection from Time Inc. This is a reproduction of a story that appeared in the December 4, 1978 issue of TIME magazine. Time Inc. is one of the world’s most influential media companies – home to 90 iconic brands like People, Sports Illustrated, Time, InStyle, Real Simple, Food & Wine, and Fortune. The Spotlight Stories in this collection aim to provide you with a quick read on a single subject, highlighting our readers’ most popular stories and featuring great reporting from our Time Inc. journalists.

3000 Facts about TV Shows


James Egan - 2016
    The producers refused. In Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor's costume was inspired by David Bowie. In Game of Thrones, Hodor's real name is Wyllis. Matthew Perry plays Chandler in Friends. He says he can't remember a single thing from the show throughout three seasons. In The Simpsons, Hans Moleman has died at least 15 times. Many mobsters contacted James Gandolfini to tell him his performance was excellent in The Sopranos but warned him not to wear shorts in the show. Millie Bobby Brown was 11 when she was cast as Eleven in Stranger Things. The Tourette Syndrome Association praised the show, South Park, for its accurate portrayal of the Tourette's condition. In Family Guy, Meg's full name is Megatron Griffin.

The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics


Thomas R. Dye - 1970
    Known for its "elitist approach" to American Government, this text presents its argument in a new context--the politics of the 21st century--including the Clinton and Bush Administrations effects on government and politics the U.S.

Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California


Albert L. Hurtado - 1999
    Looking at California under three flags--those of Spain, Mexico, and the United States--Hurtado resurrects daily life in the missions, at mining camps, on overland trails and sea journeys, and in San Francisco. In these settings Hurtado explores courtship, marriage, reproduction, and family life as a way to understand how men and women--whether Native American, Anglo American, Hispanic, Chinese, or of mixed blood--fit into or reshaped the roles and identities set by their race and gender.Hurtado introduces two themes in delineating his intimate frontiers. One was a libertine California, and some of its delights were heartily described early in the 1850s: [Gold] dust was plentier than pleasure, pleasure more enticing than virtue. Fortune was the horse, youth in the saddle, dissipation the track, and desire the spur. Not all the times were good or giddy, and in the tragedy of a teenage domestic who died in a botched abortion or a brutalized Indian woman we see the seamy underside of gender relations on the frontier. The other theme explored is the reaction of citizens who abhorred the loss of moral standards and sought to suppress excess. Their efforts included imposing all the stabilizing customs of whichever society dominated California--during the Hispanic period, arranged marriages and concern for family honor were the norm; among the Anglos, laws regulated prostitution, missionaries railed against vices, and proper women were brought in to help civilize the frontier.

Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches & the Mythic Present


Claire R. Farrer - 1996
    Why people behave as they do is as much a focus as is their actual behavior. Through instructions given to Farrer by Bernard Second, her Apache teacher for fourteen years, readers gain insight into the importance of narrative, not just in ceremony but especially in everyday living on a contemporary Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Sights and smells are almost palpable as the author provides the best in reflexive ethnography by allowing readers to see her as a person rather than an all-knowing anthropologist. She neither romanticizes nor patronizes the Apachean people, who are presented as people with foibles as well as possessing much worthy of admiration.

The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers


Mick Minas - 2016
    Author Mick Minas goes behind the scenes-- interviewing players, coaches, and front office personnel--to create the first in-depth look at the history of the Clippers.The Curse is filled with drama: the unauthorized relocation of the franchise that led to the NBA filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Clippers, the disruption of the team's first playoff appearance by the Los Angeles riots, the bold but unsuccessful attempt to sign Kobe Bryant at the peak of his career, and the scandal that ultimately resulted in owner Donald Sterling being banned from the NBA for life. Featuring some of basketball's biggest names, including World B. Free, Elgin Baylor, Danny Manning, Doc Rivers, Larry Brown, Dominique Wilkins, Elton Brand, Baron Davis, Blake Griffin, and Chris Paul, The Curse delves into the disasters of the past and the complications of the present. This is the definitive history of the NBA's most dysfunctional franchise.

Communication Theories: Origins, Methods and Uses in the Mass Media


Werner J. Severin - 1979
    The book also applies communication theories to the mass media with current examples from journalism, broadcasting, advertising and public relations to clarify the concepts. A new chapter on cyber communications explores the influential new medium, using discussions of mediamorphosis, hypertext, multimedia, interface design, Internet addiction and Internet dependency. An extensively rewritten chapter on media chains and conglomerates addresses key developments in the field. The book also includes unique coverage of media uses and institutions, meant as an alternative way to think about mass communication. For readers interested in exploring mass communication theory.

These Honored Dead: How The Story Of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory


Thomas A. Desjardin - 2003
    We remember Gettysburg as, perhaps, the biggest, bloodiest, and most important battle ever fought-the defining conflict in American history. But how much truth is behind the legend?In These Honored Dead, Thomas A. Desjardin, a prominent Civil War historian and a perceptive cultural observer, demonstrates how flawed our knowledge of this enormous event has become, and why. He examines how Americans, for seven score years, have shaped, used, altered, and sanctified our national memory, fashioning the story of Gettysburg as a reflection of, and testimony to, our culture and our nation.