Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule


Ann Laura Stoler - 2002
    It was, after all, in the intimate sphere of home and servants that European children learned what they were required to learn of place and race. Gender-specific sexual sanctions, too, were squarely at the heart of imperial rule, and European supremacy was asserted in terms of national and racial virility.Stoler looks discerningly at the way cultural competencies and sensibilities entered into the construction of race in the colonial context and proposes that "cultural racism" in fact predates its postmodern discovery. Her acute analysis of colonial Indonesian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields insights that translate to a global, comparative perspective.

The Days of Henry Thoreau


Walter Roy Harding - 1982
    To his contemporaries he was a minor disciple of Emerson; he has since joined the ranks of America's most respected and beloved writers. Few, however, really know the complexity of the man they revere — wanderer and scholar, naturalist and humorist, teacher and surveyor, abolitionist and poet, Transcendentalist and anthropologist, inventor and social critic, and, above all, individualist.In this widely acclaimed biography, outstanding Thoreau scholar Walter Harding presents all of these Thoreaus. Scholars will find here the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented; general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. Writing always with supreme clarity, Professor Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to "let them speak for themselves." Thoreau's thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and the sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics.You will see Thoreau's work in his family's pencil factory, his accidental setting of a forest fire, his love of children and hatred of hypocrisy, his contributions to the scientific understanding of forest trees, and other more and less familiar aspects of the man and his works. You will find the social as well as the reclusive Thoreau. Reactions to him by such notable contemporaries as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman — with Thoreau's responses to them — are given in rich detail.The totality is as complete, accurate, fair, vivid, and fully rounded a portrait as has ever been drawn. On its appearance, Professor Harding's work immediately established itself as "the standard biography" (Edward Wagenknecht). It has never been superseded. For this Dover edition, the author has corrected minor errors, provided an appendix bibliographically documenting hundreds of facts, and contributed an Afterword updating some of his findings and discussing Thoreau scholarship.

Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide


Lois Tyson - 1998
    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

Nikola Tesla: Prophet Of The Modern Technological Age


Michael W. Simmons - 2016
    He was a celebrity during the height of America’s Gilded Age. In this book, you will read about his friendship with Mark Twain, his furious competition with his former employer Thomas Edison, his uneasy relationship with billionaire J.P. Morgan, and his rivalry with Albert Einstein. During his lifetime, Tesla revolutionized the field of electrical engineering with his most famous invention: the induction motor. But that wasn’t all he contributed to the world of technology. His coils, turbines, robotic boats, and mysterious “death ray” continue to beguile the imagination and inspire the inventors of the 21st century. But who was Tesla really? This book will take you from his early childhood in Croatia, where he experienced strange optical visions and “luminous phenomenon” that gave him near super-human powers of memory and visualization, to the “War of the Currents”, Thomas Edison’s bizarre campaign to ruin Tesla’s reputation. From trying to fight the Spanish American War with robots, to electrifying the skies of the Colorado desert, and to starting an earthquake in the middle of New York city, learn how Nikola Tesla shaped the world we live in today.

Karate-Do Nyumon


Gichin Funakoshi - 1988
    Karate-do Nyumon is the result of Master Funakoshi's wish to clarify Karate thought and practice for those who know nothing about it. It comprises unpublished writings from the years before his death in 1957, together with simplified kata-sequences of movements-synthesized by Funakoshi from the traditional Okinawa Karate-do kata, for beginners.Master Funakoshi begins by exploding some of the myths of Karate:Karate-do is a noble martial art, and the reader can rest assured that those who take pride in breaking boards or smashing tiles, or who boast of being able to perform outlandish feats like stripping flesh or plucking out ribs, really know nothing about karate. They are playing around in the leaves and branches of a great tree, without the slightest concept of the trunk.In his description of what Karate is, the Master describes the history of Karate-its origins in the ancient methods of unarmed combat in China, and its growth as a fighting method in Okinawa, a country where arms were banned in a succession of decrees from the Japanese mainland. In order to prevent it being subjected to control, or more importantly, to prevent the Japanese overlords from knowing and using the techniques, the practice of Karate was kept a secret. To preserve this secrecy, the habit persisted until very recent times of keeping no records. Master Funakoshi, however, recognized in this book and others the need to formulate the kata precisely, so as to establish a standard of true Okinawan Karate. The kata in this book are not traditional kata, but they serve to establish the correct habits of stance, thought and action, and to facilitate the eventual mastery of the true Karate-do kata. All these special kata are clearly explained and illustrated by photos.Lastly, Master Funakoshi recalls stories of men who were living legends when he was a youth in Okinawa, men whose reputations overcame even the secrecy that clung to Karate until the middle of this century.

The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Arts and Letters)


Charles Baudelaire - 1863
    Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

The Secret Life of Puppets


Victoria Nelson - 2003
    In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Why We Need Love


Simon Van Booy - 2010
    In Why We Need Love, Simon Van Booy curates an enlightening collection of excerpts, passages, and paintings, presenting works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, O. Henry, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, Anaïs Nin, Marc Chagall, J. Krishnamurti, and others.Provocative and eye-opening, Why We Need Love is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts—along with Why We Fight and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter—introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in Love).

The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums... and why we need to talk about it


Alice Procter - 2020
    People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:The Palace The Classroom The Memorial The Playground Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky No. 1: Practical Occultism-Occultism versus the Occult Arts-The Blessings of Publicity


Helena Petrovna Blavatsky - 2006
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy Boxed Set


Bill O'Reilly - 2013
    Now you can experience both of the vivid and remarkable accounts of the assassinations that changed America's history in a dual hardcover boxed set. Relive the last days of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy—two presidents living in different eras, yet tied by their duty to their country and the legacies they so abruptly left behind.

Life in the French Foreign Legion: How to Join and What to Expect When You Get There


Evan McGorman - 2000
    Many of the legends you grew up with no longer apply, so whatever you've heard probably does not reflect the reality of service today. Evan McGorman explains in detail how to apply to get into this elite corps, what to expect if accepted, and how to make the most of the experience.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination


Sandra M. Gilbert - 1979
    An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."Contents:The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity --Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship --The parables of the cave --Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia --Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) --Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers --Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve --Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell --A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil --A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress --The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley --The buried life of Lucy Snowe --Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision --George Eliot as the angel of destruction --The aesthetics of renunciation --A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

Manifestoes of Surrealism


André Breton - 1924
    Manifestoes of Surrealism is a book by André Breton, describing the aims, meaning, and political position of the Surrealist movement.The translators of this edition were finalists of the 1970 National Book Awards in the category of translation.

The Vietnam Air War: From The Cockpit


Dennis M. Ridnouer - 2018
    Showcasing seventy-two true stories told by American servicemen who fought from the skies, this unique and historically significant collection is a stunning record of the air war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. There is no political agenda. There is no partisan opinion. There is no romanticizing. These are simply tales from the thick of an endlessly complex conflict, raw and uncut, told directly by the men who were foisted into its napalm- and sweat-soaked clutches. Occasionally funny, sometimes tragic, and often harrowing, these true accounts bring new and personal perspectives to one of the most studied and most maligned wars in America’s history, revealing with no Hollywood glamorizing what the war was really like for members of the US Air Force of all ranks and myriad functions who answered the call to fight. They saw no choice but to follow the orders they were given. And for better or for worse, by the time they returned, each of them would be changed forever.