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White Oleander
Author: Janet Fitch
File Type: epub
Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.Amazon.com ReviewOprah Book Club Selection, May 1999 Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitchs engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrids boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes. As Astrid bumps from trailer park to tract house to Hollywood bungalow, White Oleander uncoils her existential anxieties. Who was I, really? she asks. I was the sole occupant of my mothers totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. Fitch adroitly leads Astrid down a path of sorting out her past and identity. In the process, this girl develops a wire-tight inner strength, gains her mothers white-blonde beauty, and achieves some measure of control over their relationship. Even from prison, Ingrid tries to mold her daughter. Foiling her, Astrid learns about tenderness from one foster mother and how to stand up for herself from another. Like the weather in Los Angeles--the winds of the Santa Anas, the scorching heat--Astrids teenage life is intense. Fitchs novel deftly displays that, and also makes Astrids life meaningful. --Katherine AndersonFrom Publishers WeeklyThirteen-year-old Astrid Magnussen, the sensitive and heart-wrenching narrator of this impressive debut, is burdened with an impossible mother in Ingrid, a beautiful, gifted poet whose scattered life is governed by an enormous ego. When Ingrid goes to prison for murdering her ex-lover, Astrid enters the Los Angeles foster care program and is placed with a series of brilliantly characterized families. Astrids first home is with Starr, a born-again former druggie, whose boyfriend, middle-aged Ray, encourages Astrid to paint (Astrids absent father is an artist) and soon becomes her first lover, but who disappears when Starrs jealousy becomes violent. Astrid finds herself next at the mercy of a new, tyrannical foster mom, Marvel Turlock, who grows wrathful at the girls envy of a sympathetic next-door prostitutes luxurious life. Never hope to find people who will understand you, Ingrid archly advises as her daughters Dickensian descent continues in the household of sadistic Amelia Ramos, where Astrid is reduced to pilfering food from garbage cans. Then shes off to the dream home of childless yuppies Claire and Ron Richards, who shower her with gifts, art lessons and the warmth shes been craving. But this new development piques Ingrids jealousy, and Astrid, now 17 and a high school senior, falls into the clutches of the entrepreneurial Rena Grushenka. Amid Renas flea-market wares, Astrid learns to fabricate junk art and blossoms as a sculptor. Meanwhile, Ingrid, poet-in-prison, becomes a feminist icon who now has a chance at freedomAif Astrid will agree to testify untruthfully at the trial. Astrids difficult choice yields unexpected truths about her hidden past, and propels her already epic story forward, with genuinely surprising and wrenching twists. Fitch is a splendid stylist her prose is graceful and witty the dialogue, especially Astrids distinctive utterances and loopy adages, has a seductive pull. This sensitive exploration of the mother-daughter terrain (sure to be compared to Mona Simpsons Anywhere but Here) offers a convincing look at what Adrienne Rich has called this womanly splitting of self, in a poignant, virtuosic, utterly captivating narrative. Reading group guide author tour. (Apr.) FYI An excerpt from the novel was selected as a notable story in Best American Short Stories 1994. 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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21492
Author: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
File Type: epub
Philosophers have discussed virtue and character since Socrates, but many traditional views have been challenged by recent findings in psychology and neuroscience.This fifth volume of Moral Psychology grows out of this new wave of interdisciplinary work on virtue, vice, and character. It offers essays, commentaries, and replies by leading philosophers and scientists who explain and use empirical findings from psychology and neuroscience to illuminate virtue and character and related issues in moral philosophy. The contributors discuss such topics as eliminativist and situationist challenges to character investigate the conceptual and empirical foundations of self-control, honesty, humility, and compassion and consider whether the virtues contribute to well-being.ContributorsKarl Aquino, Jason Baehr, C. Daniel Batson, Lorraine L. Besser, C. Daryl Cameron, Tanya L. Chartrand, M. J. Crockett, Bella DePaulo, Korrina A. Duffy, William Fleeson, Andrea L. Glenn, Charles Goodman, Geoffrey P. Goodwin, George Graham, June Gruber, Thomas Hurka, Eranda Jayawickreme, Andreas Kappes, Kristjan Kristjansson, Daniel Lapsley, Neil Levy,E.J. Masicampo, Joshua May, Christian B. Miller, M. A. Montgomery, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy Nahmias, Hanna Pickard, Katie Rapier, Raul Saucedo, Shannon W. Schrader, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nancy E. Snow, Gopal Sreenivasan, Chandra Sripada, June P. Tangney, Valerie Tiberius, Simine Vazire, Jennifer Cole Wright **
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84194
Author: Paul A. Christensen
File Type: pdf
Depictions of an alcohol-saturated Japan populated by intoxicated salarymen, beer dispensing vending machines, and a generally tolerant approach to public drunkenness, typify domestic and international perceptions of Japanese drinking. Even the popular definitions of Japanese masculinity are interwoven with accounts of personal alcohol consumption in public settings gender norms that exclude and marginalize the alcoholic. And yet the alcoholic also exists in Japan, and exists in a manner revealing of the dominant processes by which alcoholism and addiction are globally influenced, understood, and classified. As such, this book examines the ways in which alcoholism is understood, accepted, and taken on as an influential and lived aspect of identity among Japanese men. At the most general level, it explores how a subjective idea comes to be regarded as an objective and unassailable fact. Here such a process concerns how the culturally and temporally specific treatment methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which much of Japans other major sobriety association, Danshukai, is also based, has come to be the approach in Japan to diagnosing, treating, and structuring alcoholism as an aspect of individual identity. In particular, the gendered consequences, how this process transpires or is resisted by Japanese men, are considered, as they offer substantial insight into how categories of illness and disease are created, particularly the ramifications of dominant forms of such categorizations across increasingly porous cultural borders. Ramifications that become starkly obvious when Japans persistent connection between notions of masculinity and alcohol consumption are considered from the perspective of the sober alcoholic and sobriety group member.**ReviewAnthropologist Christensen grapples with what it means to be an alcoholic man in recovery in Japan. He traces the history of drinking alcohol, even to the point of inebriation, to concepts of masculinity. People passed out in the street might be looked at with sympathy or self-recognition and be considered normal within the urban landscape. Yet the man in recovery who refuses to share in the camaraderie of drinking may be looked at as aberrant. Much of the book describes the sobriety movement in Japan, focusing on AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and Dansukai, the Japanese-developed sobriety group that, like AA, is based on abstinence and group support. Christensens book contributes to the small cross-cultural literature on AA, which, as a mutual help approach to alcoholism, has traveled around the world making accommodations as it has been embraced by various cultures. This book is best understood by students who also have a background in Japanese studies. . . .Summing Up Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. (CHOICE) Paul A. Christensens new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. . . .Throughout the study, Christensen offers an extraordinarily sensitive treatment of the struggle of individual men to build a new selfhood while their sense of masculinity, and of a place in society, have been dismantled. (New Books Network) The strength of this text is that it is tightly focused on masculinity and men within the context of alcoholism and sobriety in Japan and it rarely strays out of the ethnographic moment to dwell on history or social theory. . . .[This book gives] great insight into the complexities of alcohol consumption and abuse in contemporary Japan. (Japanese Studies) This is a good book. . . .This is a fascinating book to read, exploring a wholly new ethnographic area of research. For anyone wanting to know about alcohol and alcoholism in Japan, this book provides a very good place to begin. (Social Science Japan Journal) Toasted salarymen weaving through nighttime streets and swaying drunkenly on the last train of the evening is a common enough sight in Japan. Christensens study explores the cultural history surrounding alcohol consumption, as well as the awkward understandings and treatments for alcoholics. By tracing the way drinking is intertwined with notions of masculinity and male sociality, Christensen exposes the damaging struggles faced by men who want to dodge expectations that they imbibe with others. This is a superb book that addresses a gap in our knowledge about contemporary Japan. (Laura Miller, University of Missouri, St. Louis) Drinking in Japan is a powerful cultural imperative and social lubricant, especially for being and becoming a man. Christensen looks beyond the camaraderie to show how easy it is to drink up and how challenging it is to dry out in contemporary Japan. He provides a sensitive and moving analysis of the social worlds of drinking, of those individuals who are led to excess, and of the sobriety organizations that provide pathways to living in recovery for those desperate enough and brave enough to confront their condition. His ethnography of alcoholism and alcohol abstention as daily experience, lived identity, and organized support is a thought-provoking contribution to Japan studies and a rare analysis of the cultural framing of substance abuse and recovery therapies. (William W. Kelly, Yale University) About the Author Paul Christensen is assistant professor of anthropology at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
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