Author: Dianne Bergant
With the publication of Genesis: In the Beginning, one of today's most highly regarded Catholic Scripture scholars turns her attention to one of the most important, fascinating, and challenging books of the Bible. In this important new commentary, Bergant explores the biblical text but also points out some of the social biases of the original community, an awareness which is crucial for an adequate understanding of the text. She offers a wealth of insights into how the contemporary reader can best understand the biblical message.
Author: Janet Lee
War girls shares the stories of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), a group of audacious middle- and upper-class British women volunteers who nursed and worked as driver-mechanics during the First World War. It explores the ways the women subverted traditional mythologies about gender and imagined new cultural possibilities
Author: John A. Lawrence
In November 1974, following the historic Watergate scandal, Americans went to the polls determined to cleanse American politics. Instead of producing the Republican majority foreshadowed by Richard Nixons 1972 landslide, dozens of GOP legislators were swept out of the House, replaced by 76 reforming Democratic freshmen. In The Class of '74, John A. Lawrence examines how these newly elected representatives bucked the status quo in Washington, helping to effectuate unprecedented reforms. Lawrences long-standing work in Congress afforded him unique access to former members, staff, House officers, journalists, and others, enabling him to challenge the time-honored reputation of the Class as idealistic, narcissistic, and naive Watergate Babies. Their observations help reshape our understanding of the Class and of a changing Congress through frank, humorous, and insightful opinions. These reformers provided the votes to disseminate power, elevate suppressed issues, and expand participation by junior legislators in congressional deliberations. But even as such innovations empowered progressive Democrats, the greater openness they created, combined with changing undercurrents in American politics in the mid-1970s, facilitated increasingly bitter battles between liberals and conservatives. These disputes foreshadowed contemporary legislative gridlock and a divided Congress. Today, many observers point to gerrymandering, special-interest money, and a host of other developments to explain the current dysfunction of American politics. In The Class of '74, Lawrence argues that these explanations fail to recognize deep roots of partisanship. To fully understand the highly polarized political environment that now pervades the House and American politics, we must examine the complex politics, including a more open and contentious House, that emerged in the wake of Watergate.
Author: Ray McManus
Selected by Kate Daniels as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Driving through the Country before You Are Born is the first collection of poetry from Ray McManus. The speaker in these poems searches for redemption and solace while navigating from a traumatic loss in the past to a present fraught with violence and self-destruction. The volume chronicles his attempt to glean some measure of forgiveness through acceptance of his own responsibly for his circumstances. The reader is called on to witness family stories without happy endings, landscapes on the verge of collapse, and prophetic visions of horrors yet to come. From these haunting visions, the only viable salvation is rooted in hope that, out of the ruins, there remains the possibility of a fresh beginning.
Author: Daniel Wright
Reader, I married him, Jane Eyre famously says of her beloved Mr. Rochester near the end of Charlotte Brontes novel. But why does she do it, we might logically ask, after all hes put her through? The Victorian realist novel privileges the marriage plot, in which love and desire are represented as formative social experiences. Yet how novelists depict their characters reasoning about that erotic desiremaking something intelligible and ethically meaningful out of the aspect of interior life that would seem most essentially embodied, singular, and nonlinguisticremains a difficult question. In Bad Logic, Daniel Wright addresses this paradox, investigating how the Victorian novel represented reasoning about desire without diluting its intensity or making it mechanical. Connecting problems of sexuality to questions of logic and language, Wright posits that forms of reasoning that seem fuzzy, opaque, difficult, or simply bad can function as surprisingly rich mechanisms for speaking and thinking about erotic desire. These forms of bad logic surrounding sexuality ought not be read as mistakes, fallacies, or symptoms of sexual repression, Wright asserts, but rather as useful forms through which novelists illustrate the complexities of erotic desire. Offering close readings of canonical writers Charlotte Bronte, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Henry James, Bad Logic contextualizes their work within the historical development of the philosophy of language and the theory of sexuality. This book will interest a range of scholars working in Victorian literature, gender and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and philosophy.
Author: Edited by Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield
A comprehensive and in-depth examination of the role of rural space in the cinema, contributing needed analysis to existing work on space, place, and identity in film.
Author: Chris Gilligan
Racism and sectarianism makes an important contribution to the discussion on the crisis of anti-racism in the United Kingdom. The book looks at two phenomena that are rarely examined together racism and sectarianism. The author argues that thinking critically about sectarianism and other racisms in Northern Ireland helps to clear up some confusions regarding race and ethnicity. Many of the prominent themes in debates on racism and anti-racism in the UK today the role of religion, racism and terrorism, community cohesion were central to discussions on sectarianism in Northern Ireland during the conflict and peace process. The book provides a sustained critique of the Race Relations paradigm that dominates official anti-racism and sketches out some elements of an emancipatory anti-racism.
Author: Morgan Baillargeon
North American Aboriginal Hide Tanning examines the methodology, tools and spiritual aspects of what was once almost a lost art. Over the course of research that has spanned some 30 years, the author has interviewed more than 40 tanners from the Northwest Territories to Oklahoma. The result is a volume that includes chapters on 15 different tanners and their recipes, practical information on tools and techniques, as well as helpful tips for those interested in trying this traditional process for themselves. Although not intended as a complete how-to manual, this book is certain to whet the readers appetite for further investigation.
Author: Edited by J. R. Jokipii, C. P. Sonett, and M. S. Giampapa
Until the advent of space physics, astrophysical plasmas could be studied only using ground-based observations. Although observational methods have advanced over recent decades, the merging of heliospheric physics with astrophysics is far from complete due to the vastly different techniques employed by astronomers and space physicists. That astrophysical plasmas can be studies directly is a major advance in astrophysical research. The solar wind from the Sun is only one of many examples of solar winds, but it provides scientists with a basis for understanding how these formerly disparate disciplines are related. Cosmic Winds and the Heliosphere is a comprehensive sourcebook on conceptually correlated topics in astrophysical winds and heliospheric physics. The contributors review the various kinds of winds, such as solar wind, winds of cataclysmic variables, and winds from pulsating stars. They then examine the physics of wind origin and physical phenomena in winds. including heliospheric shocks, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, and kinetic phenomena. A final section considers interactions with surrounding media, with contributions ranging from studies of the interstellar cloud surrounding the solar system to considerations of solar wind interaction with comets. Prepared to the scrupulous standards of the University of Arizona Space Science Series, Cosmic Winds and the Heliosphere is an essential volume for astronomers and space physicists.