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Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella William Safire, America's favorite writer on language, offers a new collection of pieces drawn from his nationally syndicated "On Language" column. Laced with liberal (a loaded word, but apt) doses of Safire's wit, these pieces search culture (high and low), politics, entertainment, and the word on the street to explore what the old but livelier-than-ever English language has been up to lately. With a keen wit and a sure grasp of usage, Safire dissects trends and traces the origins of colloquialisms that have become second nature to most Americans. As always, Safire is aided by the Gotcha! Gang and the Nitpickers League; readers who claim to have found the language maven making flubs of his own.
Source: Poems This bold, wide-ranging new collection; Mark Doty's sixth book of poems; demonstrates the unmistakable lyricism, fierce observation, and force of feeling that have made his poetry significant to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The new poems in Source deepen Doty's exploration of the paradox of selfhood. Are we edgeless and unbounded, or locked within our own singularity? What is it to be one person in the world's great multiplicity of selves? Source investigates matters of public life; the degradation of Walt Whitman's vision of a democratic America, a child's display of longing on a New York sidewalk, Provincetown's restless summer crowds. But the poems also turn toward the realm of private struggle, how the self is claimed and lost through desire, how the dapple of light on a hotel windowsill makes a claim for the life of the soul.
Seeing in the Dark Seeing in the Dark is a poetic love letter to the skies and a stirring report on the revolution now sweeping amateur astronomy, in which backyard stargazers linked globally by the Internet are exploring deep space and making discoveries worthy of the professionals. Timothy Ferris invites us all to become stargazers, recounting his lifelong experiences as an enthralled stargazer, and capturing the exquisite experience when ancient starlight strikes the eye and incites the mind. A pair of binoculars suffices to see galaxies millions of light-years away, and a small telescope can probe what Ferris calls the "blue waters" of deep space. An accessible, non-technical invitation to get to know the sky, Seeing in the Dark encourages readers to make the glories of the stars a part of their lives.
Thinks Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling Center for cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness. Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own backyard. This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist who has taken up a post as writer in residence at Gloucester. Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a world-view radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralphs' bold advances but resists on moral principle. The standoff between them is shattered by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum that "we can never know for certain what another person is thinking."
The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth Among the American poets of the generation that came to prominence in the Forties, Kenneth Rexroth has been notable both for the independence of his personal voice and for his accessibility to the tradition of international avant-garde literature. He began writing and publishing in magazines at fifteen. In his twenties he wrote in the disassociative style sometimes called "literary cubism" developed by Mallarme, Apollinaire, and Reverdy. This was not free association, but the conscious disassociation and recombination of the elements of the poem to achieve the highest possible level of significance. With his later books Rexroth moved back to a direct and classically simple form of personal statement. In this period he wrote the great nature poems, the love poems, and the contemplative lyrics that have established his reputation as one of the most important American poets.
Her "To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrieme Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-reve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. |
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Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City Inner-city black America is often stereotyped by random, senseless street violence. In fact, although violence is a salient feature of the most impoverished inner-city communities, its use is far from random; rather, it is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, how you talk, how you behave, whether you make eye contact, your understanding of the pecking order; such crucial details can have life-or-death consequences, and young people are particularly at risk. This brilliant examination of inner-city life shows that the code is a complex cultural response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope. The police are greatly distrusted and exercise little real authority here; an individual's safety and sense of worth are determined largely by how much respect he or she can command in public. Through his extensive field research and analysis of areas such as family life, school, drug dealing, violence, dating, and the role of older members of the community, Anderson makes clear the intricacies of this powerful and unyielding etiquette that colors every human transaction. He has written an important, eye-opening book that brings new understanding to the lives of the truly disadvantaged.
1688: A Global History It is an extraordinary year. The Shogun of Japan is cracking down on the samurai and is obsessed with cruelty to dogs (he is known to history as the Dog Shogun). A very young Peter the Great is just about to launch his coup d'etat and transform Russia. In France, the Sun King rules over a court of unprecedented splendor and ceremonial formality. William Dampier, an Englishman sailing with buccaneers, lands on the desert coast on north-west Australia and writes down the first Western impressions of the strange stone-age people who gather around him on the shore. John E. Wills has written an epic and fascinating book. He immerses us in a world of wooden ships, of trade in precious metals and spices, of diverse religions and cultures. He is as sure a guide to Africa and the Netherlands as he is to Western science and Buddhist mythology.
Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees From the author of the critically acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault comes this stunning collection of stories united by the themes of pleasure, passion, jealousy, and revenge. Patricia Duncker creates worlds where the apparently innocent are not harmless and people never turn out to be exactly what they seem. In "The Arrival Matters", the extraordinary novella that crowns the collection, the characters play out the sinister and atmospheric end game of a mysterious and supernatural history of love. Elsewhere, a jealous husband pursues his adulterous wife through the streets of Paris, a forbidden book subverts an authoritarian state, a TV crew gets considerably more than it bargained for, and a lesbian community in uproar is described with wry humor. Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees is a remarkable encore in the career of this daring and provocative writer.
Dynamics of Character: Self-regulation in Psychopathology David Shapiro deepens his now classic studies of psychopathology with this conceptualization of a dynamics of the whole character, a self-regulatory system that encompasses personal attitudes, modes of activity and relationship with the external world. He demonstrates that symptomatically and diagnostically diverse conditions are by no means as discrete as they may seem; rather, they are closely related variations of modes originating early in life ("pre-volitional"), in which the experience of personal agency or responsibility is diminished and anxiety thereby forestalled. Shapiro proposes that it is reliance on these rigid or passive-reactive modes and their adaptive over-development that shapes defenses and determines symptoms.
Ancient Zionism: The Biblical Origins of the National Idea Nationalism is widely thought to have been a highly destructive and dangerous force in modern politics; most people view it as synonymous with fascism. Zionism in particular, an ethnic and religious form of national identity, has been branded by its enemies a racist ideology. While Zionism has had many defenders, Avi Erlich shows that even its friends have failed to grasp its essence. Zionism is not primarily a form of ethnic or religious ideology. Rather it is, in the original form that was presented in the Bible by its anonymous redactors, an ingenious poetic conception. This book reads the ancient text with ancient eyes that make it startling and fresh for those conditioned to the "modern" view of national identity as based on either race or ideology. Modern Zionism, like modern nationalism generally, is a drastically impoverished descendant of this original Jewish nationalism, and Erlich concludes that many problems not only of Israel but of all modern nations struggling to define themselves in a changing world really stem from the loss of this vigorous ancient alternative.
Everyday People It is the early autumn of 1998, and the neighborhood of East Liberty is a community in crisis. Long beset by poverty and gang violence, it is now on the brink of being cut off from the rest of the city by the opening of a new expressway. Caught in the middle of the events is the Tolbert family, whose youngest son, Chris (nicknamed Crest), has recently returned home form the hospital after a horrible accident that has claimed the use of his legs and the life of his best friend. Now Crest must begin the task of putting his life back together and repairing his relationship with Vanessa, his estranged girlfriend and the mother of his child, whose night-school class is bringing her to the threshold of a wider world. Crest's older brother Eugene, an ex-con turned born-again Christian, is facing down the temptations of his troubled past as he tries to save the younger brother of a fallen friend from being claimed by the unending cycle of urban violence. O'Nan binds together the stories of the Tolbert family with the stories of the people of East Liberty, creating a brilliantly rendered portrait of a community and its hopes and fears, memories and dreams. |
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