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A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World Series)
by Ian BrodieIn A Vulgar Art, Ian Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, engaging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize—“literature” or “theatre”; “editorial” or “morality”—and analyze it accordingly. A Vulgar Art begins with a more fundamental observation: someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh. So, this book takes the moment of performance as its focus, that stand-up comedy is a collaborative act between the comedian and the audience. Although the form of talk on the stage resembles talk among friends and intimates in social settings, stand-up comedy remains a profession. As such, it requires performance outside of the comedian's own community to gain larger and larger audiences. How do comedians recreate that atmosphere of intimacy in a roomful of strangers? This book regards everything from microphones to clothing and LPs to Twitter as strategies for bridging the spatial, temporal, and sociocultural distances between the performer and the audience.
A Walk To The River In Amazonia
by Carla StangOur lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality -- the flow of moment-to-moment existence -- and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the river. In this way, abstract schemata such as 'cosmology,' 'sociality,' 'gender,' and the 'everyday' are understood as they are actually lived. This book contributes to the ethnography of the Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu, with an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. In doing so it attempts to comprehend what Malinowski called the 'imponderabilia of actual life.'
A Walk in New York
by Salvatore RubbinoA wide-eyed boy and his dad explore the Big Apple’s busy streets and towering views in this child-friendly tribute to an incomparable city. <P><P>New York City — the perfect place for a boy and his dad to spend the day! Follow them on their walk around Manhattan, from Grand Central Terminal to the top of the Empire State Building, from Greenwich Village to the Statue of Liberty, learning lots of facts and trivia along the way. In this unabashed ode to America’s biggest city, Salvatore Rubbino’s fresh, lively paintings and breezy text capture the delight of a young visitor experiencing the wonders of New York firsthand.
A Walk in the Dark
by Howard Curtis Gianrico CarofiglioWhen no lawyer accepts to represent Marina in her attempt to bring her boyfriend to trial for assault and battery, Guerrieri takes the case. No witnesses willing to testify and a hostile judge: just his kind of case. Doesn't hurt that he's attracted to Sister Maria, the young woman protecting Marina, who shares his love for martial arts.
A Walk through the Southern Sky
by Wil Tirion Milton D. HeifetzA Walk through the Southern Sky is a beautifully illustrated guide to the stars and constellations of the southern hemisphere. By following the simplified and easy-to-use starmaps, readers will be able to identify constellations with no equipment but normal sight and a clear night sky. This book provides clear instructions on how to determine star sizes and the distances between stars, allowing readers to move easily between constellations. The budding astronomer is introduced to the mystery and wonder of the southern sky as the myths and legends of its stars and constellations are wondrously retold. The third edition of this magical book features a new moon map, an updated list of planet positions, additional illustrations and more realistic star maps. It is an invaluable and beautiful guide for beginner stargazers, both young and old.
A Walk: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About)
by Spike Carlsen“Carlsen sees a world of wonder hiding in plain sight and may just change how you look at the world around you.” - TODAY ShowA simple walk around the block set journalist Spike Carlsen, bestselling author of A Splintered History of Wood, off to investigate everything he could about everything we take for granted in our normal life—from manhole covers and recycling bins to bike lanes and stoplights.In this celebration of the seemingly mundane, Carlsen opens our eyes to the engineering marvels, human stories, and natural wonders right outside our front door. He guides us through the surprising allure of sewers, the intricacies of power plants, the extraordinary path of an everyday letter, and the genius of recycling centers—all the while revealing that this awesome world isn’t just a spectator sport.Engaging as it is endearing, A Walk Around the Block will change the way you see things in your everyday life. Join Carlsen as he strolls through the trash museum of New York City, explores the quirky world of squirrels, pigeons, and roadkill, and shows us how understanding stoplights, bike lanes, and fine art of walking can add years to our lives. In the end, he brings a sense of wonder into your average walk around the block, wherever you are. Guaranteed.
A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time
by Antonia MalchikFor readers of On Trails: an incisive, utterly engaging exploration of walking: how it is fundamental to our being human, how we've designed it out of our lives, and how it is essential that we reembrace it"I'm going for a walk." How often has this phrase been uttered by someone with a heart full of anger or sorrow? Or as an invitation, a precursor to a declaration of love? Our species and its predecessors have been bipedal walkers for at least six million years; by now, we take this seemingly arbitrary motion for granted. Yet how many of us still really walk in our everyday lives? Driven by a combination of a car-centric culture and an insatiable thirst for productivity and efficiency, we're spending more time sedentary and alone than we ever have before. If bipedal walking is truly what makes our species human, as paleoanthropologists claim, what does it mean that we are designing walking right out of our lives? Antonia Malchik asks essential questions at the center of humanity's evolution and social structures: Who gets to walk, and where? How did we lose the right to walk, and what implications does that have for the strength of our communities, the future of democracy, and the pervasive loneliness of individual lives? The loss of walking as an individual and a community act has the potential to destroy our deepest spiritual connections, our democratic society, our neighborhoods, and our freedom. But we can change the course of our mobility. And we need to. Delving into a wealth of science, history, and anecdote -- from our deepest origins as hominins to our first steps as babies, to universal design and social infrastructure, A Walking Life shows exactly how walking is essential, and how deeply reliant our brains and bodies are on this simple pedestrian act -- and how we can reclaim it.
A Wall Is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States
by Reiko HillyerThroughout the twentieth century, even the harshest prison systems in the United States were rather porous. Incarcerated people were regularly released from prison for Christmas holidays; the wives of incarcerated men could visit for seventy-two hours relatively unsupervised; and governors routinely commuted the sentences of people convicted of murder. By the 1990s, these practices had become rarer as politicians and the media—in contrast to corrections officials—described the public as potential victims who required constant protection against the threat of violence. In A Wall Is Just a Wall Reiko Hillyer focuses on gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and conjugal visits to examine the origins and decline of practices that allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries. Illuminating prisoners’ lived experiences as they suffered, critiqued, survived, and resisted changing penal practices, she shows that the current impermeability of the prison is a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon. By tracking the “thickening” of prison walls, Hillyer historicizes changing ideas of risk, the growing bipartisan acceptance of permanent exile and fixing the convicted at the moment of their crime as a form of punishment, and prisoners’ efforts to resist.
A Wall in Jerusalem: Hope, Healing, and the Struggle for Justice in Israel and Palestine
by Mark BravermanViolence in Israel and Palestine has become the norm.Do we even understand this conflict? Do we know where it comes from?Why can't the two sides reach agreement? Can Jews and Palestinians find a way to coexist?An American Jew, Mark Braverman thought he understood the reasons for Israel's existence. But when he visited the region and began to understand the forces that are fueling and perpetuating the conflict, he realized just how far we are from achieving peace. From the bustling communities on either side of the Jerusalem barrier, to the historical lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and South African apartheid, to the foremost voices in theology and conflict resolution today, Braverman answers the questions above and offers a course of action both at home and abroad to realize peace.
A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War
by Kori A. GravesThe origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black childrenThe Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions.Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.
A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War
by Kori A. GravesThe origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black childrenThe Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions.Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
by Samuel HynesBetween the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different.Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre, journalism, paintings, films, parliamentary debates, public monuments, sartorial fashions, personal diaries and letters.Told in rich detail, this penetrating account shatters much of the received wisdom about the First World War. It shows how English culture adapted itself to the needs of killing, how our stereotypes of the war gradually took shape and how the nations thought and imagination were profoundly and irretrievably changed.
A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
by Andrew HartmanWhen Patrick Buchanan took the stage at the Republican National Convention in 1992 and proclaimed, "There is a religious war going on for the soul of our country,” his audience knew what he was talking about: the culture wars, which had raged throughout the previous decade and would continue until the century’s end, pitting conservative and religious Americans against their liberal, secular fellow citizens. It was an era marked by polarization and posturing fueled by deep-rooted anger and insecurity. Buchanan’s fiery speech marked a high point in the culture wars, but as Andrew Hartman shows in this richly analytical history, their roots lay farther back, in the tumult of the 1960s--and their significance is much greater than generally assumed. Far more than a mere sideshow or shouting match, the culture wars, Hartman argues, were the very public face of America’s struggle over the unprecedented social changes of the period, as the cluster of social norms that had long governed American life began to give way to a new openness to different ideas, identities, and articulations of what it meant to be an American. The hot-button issues like abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, feminism, and homosexuality that dominated politics in the period were symptoms of the larger struggle, as conservative Americans slowly began to acknowledge--if initially through rejection--many fundamental transformations of American life. As an ever-more partisan but also an ever-more diverse and accepting America continues to find its way in a changing world, A War for the Soul of America reminds us of how we got here, and what all the shouting has really been about.
A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit
by Joanne MeyerowitzA history of US involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging “women in development” movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit—with its tiny loans—as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution.Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.
A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
by Jarrett ZigonIf we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.
A War on Terror?: The European Stance on a New Threat, Changing Laws and Human Rights Implications
by Marianne Wade Almir MaljevicThe events of September 11, 2001, have galvanized anti-terrorist efforts far beyond Ground Zero--particularly in Europe, where state responses to terror threats vary widely. In A War on Terror? The European Stance on a New Threat, Changing Laws and Human Rights Implications, an international panel of experts analyzes current trends and new developments in law enforcement and legal systems throughout the continent, including material from non-English-speaking countries that is seldom available to the broader academic community. Offering a succinct overview with special focus on criminal law, police procedure, immigration law, and human rights, the book provides unique insight into what the war on terror means to EU member and non-member countries; state supporters and critics of American anti-terrorist policy; nations with recent histories of outside terrorist attacks and those facing threats from homegrown entities. This comparative approach gives readers three levels of understanding: by country, as affecting the European Union as a whole, and in the context of the UN. Key areas covered in the book: Anti-terrorist policies across Europe, from England, Germany, France, and Spain to Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Frontline issues: threat assessment, terror funding, the use of secret service agencies, effects on Muslim communities, and more. Technological developments, including cyber-terrorism and biometric surveillance. The conflict between human rights and heightened security measures (e.g., extraordinary renditions). The emerging intersection of criminal law with the law of war. While A War on Terror? is geared to specialists and students in the field, it will be of great interest to the wider legal community. Its synthesis of salient findings and expert perspectives enhances the ongoing debate on issues that have the potential to shape the future of global politics and policy.
A Wasp Among Eagles: A Woman Military Test Pilot in World War II
by Ann CarlBefore World War II most Americans did not believe that the average woman could fly professionally, but during the war more than a thousand women pilots proved them wrong. These were the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), who served as military flyers on the home front. In March 1944 one of them, Ann Baumgartner, was assigned to the Fighter Flight Test Branch at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. There she would make history as the only woman to test-fly experimental planes during the war and the first woman to fly a jet. A WASP among Eagles is the first-person story of how Baumgartner learned to fly, trained as a WASP, and became one of the earliest jet-age pioneers. Flying such planes as the Curtiss A-25 Helldiver, the Lockheed P-38, and the B-29 Superfortress, she was the first woman to participate in a host of experiments, including in-air refueling and flying the first fighter equipped with a pressurized cockpit. But in evaluating the long-awaited turbojet-powered Bell YP-59A, she set a "first" record that would remain unchallenged for ten years.
A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time
by Michael G. FlahertyTime, it has been said, is the enemy. In an era of harried lives, time seems increasingly precious as hours and days telescope and our lives often seem to be flitting past. And yet, at other times, the minutes drag on, each tick of the clock excruciatingly drawn out. What explains this seeming paradox? Based upon a full decade's empirical research, Michael G. Flaherty's new book offers remarkable insights on this most universal human experience. Flaherty surveys hundreds of individuals of all ages in an attempt to ascertain how such phenomena as suffering, violence, danger, boredom, exhilaration, concentration, shock, and novelty influence our perception of time. Their stories make for intriguing reading, by turns familiar and exotic, mundane and dramatic, horrific and funny. A qualitative and quantitative tour de force, A Watched Pot presents what may well be the first fully integrated theory of time and will be of interest to scientists, humanists, social scientists and the educated public alike. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.
A Waterloo County Album: Glimpses of the Way We Were
by Stephanie Kirkwood WalkerCommended for the 2003 Honourable Mention for Superb Craftsmanship in Production The early settlers of Waterloo County - Mennonites, Germans, and Scots - built enterprising communities in a land of rivers, rolling hills, and fields. Today the linked cities of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge are still surrounded by small towns with strong rural traditions. This photographic history of the region contains 130 black and white images from as early as 1880, recording the cultural landscape, the buildings, parks, markets, fairs, and parades. Some of the photographs will tease your fancy with whispers of the pioneers’ spirit, while others capture the energy of events and dare us to interpret the past.
A Waxing Moon: The Modern Gaelic Revival
by Roger HutchinsonThirty years ago, the Gaelic language and culture which had been eminent in Scotland for 1,300 years seemed to be in the final stages of a 200-year terminal decline. The number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland had fallen tenfold over the previous century. The language itself was commonplace only in the scattered communities of the north-west Highlands and Hebrides.By the early years of the 21st century, however, a sea-change had taken place. Gaelic - for so long a subject of mockery and hostility - had become what some termed 'fashionable'. Gaelic-speaking jobs were available; Gaelic-medium education was established in many areas; and politicians and business-people saw benefits in acting as friends of the culture. While the numbers of Gaelic-speakers continued to fall as older people passed away, the decline was slowed and for the first time in 100 years the percentage of young people using the language began to rise proportionately. What had happened was a kind of renaissance: a Gaelic revival that manifested itself in popular music, literature, art, poetry, publishing, drama, radio and television. It was a phenomenon as obvious as it was unexpected. And at the heart of that movement lay education. A Gaelic Modern History will tell the story of one institution, Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic College in Skye that has stood at the centre of this revival. But, chiefly, the book will examine how a venerable culture was given hope for the future at the point when all seemed lost. It recounts the scores of personalities, from Sorley Maclean and Runrig to Michael Forsyth and Gordon Brown, who have become involved in that process.
A Way Forward
by Peter A. Coclanis Daniel P. GittermanIn the last half century, North Carolina and the South have experienced rapid economic growth. Much of the best analysis of this progress came from two North Carolina-based research organizations: the Southern Growth Policies Board and MDC (originally a project of the North Carolina Fund). Their 1986 reports are two of the best assessments of the achievements and limitations of the so-called Sunbelt boom. On November 17, 2011, the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University co-hosted a public discussion to build on these classic reports and to offer fresh analyses of the current challenges facing the region. A Way Forward, which issued from this effort, features more than thirty original essays containing recommendations and strategies for building and sustaining a globally competitive South.
A Way of Life: Things, Thought, and Action in Chinese Medicine (The Terry Lectures Series)
by Judith FarquharA short and thoughtful introduction to traditional Chinese medicine that looks beyond the conventional boundaries of Western modernism and biomedical science Traditional Chinese medicine is often viewed as mystical or superstitious, with outcomes requiring naïve faith. Judith Farquhar, drawing on her hard-won knowledge of social, intellectual, and clinical worlds in today’s China, here offers a concise and nuanced treatment that addresses enduring and troublesome ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. In this work, which is based on her 2017 Terry Lectures “Reality, Reason, and Action In and Beyond Chinese Medicine,” she considers how the modern, rationalized, and scientific field of traditional Chinese medicine constructs its very real objects (bodies, symptoms, drugs), how experts think through and sort out pathology and health (yinyang, right qi/wrong qi, stasis, flow), and how contemporary doctors act responsibly to “seek out the root” of bodily disorder. Through this refined investigation, East-West contrasts collapse, and systematic Chinese medicine, no longer a mystery or a pseudo-science, can become a philosophical ally and a rich resource for a more capacious science.
A Way of Seeing
by Margaret Mead Rhoda MetrauxThese essays are personal responses to events at different moments in time; as such, they reflect changes through which all of us have been living. However, they are grouped here not sequentially but in accordance with the standpoint from which they were written.
A Weberian Analysis of Business Groups and Financial Markets: Trade Relations in Taiwan and Korea and some Major Stock Exchanges
by Sandro SegreMoral economy, as a set of rules which regulate market transactions, has been the object of much research and debate since the 1980s; it has also been the focus of classical sociological authors such as Weber, Simmel and Toennies. Weber in particular examined the rules of the moral economy in the financial markets, and this volume sheds light on his contribution to the subject. The book formulates two models of business relations - one oligopolistic model, the other based on free competition - which are derived from Weber and Simmel's writings and which represent alternative instances of the moral economy. Empirical case studies in the form of South Korea and Taiwan are included to exemplify the two models and to highlight the consequences of adopting one model over the other. The volume also examines the conduct of actors in some of the leading financial markets, with reference to Weber's writings on the 19th century London and Berlin Stock Exchanges.
A Well-Paid Slave
by Brad SnyderAfter the 1969 season, the St. Louis Cardinals traded their star center fielder, Curt Flood, to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a chain of events that would change professional sports forever. At the time there were no free agents, no no-trade clauses. When a player was traded, he had to report to his new team or retire. Unwilling to leave St. Louis and influenced by the civil rights movement, Flood chose to sue Major League Baseball for his freedom. His case reached the Supreme Court, where Flood ultimately lost. But by challenging the system, he created an atmosphere in which, just three years later, free agency became a reality. Flood’s decision cost him his career, but as this dramatic chronicle makes clear, his influence on sports history puts him in a league with Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. .