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Cultivating Livability: Food, Class, and the Urban Future in Bengaluru
by Camille FrazierWhat urban food networks reveal about middle class livability in times of transformation In recent years, the concept of &“livability&” has captured the global imagination, influencing discussions about the implications of climate change on human life and inspiring rankings of &“most livable cities&” in popular publications. But what really makes for a livable life, and for whom? Cultivating Livability takes Bengaluru, India, as a case study—a city that is alternately described as India&’s most and least livable megacity, where rapid transformation is undergirded by inequalities evident in the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Anthropologist Camille Frazier probes the meaning of &“livability&” in Bengaluru through ethnographic work among producers and consumers, corporate intermediaries and urban information technology professionals. Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she reveals how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others.
Cultivating Happiness: Overcome trauma and positively transform your life
by Karen GuggenheimIs it possible to overcome pain by learning to be happy?This is the question Karen Guggenheim asked herself after the sudden death of her husband in 2013. Overwhelmed by this unexpected loss, Karen decided to use her grief as a motivator to look inwards and embark on a transformative journey of post-traumatic growth, which led her to become the co-founder of the World Happiness Summit, the leading happiness conference in the world.Drawing from her personal experiences and research in psychology and neuroscience, Karen reveals that happiness can be taught and learned, and that, through small daily changes, we can all bring more compassion and positivity into our days to feel better about ourselves and others.Cultivating Happiness is a practical and accessible guide to dealing with adversity, showing us that it is possible to grow from our challenges and lead more fulfilling and purposeful lives.
Cultivating Christlikeness: Loving as Jesus Loved
by Paul W. ChilcoteAre you ready to reclaim our inheritance as United Methodist Wesleyans?Our communities and the world are crying out for empathy, authenticity, and integrity. This book helps us choose ways of living that are grace-filled and redeeming. Cultivating Christlikeness is about the bold adventure of United Methodists celebrating and living into a grand vision that includes everyone in God’s extravagant embrace. Jesus invites us to partner in the work of transformation, new birth, and resurrection in every aspect of our lives. Together we can step into a future showered by God’s multiplying love.Paul Chilcote mines his decades of study, prayer, and devotion to Christian practices to share his vision for how we partner with God to make the world more loving and just. In Cultivating Christlikeness, he weaves the threads of insight and appreciation with special attention to Wesleyan ways of loving God and neighbor that can change us and change the world. With his gentle direction, we discover with new appreciation how 18th-century John and Charles Wesley illumine our 21st-century quest to befriend Jesus, who frees us to live into and by the grace of God.Chilcote’s book is a practical guide. He guides us with a mentor’s insightful nudge as we explore essential Wesleyan teachings about God and the beloved community. He helps us know how to share these understandings with our families and neighbors, and more importantly, he points us to ways to live out our commitments with purpose, courage, and joy.The framework and flow of Cultivating Christlikeness make it easily adaptable for group discussion and individual use. It includes a plan for a two-day retreat for those eager to join in a more intensive experience of mutual engagement to renew their spirits and discover fresh ways to grow in love and grace. The book is a companion to Chilcote’s, Multiplying Love (Abingdon Press), which casts the theological vision that animates this practical spiritual guide. And it is an updated and expanded revision of an earlier work entitled, Wesley Speaks on Christian Vocation, originally published by Discipleship Ministries, then reissued by Wipf & Stock.
Cultivated Meat: Technologies, Commercialization and Challenges
by Carlos Ricardo Soccol Carla Forte Maiolino Molento Germano Glufke Reis Susan Grace KarpCultivated meat is an emerging substitute for conventional meat that is not associated with animal farming and slaughtering. Instead, animal cells are cultivated in bioreactors and post-processed into “artificial” meat products. Although this new technology solves several ethical and environmental problems, there are techno-economic challenges that need to be addressed to make the commercial-scale production of cultivated meat a real perspective. This book addresses fundamental aspects of new food systems, animal cell culture and cultivated meat production, including cell lines, culture media, microcarriers and scaffolds, bioreactors, downstream processes, formulation, packaging, quality control, scale-up, and waste management. Also, aspects related to commercialization, market, patents, legislation, global and regional policies, and sustainability metrics such as life-cycle assessment, together with a bioeconomy perspective analysis, are reviewed. Finally, case studies are presented and the challenges and future prospects for cultivated meat production are proposed. This book is a collection of 21 chapters written by specialists in the field.
The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
by Samuel W. FranklinA history of how, in the mid-twentieth century, we came to believe in the concept of creativity. Named a best book of 2023 by the New Yorker and a notable book of 2023 by Behavioral Scientist. Creativity is one of American society’s signature values, but the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel W. Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals—psychologists, engineers, and advertising people—as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism. Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin’s eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.
The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy
by Robert B. PippinA provocative reassessment of Heidegger’s critique of German Idealism from one of the tradition’s foremost interpreters. Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended—failed, even—in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger’s basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy’s attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism.
Culinary Herbs & Spices of the World
by Ben-Erik van WykFor centuries herbs and spices have been an integral part of many of the world’s great cuisines. But spices have a history of doing much more than adding life to bland foods. They have been the inspiration for, among other things, trade, exploration, and poetry. Priests employed them in worship, incantations, and rituals, and shamans used them as charms to ward off evil spirits. Nations fought over access to and monopoly of certain spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, when they were rare commodities. Not only were many men’s fortunes made in the pursuit of spices, spices at many periods throughout history literally served as currency. In Culinary Herbs and Spices of the World, Ben-Erik van Wyk offers the first fully illustrated, scientific guide to nearly all commercial herbs and spices in existence. Van Wyk covers more than 150 species—from black pepper and blackcurrant to white mustard and white ginger—detailing the propagation, cultivation, and culinary uses of each. Introductory chapters capture the essence of culinary traditions, traditional herb and spice mixtures, preservation, presentation, and the chemistry of flavors, and individual entries include the chemical compounds and structures responsible for each spice or herb’s characteristic flavor. Many of the herbs and spices van Wyk covers are familiar fixtures in our own spice racks, but a few—especially those from Africa and China—will be introduced for the first time to American audiences. Van Wyk also offers a global view of the most famous use or signature dish for each herb or spice, satisfying the gourmand’s curiosity for more information about new dishes from little-known culinary traditions. People all over the world are becoming more sophisticated and demanding about what they eat and how it is prepared. Culinary Herbs and Spices of the World will appeal to those inquisitive foodies in addition to gardeners and botanists.
Cujo: A Novel (Collections Litterature Ser. #Vol. 6001333)
by Stephen KingThe #1 New York Times bestseller, Cujo &“hits the jugular&” (The New York Times) with the story of a friendly Saint Bernard that is bitten by a bat. Get ready to meet the most hideous menace ever to terrorize the town of Castle Rock, Maine.Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting. Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day, Cujo chases a rabbit into a cave inhabited by sick bats and emerges as something new altogether. Meanwhile, Vic and Donna Trenton, and their young son Tad, move to Maine. They are seeking peace and quiet, but life in this small town is not what it seems. As Tad tries to fend off the terror that comes to him at night from his bedroom closet, and as Vic and Donna face their own nightmare of a marriage on the rocks, there is no way they can know that a monster, infinitely sinister, waits in the daylight. What happens to Cujo, how he becomes a horrifying vortex inescapably drawing in all the people around him, makes for one of the most heart-stopping novels Stephen King has ever written. &“A genuine page-turner that grabs you and holds you and won&’t let go&” (Chattanooga Times), Cujo will forever change how you view man&’s best friend.
Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight (Mazirian The Magician Ser.)
by Jack VanceJack Vance is one of the most remarkable talents to ever grace the world of science fiction. His unique, stylish voice has been beloved by generations of readers. One of his enduring classics is his Mazirian the Magician (previously titled The Dying Earth), and its sequels--a fascinating, baroque tale set on a far-future Earth, under a giant red sun that is soon to go out forever.In Cugel: the Skybreak Spatterlight , Cugel the Clever is still seeking revenge on the magician Iucounu, whom he blames for his exile and all his troubles. But revenge is hard to come by, and the adventures on the way are so very diverting….At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Cuckoo Land: The Cuckooing Risk Environment (Drugs, Crime and Society)
by Jack SpicerDrawing on rich qualitative data, this book presents a novel way of understanding the drug market-related harm of ‘cuckooing’, providing a theoretically informed account of this increasingly high-profile area.Applying the framework of the ‘risk environment’, the book examines why people become cuckooed, how it is responded to and how this exploitative practice is socially produced. In doing so, a diverse range of environments and features relevant to cuckooing are analysed, including the role of housing, political economy, drug policy, policing and social exclusion. By interrogating how these constrain and enable the actions of people who are affected, the book develops a critical analysis that recognises the complexity of cuckooing while eschewing superficial explanations of why it occurs. Resisting simplistic solutions, it also considers what an enabling environment capable of reducing the harms of this exploitative practice might look like.Cuckoo Land will be of interest to academic researchers in the fields of criminology, victimology, social work and drugs. It will also be essential reading for policymakers and practitioners working on the issue of cuckooing.
Cubicle Warfare: 101 Office Traps and Pranks
by John AustinA guide to the best ways to lighten the mood at the office, from fun pranks to strategies for getting revenge on annoying coworkersPerfect for every cubicle drone whose eyes are beginning to glaze over from fluorescent lighting and too many burned cups of coffee, Cubicle Warfare is a guide to having fun during the daily grind. Readers will learn how to make their coworkers jump, squeal, and run for cover with hilarious office traps such as the Paper Clip Chain and the Post-it Fake Out, as well as the more advanced Freezer Bomb, Foil Office, 5 Blind Mice, and Keyboard Clover. Even if readers are not pranksters themselves, they can still use Cubicle Warfare to recognize warning signs and defend their cubicles from conniving coworkers. With Cubicle Warfare, dissatisfied office workers can vent their frustrations in fun and harmless ways—and then get back to work.
A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow: Soon to be a movie starring Kit Connor (Cuban Girl's Guide Ser.)
by Laura Taylor NameyLove isn't always part of the plan . . . A charming, heartwarming story following a Miami girl who unexpectedly finds love – and herself – in a small English town. Soon to be a movie starring Heartstopper's Kit Connor and Pretty Little Liars' Maia Reficco! For Lila Reyes, a summer in England hadn't been on the cards. Certainly not one stuck in the small town of Winchester with a lack of sun and zero Miami flavour. But when Lila meets Orion Maxwell in the local tea shop, her nightmare trip starts to look up. With a bright new future suddenly on the horizon, will Lila leave behind everything she's ever planned and follow her heart? A New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club YA Pick.PRAISE FOR A CUBAN GIRL'S GUIDE TO TEA AND TOMORROW: 'An absolute delight' Rachael Lippincott, author of Five Feet Apart 'An utterly charming read that feels like a treasured recipe that will heal and feed a broken heart.' Nina Moreno, author of Don&’t Date Rosa Santos 'I could live inside Laura Taylor Namey&’s lush, vibrant words forever.' Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of Today Tonight Tomorrow 'This book. THIS BOOK. Laura Taylor Namey has written the coziest love story I&’ve ever had the pleasure to read.' Erin Hahn, author of You&’d Be Mine and More Than Maybe
A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow (Cuban Girl’s Guide)
by Laura Taylor NameyA New York Times bestseller A Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club YA Pick Love & Gelato meets Don&’t Date Rosa Santos in this charming, heartfelt story following a Miami girl who unexpectedly finds love—and herself—in a small English town.For Lila Reyes, a summer in England was never part of the plan. The plan was 1) take over her abuela&’s role as head baker at their panadería, 2) move in with her best friend after graduation, and 3) live happily ever after with her boyfriend. But then the Trifecta happened, and everything—including Lila herself—fell apart. Worried about Lila&’s mental health, her parents make a new plan for her: spend three months with family friends in Winchester, England, to relax and reset. But with the lack of sun, a grumpy inn cook, and a small town lacking Miami flavor (both in food and otherwise), what would be a dream trip for some feels more like a nightmare to Lila…until she meets Orion Maxwell. A teashop clerk with troubles of his own, Orion is determined to help Lila out of her funk, and appoints himself as her personal tour guide. From Winchester&’s drama-filled music scene to the sweeping English countryside, it isn&’t long before Lila is not only charmed by Orion, but England itself. Soon a new future is beginning to form in Lila&’s mind—one that would mean leaving everything she ever planned behind.
Cuba and Hong Kong
by Stephen CoontsCubaStephen Coonts' bestelling novels takes readers into the heart of harrowing, pulse-pounding action, whether on land, on sea, or in the air. Now, this master of full-tilt, blockbuster suspense turns into a lush setting 90 miles from U.S. soil. In Cuba, Fidel Castro lies dying. Human sharks are circling. And one man has his finger on the trigger of a weapon that will change everything...Admiral Jake Grafton is overseeing a shipment of nerve gas being transferred for a top-secret U.S. stockpile at Guantanamo Bay. But a power struggle inside Cuba has ignited an explosive plot and turned a horrific new weapon on the U.S. Now, Jake must strap himself into the cockpit of a new generation of American aircraft and fly blind into the heart of an island that is about to blow--and take the whole world with it...Hong KongJake Grafton takes his wife, Callie, along when the U.S. government sends him to Hong Kong to find out how deeply the U.S. consul-general is embedded in a political money-raising scandal. And why not? Jake and Callie met and fell in love in Hong Kong during the Vietnam War, and the consul-general is an old friend from those days, Tiger Cole.The Graftons quickly discover that Hong Kong is a powder keg ready to explode. A political murder and the closure of a foreign bank by the communist government are the sparks that light the fuse . . . and Tiger Cole is right in the middle of the action.When Callie is kidnapped by a rebel faction, Jake finds himself drawn into the vortex of a high-tech civil war. Drawing on the skills of CIA operative Tommy Carmellini, in order to save his wife Jake Grafton must figure out who he can trust-both among the Western factions vying for control of the volatile situation, and among the Chinese patriots fighting for their nation's future-and make sure the right side wins.
Crystals: Understand and Connect to the Medicine and Healing of Crystals
by Rachelle CharmanIn the ancient world, priestesses were wise women who delivered messages from the gods. They also served the people, offering healing, virtue, leadership, and insight. In our modern times, women's responsibilities can be overwhelming. When you're juggling a high-powered job, caring for your young family and even your elderly parents, when can you find time for yourself, let alone service to the wider world? This practical guide offers lessons both ancient and modern to help us to rise into our own inner power. It invites us to look to the timeless mythos of the cultures of the world for direction to build resilience, strength, and confidence as well as our capacity for profound joy, creativity, and focused action. Priestess Path will inspire you to be more ethically powerful, make a positive difference to your community and to the planet – and, in turn, inspire others.
Crystals: Understand and Connect to the Medicine and Healing of Crystals
by Rachelle CharmanDreams is a comprehensive and practical guide to all aspects of dreaming. Discover how you can intuitively interpret your dream symbols and on waking, use practical self-help remedies to recall the dream's message. You can learn to unlock your dreams and bring them to your conscious mind to process. Explore the meanings behind some of the most common dreams, recurring dreams, violent, and sexual dreams, Freud and Jung's psychoanalytical early interpretations, archetypes in dreams, and the magic in mystical dreaming. Learn the practices of recalling dreams, lucid dreaming, dream journaling, and proven dream techniques that include active imagination, meditation, dream group therapy, and ancient dreaming. Covers all aspects of dreaming; common dreams, how to interpret them, how to recall your dreams, and understand them so that your life makes more sense. Includes a mini A-Z guide of dreams that covers universal dreams, including a list of kids' most prevalent dreams, nightmares, and night terrors.
Crystal Shamanism
by Rachelle CharmanBased on bestselling author Rachelle Sharman's 20 years of teaching and writing practice, Crystal Shamanism comes to offer practical healing rituals in order to awaken your knowledge of earth medicine. By using crystals, you will experience a shamanic awakening that will assist you to build a strong relationship with the spirit of each medicine. This book includes stories of Rachelle's personal experiences, which offer a healing process and ceremony for readers to share in this experience. Each story also offers earth medicines and healing rituals that you can learn and teach to others. We are currently living in a very special time, where as a mass consciousness we are awakening to a deeper truth. It is time to awaken this innate knowing inside of us to offer this in our present time to our community, and to those who feel lost and in need of guidance and healing. This book is for anyone drawn to the path of healing and helping humanity.
Crystal Rituals by the Moon: RAISING YOUR VIBRATION THROUGH EVERY CYCLE
by Leah ShomanCrystal Guardian's Lunar Guide has been created as not only a guide for beginners, but for seasoned crystal collectors and healers. Leah Shoman has used her own crystal healing journey to inspire and motivate the collective into connecting to their own intuition and Source on a deeper, more authentic level. This practical book offers real-life crystal and lunar rituals and applications that can be practiced every day: • Discover different crystal shapes, formations and inclusions and understand how to use their frequency to raise your vibration. • Using specific rituals, learn the different methods to cleanse, charge and program your crystals and keep them operating to their fullest capacity. • Embrace 13 practical crystal healing rituals for each lunar cycle. Crystal Guardian's Lunar Guide is here to help you unlock the sacred knowledge that has been embedded within you for generations and past lifetimes. When we begin to use crystals with intent, the magic begins to unfold, and the veil between this realm and the next becomes thinner and we can tap into our ever-growing potential.
Crystal Grids
by NICOLA MCINTOSHMARILYN WHALL is a Medium, Spiritual Teacher and Mentor from Sydney, Australia. Loneliness, abuse and despair were the only aspects of life Marilyn knew until one day she heard a voice deep within telling her to listen to her heart. By following this voice she began a journey which not only changed her life but the thousands of people who have been touched by her words. Once a shy and demure child, Marilyn has become a brilliant light for the spirit world. In this book you will learn how Marilyn blossomed through love and compassion as the unseen world revealed to her that love is the key to heal pain and move mountains. Marilyn shares in Knowing some of the many steps that have guided her to a place of eternal gratitude and peace.
Crystal Companions
by Jessica LahoudCrystal healing is for everyone. Learning to work with these gifts from nature should be simple, easy, and effective. This beautifully illustrated book is a modern guide that aims to demystify the spiritual jargon surrounding crystal healing and teach practical rituals to help you attune to crystal energy. It can either be read the whole way through or used as a reference guide. With everything you need to know to start your crystal journey, Crystal Companions ensures you have all of your questions answered in simple terms so you can focus on self-care and exploring the magic of nature's precious creations.
Cryptonomicon
by Neal StephensonAn epic adventure awaits in this page-turning sci-fi read!With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. As an added bonus, the e-book edition of this New York Times bestseller includes an excerpt from Stephenson's new novel, Seveneves.In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.
Cryo-Electron Tomography: Structural Biology in situ (Focus on Structural Biology #11)
by Friedrich Förster Ariane BriegelThis book presents key aspects and recent developments of cryogenic sample electron tomography (cryo-ET) methodology, authored by leading experts in the field. Understanding structure and function of biomolecules in the context of cells is a new frontier in cellular and structural biology. To facilitate such research, cryo-ET is a key method to visualize the molecules of life in their native settings. Cryo-ET enables the imaging of samples that are preserved in a near-native state, at (macro)-molecular resolution and in three dimensions. Thus, this technique is a unique tool to gain insights into how biomolecules collaborate in orchestrating fundamental biological processes, how mutations cause diseases, pathogens cause infections, and to develop novel therapeutics to treat such illnesses. This book provides a unique reference for the emerging field of cryo-ET. The topics covered range from the fundamental principles of imaging to sample preparation, data analysis,and data sharing within the scientific community. It serves as a valuable resource for the next generation of structural biologists, making it suitable both for undergraduate students studying biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology and highly valuable for the more experienced and specialized PhD student. Furthermore, it stands as a state-of-the–art source of knowledge for the established senior scientist within the field of structural biology.
Cruelty & Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century
by Simon DickieEighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. Simon Dickie disputes these assumptions in Cruelty and Laughter, a wildly enjoyable but shocking plunge into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, Dickie uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy.Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, Dickie finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. He shows us that everyone—rich and poor, women as well as men—laughed along. In the process, Dickie also expands our understanding of many of the century’s major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. He devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. Cruelty and Laughter is an engaging, far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence
by Susie LinfieldIn The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.
Cruel Destiny and The White Negress: Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin
by Cléante D. ValcinCléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was a poet, writer, and feminist—most prominently Haiti’s first published female novelist, who employed her sentimental fiction to explore matters of race, gender, nationalism, and sovereignty. A contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Valcin emerged as an influential writer and political figure among the Black Atlantic diaspora. Now, for the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation. Cruel Destiny (1929) tells the tragic love story of Armand and Adeline, drawn together by a magnetic attraction, yet kept apart by a dark family secret. Depicting the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti’s elite society, it also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French. In The White Negress (1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very different men, a Black Haitian lawyer, and a white American carpetbagger. Putting a fresh spin on the tired tragic mulatta trope, Valcin reveals the racial prejudices, class tensions, and anti-colonial resentments of an island under American occupation. Together, these two novels expand our understanding of Caribbean literature, as well as the political struggles and artistic triumphs of Black women in the Americas.