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Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
by Jason ElliotA fascinating journey through the cultural and artistic landscape of Iran, both past and present, by the New York Times bestselling author of An Unexpected LightIn our current climate of war and suspicion, Iran is depicted as the "next" rogue nation that America and the world must "deal with." But the rhetoric about nuclear weapons and jihad obscures the real Iran: an ancient nation and culture, both sophisticated and isolated, which still exists clandestinely in major cities as well as the country's remote mountains and deserts. Jason Elliot has spent the last four years traveling in Iran, and in this remarkable book he reveals the many sides of the culture, art, architecture, and people that Westerners cannot see or conveniently ignore. Part close reading of symbols and images, part history, and part intimate interviews with Iranians of many different kinds—from wealthy aristocrats at forbidden parties to tribal horsemen in the most remote mountain villages, who have never seen a Westerner—Mirrors of the Unseen is a beautiful and thought-provoking book by one of the world's most acclaimed adventurers and authors.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel
by Rebecca MillerRebecca Miller's novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the study of a brave, curious, multilayered woman--an acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name. Now a major motion film. What part of our selves do we hide away in order to have a stable, prosperous life? Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides that they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place. She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage--years of neglect and rebellion, wild transgressions and powerful defiance.
The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
by Courtenay Raia PhDThe Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind. The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of four men: chemist Sir William Crookes, depth psychologist Frederic Myers, ether physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, and anthropologist Andrew Lang. All past presidents of the society, these men brought psychical research beyond academic circles and into the public square, making it part of a shared, far-reaching examination of science and society. By layering their papers, textbooks, and lectures with more intimate texts like diaries, letters, and literary compositions, Courtenay Raia returns us to a critical juncture in the history of secularization, the last great gesture of reconciliation between science and sacred truths.
The Enchanted Isle
by James M. CainWhile searching for her real father, a runaway stumbles into a deadly mess in this gritty noir novel by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice.With just seventy-four bucks in her pocket, Mandy packs her things and buys the bus ticket that will get her away from the stepfather who’s been abusing her for years—and the mother who lets it happen. She plans to head to Baltimore and find her biological father—someone she hopes will finally stand up for her. At the bus stop, Mandy meets Rick—a handsome young thug who’s a few days removed from his last bath. He’s charming and sympathetic, so she buys him a ticket and tells him her story. But wouldn’t it be better, Rick suggests, to greet Daddy in style? Of course, a mink coat would cost a little money, but Rick knows just where to get it. His plan is daring, foolish, and highly dangerous. What teenage runaway could resist?Praise for James M. Cain’s fiction“Cleverly plotted.” —The New York Times“Swift and absorbing.” —The Wall Street Journal
The Frequency of Souls: A Novel
by Mary Kay ZuravleffA staid refrigerator designer's life is changed by a quirky, spiritual female colleague who is obsessed with finding electrical evidence of life after death in this extraordianry debut novel.
Bread Is the Devil: Win the Weight Loss Battle by Taking Control of Your Diet Demons
by Heather Bauer Kathy MatthewsStop mindlessly inhaling the breadbasket and stop shoveling in the M&M'S-Bread is the Devil is the solution to all of our diet saboteurs.Nutritionist Heather Bauer can count on the fingers of one hand the number of her clients who don't already know what they should eat to lose weight. So why can't they (and their best friend and their neighbor) lose weight? Because Bread is the Devil! Yes, that's Bauer's shorthand for the inevitable, demonic pull that certain bad habits exert on people who try to change their eating routines to drop the pounds. Many of us have been there: You had a sensible, healthy breakfast, high in protein with complex carbs. Ditto for lunch-soup and a salad with a warm rush of accomplishment and self control for dessert. But now it's dinnertime and you're out with friends: enter a large basket of warm, sliced, crusty sourdough bread with a little tub of chive butter. Suddenly you're in the seventh circle of hell-the one reserved for gluttons. Bread's not your devil? How about ice cream or chips or that big slab of buttercream-frosted birthday cake?Bread Is the Devil will help you fight those hellish cravings that stop you from losing the weight you want. By identifying how certain factors promote overeating, Heather will:* Identify the top-ten Diet Devils that challenge healthy eating* Provide specific, proven strategies that free you from these devils once and for all* Offer up a simple, flexible guide that will help you reach your goal in twenty-one days and make eating fun again* Suggest an easy, affordable, and doable shopping list for eating at home as well as great meal choices when eating outBread is the Devil will help you say good-bye to your devils, for good.
City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism
by Jim KraneAward-winning journalist Jim Krane charts the history of Dubai from its earliest days, considers the influence of the family who has ruled it since the nineteenth century, and looks at the effect of the global economic downturn on a place that many tout as a blueprint for a more stable Middle EastThe city of Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, is everything the Arab world isn't: a freewheeling capitalist oasis where the market rules and history is swept aside. Until the credit crunch knocked it flat, Dubai was the fastest-growing city in the world, with a roaring economy that outpaced China's while luring more tourists than all of India. It's one of the world's safest places, a stone's throw from its most dangerous. In City of Gold, Jim Krane, who reported for the AP from Dubai, brings us a boots-on-the-ground look at this fascinating place by walking its streets, talking to its business titans, its prostitutes, and the hard-bitten men who built its fanciful skyline. He delves into the city's history, paints an intimate portrait of the ruling Maktoum family, and ponders where the city is headed. Dubai literally came out of nowhere. It was a poor and dusty village in the 1960s. Now it's been transformed into the quintessential metropolis of the future through the vision of clever sheikhs, Western capitalists, and a river of investor money that poured in from around the globe. What has emerged is a tolerant and cosmopolitan city awash in architectural landmarks, luxury resorts, and Disnified kitsch. It's at once home to America's most prestigious companies and universities and a magnet for the Middle East's intelligentsia. Dubai's dream of capitalism has also created a deeply stratified city that is one of the world's worst polluters. Wild growth has clogged its streets and left its citizens a tiny minority in a sea of foreigners. Jim Krane considers all of this and casts a critical eye on the toll that the global economic downturn has taken.While many think Dubai's glory days have passed, insiders like Jim Krane who got to know the city and its creators firsthand realize there's much more to come in the City of Gold, a place that, in just a few years, has made itself known to nearly every person on earth.
The Dog Who Spoke with Gods: A Novel
by Diane JessupWhen Elizabeth, a young pre-med. student happens upon Damien, a dog being used in laboratory research on her campus, she has no way of knowing how drastically her life - and her beliefs - will be changed. Without meaning to, she slowly becomes drawn into the dog's fate and is soon torn between the love and respect she has come to feel for Damien and the sense of loyalty and obligation she feels for the medical profession as well as her father and grandfather, both cardiac surgeons.With an uncanny ability to write convincingly about life from the point of view of a canine, Diane Jessup tells an extraordinary story of friendship and loyalty in The Dog Who Spoke with Gods. Few writers have ever shown the world of man's closest friend as clearly and movingly. For anyone who has ever loved a dog this is a must-read.
O. J. in the Morning, G&T at Night: Spirited Dispatches on Aging with Joie de Vivre
by A. E. Hotchner"Acclaimed author and feisty nonagenarian Hotchner's witty ruminations about the art of living well into old age...with brio and a touch of his trademark sass, Hotchner writes about rediscovering love after 75, finding joy in a scrappy African gray parrot he named after his longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway, and going on his very first safari at age 88." - Kirkus ReviewsWhen youngsters in their seventies and eighties, nervously lurching toward the horizon of ninety, ask me, "What's the secret?" That's what I tell them: "O.J. in the morning, gin and tonic at night."You don't have to be in your seventies or eighties to enjoy A. E. Hotchner's elixir for aging happily, but after reading this charming collection of essays, you may wish you were. Nonagenarian, novelist, playwright, and biographer, Hotchner gives us heartfelt and laugh-out-loud anecdotes that describe his unique reflections on the aging process. His musings cover everything from the outlandish commercials that target the older generation (Viagra, Cialis, and Flomax) to suggestions on adapting the tennis game for seniors (he suggests lowering the net by two inches and moving all outer lines two feet inward) to the advantages of having a pet (his pet parrot often tells guests to "kiss my ass").He can equally capture the headier side of aging, which is bittersweetly revealed in his piece about divorce. With his disarming, eloquent voice and dry sense of humor, Hotch illuminates life's wisdoms through his optimistic, witty, and romantic outlook, all the while making you feel, well, not unhappy about growing older.O.J. in the Morning, G&T at Night is a book of courageous advice, humorous wisdom, and, above all, good strategies for how to stay young at heart.
The Lost Van Gogh: A Novel
by A. J. ZerriesWhen Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Monsieur Trabuc turns up unexpectedly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a $50 million painting shipped from Argentina via UPS, like an ordinary package—the case goes to Clay Ryder, the NYPD Major Case Squad detective assigned to art theft.Ryder discovers that in Paris, late 1944, a Jewish widow accused a German SS officer of stealing the painting. The officer was reported to have died in a car crash at the war's end, and the whereabouts of the Trabuc between then and now remain a mystery. Ryder's search for the widow's heirs leads him to Rachel Meredith, who teaches at NYU. The museum presents the painting to her in a spectacular public ceremony that winds up on the front page of newspapers around the world.Though the case is closed, Ryder can't seem to shake it. When Rachel Meredith is attacked, she calls on him; what might be a simple assault doesn't quite add up. And he still wonders who sent the van Gogh from Argentina. One of his most reliable contacts in the art world floats a theory that ties the van Gogh portrait to a black market auction in the 70's that might have involved a Swiss art dealer and an international crime kingpin with unlimited cash. Then Israel's Mossad pays Ryder a clandestine visit; the news splash about the van Gogh is the first link they've had to the SS officer in decades.Meanwhile, art dealers, auction houses, and museums vie to buy the van Gogh from Rachel Meredith. When she refuses to sell, the situation goes from predatory to violent. Ryder has to race against time to outmaneuver a cunning mastermind who will resort to as many murders as it takes to get hold of the Trabuc.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Twenty-One Truths About Love: A Novel
by Matthew DicksFrom the beloved author of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend comes a wonderful new novel about a struggling man, written entirely in lists.Daniel Mayrock's life is at a crossroads. He knows the following to be true:1. He loves his wife Jill... more than anything. 2. He only regrets quitting his job and opening a bookshop a little (maybe more than a little)3. Jill is ready to have a baby.4. The bookshop isn’t doing well. Financial crisis is imminent. Dan doesn't know how to fix it.5. Dan hasn’t told Jill about their financial trouble.6. Then Jill gets pregnant.This heartfelt story is about the lengths one man will go to and the risks he will take to save his family. But Dan doesn’t just want to save his failing bookstore and his family’s finances:1. Dan wants to do something special.2. He’s a man who is tired of feeling ordinary.3. He’s sick of feeling like a failure.4. He doesn't want to live in the shadow of his wife’s deceased first husband.Dan is also an obsessive list maker; his story unfolds entirely in his lists, which are brimming with Dan’s hilarious sense of humor, unique world-view, and deeply personal thoughts. When read in full, his lists paint a picture of a man struggling to be a man, a man who has reached a point where he’s willing to do anything for the love (and soon-to-be new love) of his life.
Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems
by Barbara J. NelsonIn this absorbing story of how child abuse grew from a small, private-sector charity concern into a multimillion-dollar social welfare issue, Barbara Nelson provides important new perspectives on the process of public agenda setting. Using extensive personal interviews and detailed archival research, she reconstructs an invaluable history of child abuse policy in America. She shows how the mass media presented child abuse to the public, how government agencies acted and interacted, and how state and national legislatures were spurred to strong action on this issue. Nelson examines prevailing theories about agenda setting and introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding how a social issue becomes part of the public agenda. This issue of child abuse, she argues, clearly reveals the scope and limitations of social change initiated through interest-group politics. Unfortunately, the process that transforms an issue into a popular cause, Nelson concludes, brings about programs that ultimately address only the symptoms and not the roots of such social problems.
What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche
by Laurence LampertThe trajectory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought has long presented a difficulty for the study of his philosophy. How did the young Nietzsche—classicist and ardent advocate of Wagner’s cultural renewal—become the philosopher of Will to Power and the Eternal Return? With this book, Laurence Lampert answers that question. He does so through his trademark technique of close readings of key works in Nietzsche’s journey to philosophy: The Birth of Tragedy, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Human All Too Human, and “Sanctus Januarius,” the final book of the 1882 Gay Science. Relying partly on how Nietzsche himself characterized his books in his many autobiographical guides to the trajectory of his thought, Lampert sets each in the context of Nietzsche’s writings as a whole, and looks at how they individually treat the question of what a philosopher is. Indispensable to his conclusions are the workbooks in which Nietzsche first recorded his advances, especially the 1881 workbook which shows him gradually gaining insights into the two foundations of his mature thinking. The result is the most complete picture we’ve had yet of the philosopher’s development, one that gives us a Promethean Nietzsche, gaining knowledge even as he was expanding his thought to create new worlds.
Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power
by Mary MapesA riveting account of how the public's right to know is being attacked by an unholy alliance among politicians, news organizations and corporate AmericaTruth and Duty was made into the 2015 film Truth, starring Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace and Elizabeth Moss. For twenty five years, Mary Mapes has been an award-winning television producer and reporter -- the last fifteen of them for CBS News, principally for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and 60 Minutes. She had the bedrock of respect of her peers -- in 2003 alone, she broke the story of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures (which won CBS The Peabody Award) and the existence of Strom Thurmond's illegitimate bi-racial daughter Essie Mae Washington. But it was Dan Rather's lightning rod of a story on George W. Bush's National Guard Service that brought Mapes into an unwanted limelight. The firestorm that followed the broadcast led not only to Mapes' firing and Rather's stepping down from his anchor chair a year early, but to an unprecedented "internal" inquiry into the story -- chaired by former Reagan Attorney General Richard Thornburgh.Peopled with an historic and colorful cast of characters—from Karl Rove to Summer Redstone to John Kerry to Col. Bobby Hodges -- this groundbreaking book about how the television news is made (and unmade) made headlines itself when first published. But this, it turns out, is only part of the story. Mapes talks for the first time about the riveting behind-the-scenes action at CBS during this frenzied period and exposes some of the largest political and social controversies that have broken in this new age of dissonance.
Speaking Your Way to Success
by Sheryl Lindsell-RobertsIn Speaking Your Way to Success, Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts draws on years of experience as a business communications expert to deliver straightforward guidelines for professionals on how to speak powerfully and effectively. Whether talking in front of a large group or engaging in a one-to-one conversation, this book will help anyone to speak up, speak well, and get noticed. Chapters include: -- Making Introductions -- Developing Listening Skills -- Using Politically Neutral Language -- Interviewing and Being Interviewed -- Speaking in Public -- Communicating Cross-Culturally -- Harnessing the Power of Today&’s Multigenerational Workforce In her signature no-nonsense style, Lindsell-Roberts shows speakers how to pay attention to their audience, support their words with body language, interject stories the audience will relate to and enjoy, encourage audience interaction, and more. This book is packed with specific suggestions that can be applied immediately on topics such as giving and receiving compliments, keeping a conversation going, asking for a raise, and cold calling. There are strategies for introducing yourself when you don&’t know anyone at an event, techniques for initiating conversation, and a checklist for rating your listening skills. Lindsell-Roberts also has a proven, no-fail attack plan for how to work a room. Stop lurking quietly in the shadows and start speaking your way to success!
A Boy Made of Blocks: A Novel
by Keith StuartA Boy Made of Blocks is a funny, heartwarming story of family and love inspired by the author's own experiences with his son, the perfect latest obsession for fans of The Rosie Project, David Nicholls and Jojo Moyes. A father who rediscovers loveAlex loves his wife Jody, but has forgotten how to show it. He loves his son Sam, but doesn't understand him. He needs a reason to grab his future with both hands.A son who shows him how to liveMeet eight-year-old Sam: beautiful, surprising - and different. To him the world is a frightening mystery. But as his imagination comes to life, his family will be changed . . . for good."One of those wonderful books that makes you laugh and cry at the same time."Good Housekeeping"Funny, expertly plotted and written with enormous heart. Readers who enjoyed The Rosie Project will love A Boy Made of Blocks - I did."Graeme Simsion"Very funny, incredibly poignant and full of insight. Awesome."Jenny Colgan"'A wonderful, warm, insightful novel about family, friendship and love."Daily Mail“A charming and timely tale of learning to connect in the digital age.” Kirkus"This is an author who understands fatherhood and boyhood and everything in between. A truly beautiful book." Matthew Dicks, author of Memoirs of An Imaginary Friend"A Boy Made of Blocks will make you laugh and cry in equal measure; a book you won’t soon forget." Brenda Janowitz, author of The Dinner Party
The Last Mazurka: A Family's Tale of War, Passion, and Loss
by Andrew TarnowskiThe shot Count Hieronim Tarnowski fired on his wedding night in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, was like a tocsin that sounded the doom of his ancient Polish family. When, in August 1939, on the eve of another war, his daughter Sophie saw blood pouring down the side of her train, she felt a terrible foreboding and knew her idyllic world would be swept away. Thirty years later, when Count Hieronim's British grandson Andrew learned of the death of his mother---the beautiful, fragile, and abused Chouquette---his sense of a lost identity deepened and he set out to rediscover the world from which he came. These moments punctuate an extraordinary tale of the downfall of a once-powerful family, which in turn mirrors the twentieth-century fate of a nation ravaged by invasions and crushed by tyranny. Before 1945, Poland, now a fledgling EU country, was an almost Tolstoyan world of wolf hunts and extravagant wealth, set alongside great poverty and a semifeudal peasantry, in a landscape of frozen fields and dark forests. Broken by war, it was reduced by Communism to drab uniformity, and a way of life was lost forever. This world out of time is the setting for Andrew Tarnowski's memoir, The Last Mazurka, a tale of loss and exile, love and violence, wandering and longing, told with poignancy and unexpected humor, and a lingering regret.
The Ripper Gene: A Novel
by Michael RansomA neuroscientist-turned-FBI-profiler discovers a gene that produces psychopaths in The Ripper Gene, a thrilling debut novel from Michael Ransom. Dr. Lucas Madden is a neuroscientist-turned-FBI profiler who first gained global recognition for cloning the ripper gene and showing its dysfunction in the brains of psychopaths. Later, as an FBI profiler, Madden achieved further notoriety by sequencing the DNA of the world's most notorious serial killers and proposing a controversial "damnation algorithm" that could predict serial killer behavior using DNA alone. Now, a new murderer—the Snow White Killer—is terrorizing women in the Mississippi Delta. When Mara Bliss, Madden's former fiancée, is kidnapped, he must track down a killer who is always two steps ahead of him. Only by entering the killer's mind will Madden ultimately understand the twisted and terrifying rationale behind the murders—and have a chance at ending the psychopath's reign of terror.
Moonrise: Book Three of the Snowfall Trilogy (Snowfall Ser. #3)
by Mitchell SmithSeveral hundred years after a change in the orbit of Jupiter sent the Earth into a new Ice Age, remnants of civilization battle over territory and technology. A generation has passed since Sam Monroe defeated the Great Khan, became King of Middle Kingdom, and ushered in an era of peace and prosperity, a time when Middle Kingdom grew even more powerful, driven by trade and emerging technology. In a grand gesture, Sam and Queen Rachel adopted the young son of their former enemy and raised him as a prince, second only to the heir to Middle Kingdom's throne. The accidental drowning deaths of the King and Queen trigger the assassination of the Crown Price. Bajazet, too, is attacked, lest he serve as a rallying point for those who support the royal family. Barely twenty, the once-pampered Bajazet flees for his life.Stumbling through the forest, prey where he once was the hunter and with the usurper King's forces on his heels, Bajazet is rescued by a trio of genetically engineered "Persons": Richard, who is almost more bear than human; Nancy, a cunning little vixen; and Errol, whose very human exterior hides a weasel's cold, cruel heart. Boston, buried under glacial ice, gave them life. Boston's perverted technology, used to conquer and oppress, seems almost like magic to the North Americans who are slowly dragging themselves back up the ladder of civilization. Now the rulers of Boston eye the chaos in Middle Kingdom and find it ripe for conquest.Bajazet's new friends are plotting the frozen city's destruction. The one-time Prince, now a lonely warrior, has one choice---help destroy Boston, or die. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High
by Signithia FordhamThis innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.
How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit
by Witold RybczynskiAn essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday livesWe spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing. Buildings often overawe us with their beauty. Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art form—but it remains mysterious to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good—and not-so-good—buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he takes us behind the scenes, revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to "read" plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail—of a stair balustrade, for instance—can convey an architect's vision. Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architect's private retreat in downtown Princeton, How Architecture Works, explains the central elements that make up good building design. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh. "Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to all of us," Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.
What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk
by Michael LuceyMichael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust’s narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their use of language. Proust, in other words, is interested in what linguistic anthropologists call language-in-use. Michael Lucey elucidates Proust’s approach to language-in-use in a number of ways: principally in relation to linguistic anthropology, but also in relation to speech act theory, and to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The book also includes an interlude after each of its chapters that contextualizes Proust’s social-scientific practice of novel writing in relation to that of a number of other novelists, earlier and later, and from several different traditions, including Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. Lucey is thus able to show how, in the hands of quite different novelists, various aspects of the novel form become instruments of linguistic anthropological analysis. The result introduces a different way of understanding language to literary and cultural critics and explores the consequences of this new understanding for the practice of literary criticism more generally.
Walking West: A Novel
by Noëlle SickelsAbout the great migration west, Edna Ferber wrote, "I am not belittling the brave pioneer men, but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero helped to settle this glorious land of ours." These westering foremothers take center stage in Walking West, Noelle Sickels's remarkable first novel of women and their families on a grueling wagon train journey across the United States.In the wet spring of 1852, a small band of Indiana farm families set off for California, lured west by the promise of a better life. The Muller party crosses treacherous rivers, slogs through mud and thunderstorms, and hauls wagons up and down mountains and over baking deserts in a seven-month journey across our raw continent.Among them is Alice Muller, a reluctant traveler forced to leave home by her husband Henry's dreams of prosperity. But the Mullers greatly underestimate the hardships they will face, and it is ultimately Alice who must draw on the deepest reserves of body and soul to lead the little group of bone-weary emigrants through their final miles. In doing so, Alice changes from a dutiful farm wife into a woman capable of deep commitment, strong actions, and profound self-knowledge.Noelle Sickels's novel takes readers across America--through Fort Laramie, Chimney Rock, the Black Hills, the Rockies, and the Sierras--and into the minds of her extraordinary characters. Offering a woman's perspective on a historical period more often portrayed through the male icons of cowboys, outlaws, and gold seekers, Walking West combines history and storytelling in a novel of astonishing authenticity and emotional power.
Thomas Merton's Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative
by William H. ShannonIn the mystical tradition the "dark," or apophatic way has a long history. It is the way of John of the Cross, of Master Eckhart, of Juliana of Norwich, of the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and of Thomas Merton. This dark path of contemplation that Merton followed, wrote about extensively, and considered the focal point of his life is the subject of William H. Shannon's book.
The Face of Emotion: How Botox Affects Our Moods and Relationships
by Eric FinziWilliam Shakespeare famously wrote that "a face is like a book," and common wisdom has it that our faces reveal our deep-seated emotions. But what if the reverse were also true? What if our facial expressions set our moods instead of revealing them? What if there were actual science to support the exhortation, "smile, be happy?" Dermatologic surgeon Eric Finzi has been studying that question for nearly two decades, and in this ground breaking book he marshals evidence suggesting that our facial expressions are not secondary to, but rather a central driving force of, our emotions. Based on clinical experience and original research, Dr. Finzi shows how changing a person's face not only affects their relationships with others but also with themselves. In his studies using Botox, he has shown how inhibiting the frown of clinically depressed patients leads many to experience relief. This work is a dramatic departure from the neuroscience-based thinking on emotions that tends to view emotions solely as the result of neurotransmitters in the brain. Part absorbing medical narrative, part think piece on the nature of emotion, this is a bold call for us to rethink the causes of unhappiness.