Books From University Presses

In a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, survivors who were children or teens during World War II assembled to remember the pivotal moments in which their lives were irreparably changed by the Nazis. These "flares of memory" preserve the voices of over forty Jews from throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten.Ninety-two brief vignettes arranged both chronologically and thematically recreate the disbelief and chaos that ensued as families were separated, political rights were abolished, and synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. Survivors remember the daily humiliation, the quiet heroes among their friends, and the painful abandonment by neighbors as Jews were restricted to ghettos, forced to don yellow stars, and loaded like cattle into trains. Vivid memories of hunger, disease, and a daily existence dependent on cruel luck provide penetrating testimonies to the ruthlessness of the Nazi killing machine, yet they also bear witness to the resilience and fortitude of individual souls bombarded by evil."I don't think that there will be many readers who will be able to put this book down."--Jerome Chanes, National Foundation for Jewish Culture

Recommendation: This book is recommended for those who enjoy reading autobiographies of people who have lived unconventional lives. The unique and distinctive feature of this book is its narrative style, which is unvarnished and straightforward. It offers insight into the difficult life of a traveling tramp, and provides a glimpse into the harsher side of American life during the Great Depression. Readers who appreciate a raw human experience and a unique perspective on life will appreciate this book.

A "commonplace book," must, by its very nature, be unique, a mixture of personal, critical, playful, and profound musings. In Interplay , the noted critic and poet D. J. Enright has arranged and expanded his jottings, thoughts, observations, and impressions from over the years, resulting in amoving, lucid, and inviting mixture of autobiography and commentary.Much of what Enright shares concerns literary the eccentricities of reviewing; the reductiveness of current fiction; reflections on modern biography; the necessity and impossibility of censorship; irony and sentimentality; treason among intellectuals; linguistic hanky-panky; literarytheory and literary practice (Proust versus Paul de Man); and some of his new poetry. Interspersed are such fascinating asides as a layman's look at Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Barthes; curious points of theology; an account of racial stereotypes, their use and limitations; ars eroticaancient and modern; sidelights on Chinese and Japanese thought; the obsolete notion of integrity in politics and business; and dreams in life and literature.To all of these questions and subjects Enright brings his inimitable style and manner, as well as varying moods--sad, humorous, ironic--bound together by his overwhelming humanism that makes life and literature inseparable. This is a brilliant book, full of wit, insight, and intriguing miscellany,one that serves as an eclectic self-portrait of a leading literary mind and a very telling account of modern attitudes and life as we know it.

This book could be a good read for those interested in delving deeper into Australian poetry and literature. It offers an insightful critique of the works of one of Australia's most popular poets, Bruce Dawe. The book analyzes his poetry in the context of Australian culture and society, providing a unique perspective on his works. Readers who enjoy critical analysis and are curious about Australian poets will find this book particularly interesting.

Richard Gilman examines each of Chekhov's full-length plays, showing how they relate to each other, to Chekhov's short stories, and to his life. He also places the plays in the context of Russian and European drama and the larger culture of the period. Gilman interweaves biographical narrative with textual commentary and with a discussion of stage-craft and dramaturg - Chekhov's techniques for influencing viewers, the scenic framing of the action, and issues of genre and temporal structuring. Although previous critics of Chekhov have tended to view him as an essentially social dramatist or as an observer of the smaller aspects of existence, Gilman asserts that Chekhov was far more of an innovative playwright, a revolutionary, than has been seen.

Bernard Williams, who died in 2003, was one of the most influential moral philosophers of his generation. A lifelong opera lover, his articles and essays, talks for the BBC, contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Opera , and program notes for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the English National Opera, generated a devoted following. This elegant volume brings together these widely scattered and largely unobtainable pieces, including two that have not been previously published. It covers an engaging range of topics from Mozart to Wagner, including sparkling essays on specific operas by those composers as well as Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Janacek, and Tippett. Reflecting Williams’s brilliance, passion, and clarity of mind, these essays engage with, and illustrate, the enduring appeal of opera as an art form.

“I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!”In Undertones of War , one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That .

In the history of modern theater Ibsen is one of the dominating figures. The sixteen chapters of this Companion explore his life and work. The plays are grouped and discussed chronologically; among the thematic topics are discussions of Ibsen's comedy, realism, lyric poetry and feminism. Substantial chapters account for Ibsen's influence on the international stage, including an interview with ex-RSC director John Barton and an essay by Arthur Miller exploring Ibsen's challenge to contemporary theater and film. Essential reference materials include a full chronology, list of works, and essays on twentieth-century criticism and further reading.

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.

The confusion, losses, and devastation of Alzheimer's disease are familiar to the millions of Americans suffering from the disease and to their family members. Understandably, declining abilities and changing personal characteristics shape our picture of the disease, leading some to refer to the "double death" of Alzheimer's in which the sufferer drifts away long before his or her eventual physical end.This small, tender volume of 85 photographs and accompanying discussion powerfully shows the limitations of this view. Cathy Stein Greenblat, an internationally respected sociologist and photographer, demonstrates in Alive with Alzheimer's that, while the ravages of the disease are real, Alzheimer's sufferers can do more than survive, they can thrive. Her images, interviews, and observations attest to the possibility of their being "alive" with Alzheimer's far beyond the expectations of the general public and even of many physicians with long experience with the disease.Greenblat offers a new vision, taking us into a world of life-enhancing institutional care. Nursing homes and similar facilities don't have to be a last resort; as Greenblat shows, with a dedicated and experienced staff and an enriched environment (that includes respect, choices, pets, and music), extraordinary changes can be effected in Alzheimer's patients. Alive with Alzheimer's, the first photographic book on the disease, offers hope and inspiration. Moreover, its vivid, impressive evidence that ongoing stimulation in a good institutional setting can sustain Alzheimer's patients at a far higher level than is generally believed has significant implications for personal and policy decisions.The new standard of care chronicled in Alive with Alzheimer's will provide hope and inspiration to those touched by the disease. As Dr. Enid Rockwell writes in her Afterword to Greenblat's moving book, "These photographs are extraordinary for practitioners, for family members, for everyone to see what's going on with these people. The stimulation pictured in this book is more powerful than any medication that we will have in our lifetime. . . . They so vividly show us that there are people inside these bodies, people with personalities, who experience emotion, and they show that there is life after Alzheimer's."

"Starry Island" might be just the cultural tapestry you're looking for. As Singapore commemorates its independence anthology-style, you'll traverse through myriad voices—each presenting a unique facet of this vibrant society. This book unravels the paradoxes and harmonies of Singaporean identity, through an engaging mix of essays, fiction, and poetry. It's a chance to witness the literary heartbeat of a country at a pivotal moment, all curated within one enriching volume.

Abe Fortas was a New Dealer, a sub-cabinet official, the founder of an eminent Washington law firm, a close adviser to Lyndon Johnson, and a Supreme Court justice. Nominated by Johnson to be Chief Justice, he was rejected by Congress and resigned from the Court early in the Nixon administration under a cloud of impending scandal. This engrossing book--the first full biography of Abe Fortas--tells his dramatic story.Drawing on Fortas's previously unavailable personal papers, on numerous archives, and on extensive interviews with his family and associates, Laura Kalman, a historian and lawyer, illuminates Fortas's evolution from New Dealer to Washington lawyer to Great Society liberal, and in so doing also provides a unique view of American liberalism from the 1930s through the 1960s."There was no single Abe Fortas," writes Kalman. "There was a variety of personae, and Fortas moved comfortably from one to another. Kalman describes Fortas's various personae:* the boy who as "Fiddlin' Abe" played the violin in dance bands to earn spending money and who grew to consider chamber music the love of his life;* the Jew who cared more about Israel than Judaism;* the civil libertarian who worked for irascible Harold Ickes as Under Secretary of the Interior during the New Deal, who defended those charged with disloyalty by Joseph McCarthy, and promoted social justice on the Court;* the urbane corporate lawyer whose friends became clients and whose clients became friends;* the brilliant legal tactician who secured Lyndon Johnson's Senate seat in 1948 and whose successful defense of the Gideon case was described by William O. Douglas as "the best single argument" he heard in all his years on the Supreme Court;* the Supreme Court justice who willingly risked compromising his judicial integrity to advise President Johnson;* the man who hobnobbed with the powerful yet was powerless to combat the attacks against him when he was a Supreme Court justice, and whose resignation from the Court contributed to the destruction of the liberal agenda for social reform.Reflecting on the various aspects of Fortas's enigmatic personality and the events of his life, Kalman creates a new portrait of the man that is more insightful and complete than any yet published. Engagingly written and superbly researched, this is the authoritative account of Fortas and the legal and political history he helped to shape.

Collection of essays written in honour of Emeritus Professor Thumboo. It reflects the wide range of his interests: poetry, sociolinguistics, post-colonialism and new literatures, especially those of Singapore, Malaysia, India and Africa.

If you're intrigued by how cultural observation intertwines with personal and disciplinary growth, "After the Fact" offers a unique perspective. Clifford Geertz doesn't just take you on a journey through two towns he studied; he also invites you to witness the transformation of anthropology and the world over four decades. It's thought-provoking for anyone interested in the human condition and the way we study it.

In this book readers are invited to explore a fascinating but neglected field of English letters; the books written by British men and women about their experience in the Indian subcontinent. Over forty individual works are surveyed, covering the time period from when the East India Company began consolidating its powers to the eve of the Mutiny. The author balances generous excerpts from the original texts with her own exegeses to produce a work which offers rich insights to lay readers as well as to professional students of literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and travel writing.