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Скачивание или чтение онлайн электронных книг.The Quick
The Quick is a book of essences. Katrina Roberts's large-spirited and exhilarating poetry is at once celebratory and elegiac, lyric and narrative, striving to divine what's at the quick of this fleeting existence we share. Anchored in many ways by the long poem «Cantata,» which chronicles her pregnancy and the birth of her son, the book turns and turns its kaleidoscopic lens, settling now on origins and creation myths, now on Greek or Welsh gods, now on a painting by Vermeer or on an article from the daily news, all slipping together to illuminate our coming to consciousness, our coming to «be.»The poems ask how one might reconcile one's simple joys with the world's larger concerns. An inquiry of this depth cannot fail to encounter grief, but it is a grief tempered and transcended by the acceptance of ongoing life, as well as a consistently outward-focused eye and a passion for language. Sparked by Roberts's sharp imagery and daring cadences, this is a fresh and savvy collection, informed by science, myth, music, philosophy, and etymology, all braided within a sinuous narrative line that runs from sorrow to rich celebration.
Faith in Nature
The human impulse to religion–the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans’ place in the universe – can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. Faith in Nature traces the history of environmentalism–and its moral thrust–from its roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism through the Progressive Era to the present. Drawing astonishing parallels between religion and environmentalism, the book examines the passion of the movement’s adherents and enemies alike, its concern with the moral conduct of daily life, and its attempt to answer fundamental questions about the underlying order of the world and of humanity’s place within it.Thomas Dunlap is among the leading environmental historians and historians of science in the United States. Originally trained as a chemist, he has a rigorous understanding of science and appreciates its vital importance to environmental thought. But he is also a devout Catholic who believes that the insights of religious revelation need not necessarily be at odds with the insights of scientific investigation. This book grew from his own religious journey and his attempts to understand human ethical obligations and spiritual debts to the natural world.CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2005
Vigilante Newspapers
This riveting work of social history documents the role the news media played in spurring two murders revolving around Edmund Creffield, a charismatic «Holy Roller» evangelist who arrived in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1903 and quickly enraged the citizenry by defiantly challenging the religious and sexual mores of the time. When ardent female followers began refusing to speak to their nonbelieving husbands, vigilantes tarred and feathered Creffield, eventually forcing him to flee to Seattle.Once there, Creffield was murdered by George Mitchell, the brother of one of his followers. The news media in Seattle and Oregon applauded George's defense of his sister Esther's honor, influencing the jury. Citing temporary insanity, the jury quickly acquitted George, pleasing the cheering crowds and the approving media. As George prepared to return to Oregon, however, Esther shot him point-blank at Union Station and another moralizing media frenzy broke out. Esther was sent to Western State Hospital and committed suicide after her release. Her short life was among the most poignant of the dozens wrecked by the controversy.Gerald Baldasty's examination of Seattle and Oregon media coverage shows the tenacity with which frontier media protected traditional mores, particularly the notion that men are responsible for women's purity and have the right to take action if they feel another man has besmirched a woman's honor. Expertly crafted in a brisk, accessible style, Vigilante Newspapers illustrates through the tragic tale of Edmund Creffield, George Mitchell, and Esther Mitchell how the news media defined social deviance using vague concepts such as hysteria and temporary insanity, vigorously defending the established order of religious, class, and gender norms.
A Life Disturbed
An exceptional storyteller with an analytical eye, Merrel Clubb has gathered the letters he sent his parents from the Pacific Theater of World War II and his subsequent reflections on that war and on his life into a kind of then-and-now memoir. The letters are a treasure trove of humor, anxiety, and hope, revealing a young man thrust into a war that he does not understand. Through this exceptional portal on the past, we learn of the tragic absurdity of war, of a soldier trained for naval warfare but sent into land battle with weapons he'd never before fired; of command post latrines at which even commanding officers were sitting ducks; of the ghoulish trophies and mementos that soldiers collected from the battlefields.The letters describe a vivid cast of characters, from Clubb's childhood friend who instilled a love of poetry in his comrades to the hillbilly singer and the prostitute with whom the young Clubb had varied amorous adventures. But the most compelling figure in this narrative is, of course, Clubb himself, an intellectual who carried Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad along with his tommy gun; who used books as a fortification for his foxhole, discovering upon waking one morning that «Ouspensky stopped a bullet»; and who, in a darkly humorous moment, wrote home that «Plato is pretty consoling, because I can always think that somewhere there is a perfect hell of a navy of which this is but an imitation or representation.»Returning to these letters years later prompts Clubb to look again at the Second World War and at the atomic bomb that ended it. In an analysis as useful to understanding our own historical moment as it is to reconsidering the past, Clubb counters the conventional wisdom shared by veterans and civilians alike, particularly regarding the concept of a «just war.»For Clubb, as for so many veterans, the war does not end with the victory over Japan. Despite the intervening years, Clubb finds that the haunting episodes experienced over half a century ago echo still. Even in the solitude of the forest, in the hunting parties he meets, in the animals he himself kills, he hears again the sound of battle, sees again the faces of the victims of war.Part letters, part memoir, and part scholarly analysis, this volume ranges over a vast, colorful, and weighted territory. From the battles and respites in the Pacific Islands, to the night clubs and call girls of mainland San Francisco and San Diego; from the relative quiet of his aptly named hometown, Stillwater, to the similarly quiet Montana backcountry, Clubb's narrative explores the psychological terrain of a life disturbed, and forever changed, by war.
The Lost Wolves of Japan
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history.Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer. Talismans and charms adorned with images of wolves protected against fire, disease, and other calamities and brought fertility to agrarian communities and to couples hoping to have children. The Ainu people believed that they were born from the union of a wolflike creature and a goddess.In the eighteenth century, wolves were seen as rabid man-killers in many parts of Japan. Highly ritualized wolf hunts were instigated to cleanse the landscape of what many considered as demons. By the nineteenth century, however, the destruction of wolves had become decidedly unceremonious, as seen on the island of Hokkaido. Through poisoning, hired hunters, and a bounty system, one of the archipelago's largest carnivores was systematically erased.The story of wolf extinction exposes the underside of Japan's modernization. Certain wolf scientists still camp out in Japan to listen for any trace of the elusive canines. The quiet they experience reminds us of the profound silence that awaits all humanity when, as the Japanese priest Kenko taught almost seven centuries ago, we «look on fellow sentient creatures without feeling compassion.»
Information Ethics
This anthology focuses on the ethical issues surrounding information control in the broadest sense. Anglo-American institutions of intellectual property protect and restrict access to vast amounts of information. Ideas and expressions captured in music, movies, paintings, processes of manufacture, human genetic information, and the like are protected domestically and globally.The ethical issues and tensions surrounding free speech and information control intersect in at least two important respects. First, the commons of thought and expression is threatened by institutions of copyright, patent, and trade secret. While institutions of intellectual property may be necessary for innovation and social progress they may also be detrimental when used by the privileged and economically advantaged to control information access, consumption, and expression. Second, free speech concerns have been allowed to trump privacy interests in all but the most egregious of cases.At the same time, our ability to control access to information about ourselves–what some call «informational privacy»–is rapidly diminishing. Data mining and digital profiling are opening up what most would consider private domains for public consumption and manipulation.Post-9/11, issues of national security have run headlong into individual rights to privacy and free speech concerns. While constitutional guarantees against unwarranted searches and seizures have been relaxed, access to vast amounts of information held by government agencies, libraries, and other information storehouses has been restricted in the name of national security.
The Transparent Body
From the potent properties of X rays evoked in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to the miniaturized surgical team of the classic science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, the possibility of peering into the inner reaches of the body has engaged the twentieth-century popular and scientific imagination. Drawing on examples that are international in scope, The Transparent Body examines the dissemination of medical images to a popular audience, advancing the argument that medical imaging technologies are the material embodiment of collective desires and fantasies–the most pervasive of which is the ideal of transparency itself. The Transparent Body traces the cultural context and wider social impact of such medical imaging practices as X ray and endoscopy, ultrasound imaging of fetuses, the filming and broadcasting of surgical operations, the creation of plastinated corpses for display as art objects, and the use of digitized cadavers in anatomical study.In the early twenty-first century, the interior of the body has become a pervasive cultural presence – as accessible to the public eye as to the physician's gaze. Jose van Dijck explores the multifaceted interactions between medical images and cultural ideologies that have brought about this situation. The Transparent Body unfolds the complexities involved in medical images and their making, illuminating their uses and meanings both within and outside of medicine. Van Dijck demonstrates the ways in which the ability to render the inner regions of the human body visible – and the proliferation of images of the body's interior in popular media – affect our view of corporeality and our understanding of health and disease. Written in an engaging style that brings thought-provoking cultural intersections vividly to life, The Transparent Body will be of special interest to those in media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.
Guest People
The essays in this volume analyze and compare what it means to be Hakka in a variety of sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Taiwan, and contemporary China.
Driven Wild
In its infancy, the movement to protect wilderness areas in the United States was motivated less by perceived threats from industrial and agricultural activities than by concern over the impacts of automobile owners seeking recreational opportunities in wild areas. Countless commercial and government purveyors vigorously promoted the mystique of travel to breathtakingly scenic places, and roads and highways were built to facilitate such travel. By the early 1930s, New Deal public works programs brought these trends to a startling crescendo. The dilemma faced by stewards of the nation's public lands was how to protect the wild qualities of those places while accommodating, and often encouraging, automobile-based tourism. By 1935, the founders of the Wilderness Society had become convinced of the impossibility of doing both.In Driven Wild, Paul Sutter traces the intellectual and cultural roots of the modern wilderness movement from about 1910 through the 1930s, with tightly drawn portraits of four Wilderness Society founders–Aldo Leopold, Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, and Bob Marshall. Each man brought a different background and perspective to the advocacy for wilderness preservation, yet each was spurred by a fear of what growing numbers of automobiles, aggressive road building, and the meteoric increase in Americans turning to nature for their leisure would do to the country�s wild places. As Sutter discovered, the founders of the Wilderness Society were «driven wild»–pushed by a rapidly changing country to construct a new preservationist ideal.Sutter demonstrates that the birth of the movement to protect wilderness areas reflected a growing belief among an important group of conservationists that the modern forces of capitalism, industrialism, urbanism, and mass consumer culture were gradually eroding not just the ecology of North America, but crucial American values as well. For them, wilderness stood for something deeply sacred that was in danger of being lost, so that the movement to protect it was about saving not just wild nature, but ourselves as well.
Neighbor Power
Building on the lessons of early labor leaders, civil rights volunteers, and political activists, Jim Diers has developed his own models and successful strategies for community development. Neighbor Power chronicles his involvement with Seattle�s communities. This book not only gives hope that participatory democracy is possible, but it offers practical applications and invaluable lessons for ordinary, caring citizens who want to make a difference. It also provides government officials with inspiring stories and proven programs to help them embrace citizen activists as true partners.Diers�s experience is extensive. He began as a community organizer in 1976, then moved on to help establish and staff a system of consumer-elected medical center councils. This led him to Seattle city government, where he served under three mayors as the first director of the Department of Neighborhoods, recognized as the national leader in such efforts.In the 1990s, Jim Diers helped Seattle neighborhoods face challenges ranging from gang violence to urban growth. The Neighborhood Matching Fund grew to support over 400 community self-help projects each year while a community-driven planning process involved 30,000 people. Diers provides evidence that productive community life is thriving, not just in Seattle, Washington, but in towns and cities across the globe. Both practical and inspiring, Neighbor Power offers real-life examples of how to build active, creative neighborhoods and enjoy the rich results of community empowerment.