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Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon�s citizens � rural and urban � would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that provided income to timber corporations, small mill owners, loggers, and many small towns in Oregon, also provided a dramatic landscape and a home to creatures at risk. The rivers whose harnessing created power for industries that helped sustain Oregon�s growth � and were dumping grounds for municipal and industrial wastes � also provided passageways to spawning grounds for fish, domestic water sources, and recreational space for everyday Oregonians.The story of Oregon�s accommodation to these divergent interests is a divisive story between those interested in economic growth and perceived stability and citizens concerned with exercising good stewardship towards the state�s natural resources and preserving the state�s livability. In his second volume of Oregon�s environmental history, William Robbins addresses efforts by individuals and groups within and outside the state to resolve these conflicts. Among the people who have had roles in this process, journalists and politicians Richard Neuberger and Tom McCall left substantial legacies and demonstrated the ambiguities inherent in the issues they confronted.
The Jewish Life Cycle
In this original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history, Ivan Marcus examines how and why various rites and customs celebrating stages in the life cycle have evolved through the ages and persisted to this day. For each phase of life–from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and the advanced years�the book traces the origin and development of specific rites associated with the events of birth, circumcision, and schooling; bar and bat mitzvah and confirmation; engagement, betrothal, and marriage; and aging, dying, and remembering. Customs in Jewish tradition, such as the presence of godparents at a circumcision, the use of a four-poled canopy at a wedding, and the placing of small stones on tombstones, are discussed. In each chapter, detailed descriptions walk the reader through such ceremonies as early modern and contemporary circumcision, weddings, and funerals.In a comparative framework, Marcus illustrates how Jewish culture has negotiated with the majority cultures of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, medieval European Christianity, and Mediterranean Islam, as well as with modern secular and religious movements and social trends, to renew itself through ritual innovation.In his extensive research on the Jewish life cycle, Marcus draws from documents on various customs and ritual practices, offering reassessments of original sources and scholarly literature.Marcus�s survey is the first comprehensive study of the rites of the Jewish life cycle since Hayyim Schauss's The Lifetime of the Jew was published in 1950, written for Jewish readers. Marcus�s book addresses a broader audience and is designed to appeal to scholars and interested readers.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
Occupying much of imperial China’s Yangzi River heartland and costing more than twenty million lives, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was no ordinary peasant revolt. What most distinguished this dramatic upheaval from earlier rebellions were the spiritual beliefs of the rebels. The core of the Taiping faith focused on the belief that Shangdi, the high God of classical China, had chosen the Taiping leader, Hong Xiuquan, to establish his Heavenly Kingdom on Earth.How were the Taiping rebels, professing this new creed, able to mount their rebellion and recruit multitudes of followers in their sweep through the empire? Thomas Reilly argues that the Taiping faith, although kindled by Protestant sources, developed into a dynamic new Chinese religion whose conception of its sovereign deity challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese empire. The Taiping rebels denounced the divine pretensions of the imperial title and the sacred character of the imperial office as blasphemous usurpations of Shangdi’s title and position. In place of the imperial institution, the rebels called for restoration of the classical system of kingship. Previous rebellions had declared their contemporary dynasties corrupt and therefore in need of revival; the Taiping, by contrast, branded the entire imperial order blasphemous and in need of replacement.In this study, Reilly emphasizes the Christian elements of the Taiping faith, showing how Protestant missionaries built on earlier Catholic efforts to translate Christianity into a Chinese idiom. Prior studies of the rebellion have failed to appreciate how Hong Xiuquan’s interpretation of Christianity connected the Taiping faith to an imperial Chinese cultural and religious context. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom shows how the Bible–in particular, a Chinese translation of the Old Testament–profoundly influenced Hong and his followers, leading them to understand the first three of the Ten Commandments as an indictment of the imperial order. The rebels thus sought to destroy imperial culture along with its institutions and Confucian underpinnings, all of which they regarded as blasphemous. Strongly iconoclastic, the Taiping followers smashed religious statues and imperially approved icons throughout the lands they conquered. By such actions the Taiping Rebellion transformed–at least for its followers but to some extent for all Chinese–how Chinese people thought about religion, the imperial title and office, and the entire traditional imperial and Confucian order.This book makes a major contribution to the study of the Taiping Rebellion and to our understanding of the ideology of both the rebels and the traditional imperial order they opposed. It will appeal to scholars in the fields of Chinese history, religion, and culture and of Christian theology and church history.
Eat Everything Before You Die
In this vibrant and original novel, Christopher Columbus Wong, orphan son of a Chinatown bachelor community, is trying to invent a family for himself while all around him American popular culture is reinventing itself with sex, drugs, and rock �n� roll. Christopher finds himself on a wild journey with his gay older brother, Peter, a pan-Pacific TV chef; the defrocked, deranged, and eroding ex-director of a Chinatown settlement house, Reverend Ted Candlewick; the sharp-eyed, conspiring matriarch Auntie Mary, the bridge between the conflicting values that make up this cultural stew; and Uncle Lincoln, a bachelor, short order cook, and, quite possibly, Christopher and Peter�s father. Further complicating Christopher�s voyage are his ex-wives: Winnie, a Hong Kong immigrant looking for a green card, and Melba, an American orphan of the counterculture.Set against the backdrop of America�s wars in Asia and the assimilation of that experience�the refugees, the stereotypes, the food�Eat Everything Before You Die is an ironic commentary on the identities the children of Chinese American immigrants concoct from their questionable histories, cultural practices, and survival strategies.Chan�s riotous story will appeal to general readers, particularly those interested in the Asian American experience, and will be of strong, enduring interest to students and scholars in Asian American Studies.
Autobiographical Jews
Autobiographical Jews examines the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews from antiquity to the present, and the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. Drawing on current literary theory, which questions the very nature of autobiographical writing and its relationship to what we normally designate as the truth, and, to a lesser extent, the new cognitive neurosciences, Michael Stanislawski analyzes a number of crucial and complex autobiographical texts written by Jews through the ages.Stanislawski considers The Life by first-century historian Josephus; compares the early modern autobiographies of Asher of Reichshofen (Book of Memories) and Glikl of Hameln (Memoirs); analyzes the radically different autobiographies of two Russian Jewish writers, the Hebrew Enlightenment author Moshe Leib Lilienblum and the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; and looks at two autobiographies written out of utter despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II, Stefan Zweig�s The World of Yesterday and Sarah Kofman�s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.These writers� attempts to portray their private and public struggles, anxieties, successes, and failures are expressions of a basic drive for selfhood which is both timeless and time-bound, universal and culturally specific. The challenge is to attempt to unravel the conscious from the unconscious distortions in these texts and to regard them as artifacts of individuals� quests to make sense of their lives, first and foremost for themselves and then, if possible, for their readers.
Shiraz in the Age of Hafez
In the fourteenth-century Persian city of Shiraz, poets composed, scholars studied, mystics sought hidden truths, ascetics prayed and fasted, drunkards brawled, and princes and their courtiers played deadly games of power. This was the world of Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, a classical poet who remains broadly popular today in his native Shiraz and in modern Iran as a whole, and among all lovers of great verse traditions.As John Limbert notes, Hafez's poetry is inseparable from the Iranian spirit–a reflection of Iranians� intellectual and emotional responses to events. But if Hafez�s endurance derives from the considerable charm of his work, it also arises from his sure grounding in the life of his day, from a setting so deftly explored by his verse that his depictions of it retain a timeless relevance.To fully comprehend and enjoy Hafez, and thus to understand a root force in modern Iranian consciousness, we must know something of the city in which he lived and wrote. In this book, Limbert provides not only a rich context for Hafez�s poetry but also a comprehensive perspective on a fascinating place in a dynamic time. His portrait of this elegant, witty poet and his marvelous city will be as valuable to medievalists, students of the Middle East, and specialists in urban studies as it will be to connoisseurs of world literature.
Studying the Jewish Future
Studying the Jewish Future explores the power of Jewish culture and assesses the perceived threats to the coherence and size of Jewish communities in the United States, Europe, and Israel. In an unconventional and provocative argument, Calvin Goldscheider departs from the limiting vision of the demographic projections that have shaped predictions about the health and future of Jewish communities and asserts that «the quality of Jewish life has become the key to the future of Jewish communities.»Through the lens of individual biographies, Goldscheider shows how context shapes Jewish senses of the future and how conceptions of the future are shaped and altered by life experiences. Goldscheider�s distinctive comparative approach includes a critical review of population issues, a consideration of biographies as a basis for understanding Jewish values, and an analysis of biblical texts for studying contemporary values. He combines demographic and sociological analyses in historical and comparative perspectives to dispel the notion that quantitative issues are at the heart of the challenge of Jewish continuity in the future.Numbers are clearly the building blocks of community. But the interpretations of these demographic issues are often confusing and biased by ideological preconceptions. As a basis for studying the core themes of the Jewish future, �hard facts� are less �hard� and less «factual» than interpreters have made them out to be. Population projections are limited by the vision of those who prepare them.Goldscheider concludes that the futures of Jewish communities–in America, Europe, and Israel–are much more secure than has been presented in most scholarly and popular publications, and discussions about the Jewish future should shift to other patterns of distinctiveness.This book will appeal to the general Jewish reader as well as to social scientists and modern Jewish historians. It is appropriate for Jewish studies courses, particularly, but not exclusively, those focusing on Jews in the United States, the American Jewish community, and modern Jewish society, and in courses on ethnicity, multiculturalism, cultural diversity, and ethnic relations.
On the Margins of Tibet
The state of Tibetan culture within contemporary China is a highly politicized topic on which reliable information is rare. But what is Tibetan culture and how should it be developed or preserved? The Chinese authorities and the Tibetans in exile present conflicting views on almost every aspect of Tibetan cultural life.Ashild Kolas and Monika Thowsen have gathered an astounding array of data to quantify Tibetan cultural activities–involving Tibetan language, literature, visual arts, museums, performing arts, festivals, and religion. Their study is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in the ethnic Tibetan areas surrounding the Tibetan Autonomous Region–parts of the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan, and Qinghai. Aware of the ambiguous nature of information collected in restricted circumstances, they make every effort to present a complete and unbiased picture of Tibetan communities living on China's western frontiers.Kolas and Thowsen investigate the present conditions of Tibetan cultural life and cultural expression, providing a wealth of detailed information on topics such as the number of restored monasteries and nunneries and the number of monks, nuns, and tulkus (reincarnated lamas) affiliated with them; sources of funding for monastic reconstruction and financial support of clerics; types of religious ceremonies being practiced; the content of monastic and secular education; school attendance; educational curriculum and funding; the role of language in Tibetan schools; and Tibetan news and cultural media.On the Margins of Tibet will be of interest to historians and social scientists studying modern China and Tibetan culture, and to the many others concerned about Tibet's place in the world.
Light's Ladder
In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with: And if he remembers now he is in love, which is the soul�s condition, and alone because that is how we live."How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live?KeatsWhen Keats, at last beyond the curtainof love�s distraction, lay dying in his roomon the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the BerniniFountain �filling him like flowers,�he held his breath like a coin, looked outinto the moonlight and thought he saw snow.He did not suppose it was fever or the body�sweakness turning the mind. He thought, �England!�and there he was, secretly, for the restof his improvidently short life: up to his neckin sleigh bells and the impossibly English criesof street venders, perfectand affectionate as his soul.For days the snow and statuary sang him so farbeyond regret that if now you walk rancorlessand alone there, in the piazza, the white shadowof his last words to Severn, �Don�t be frightened,�may enter you.
Reading Seattle
Seattle, with its spectacular natural beauty and rough frontier history, has inspired writers from its earliest days. This anthology spans seven decades and includes fiction, memoirs, histories, and journalism that define the city or use it as a setting, imparting the flavor of the city through a literary prism.Reading Seattle features classics by Horace R. Cayton, Richard Hugo, Betty MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, Murray Morgan, and John Okada as well as more recent works by Sherman Alexie, Lynda Barry, David Guterson, J. A. Jance, Jonathan Raban, and others. It includes cutting-edge work by emerging talents and reintroduces works by important Seattle writers who may have been overlooked in recent years.The writers featured in this volume explore a variety of neighborhoods and districts within the city, delineating urban spaces and painting memorable portraits of characters both historical and fictional.