Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that—despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone—is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality: Is what exists a souvenir of the time Of the great nought and deep night without stars The time before the universe began? When we look at each other and see nothing Is that not a confirmation that we are less Than meets the eye and embody some of The night of our origins? A timeless pursuit of timeless questions, Dark Harbor centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets.

On a visit to his rich eccentric uncle, who owns many wonderful paintings, Tom is amazed when Rembrandt leaves his self-portrait and takes a walk with Tom.

The tenure of Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (1953-69) was marked by a series of decisions unique in the history of the Court for the progressive agenda they bespoke. What made the Warren Court special? How can students of history and political science understand the Warren Court as part of constitutional history and politics? To answer such questions, nine well-known legal scholars and historians explore how each justice contributed to the distinctiveness of the Warren Court in Supreme Court history.

Mark W. Clark was a major figure in World War II. He was prominent as one of the top American commanders. Together with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, and George S. Patton, Jr., Clark was widely regarded as being responsible for victory on the European side of the conflict. One of the great World War II memoirs by a legendary American general in charge of operations in North Africa and Italy. General Mark W. Clark recounts his wartime exploits and tells the story of the battles in Tunisia and Italy with verve and attention to key detail. An unparalleled account by a great military leader.

An exploration of how LSD influences imagination and the creative process. • Based on the results of one of the longest clinical studies of LSD that took place between 1954 and 1962, before LSD was illegal. • Includes personal reports, artwork, and poetry from the original sessions as testimony of the impact of LSD on the creative process. In 1954 a Los Angeles psychiatrist began experimenting with a then new chemical discovery known as LSD-25. Over an eight-year period Dr. Oscar Janiger gave LSD-25 to more than 950 men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 81 and coming from all walks of life. The data collected by the author during those trials and from follow-up studies done 40 years later is now available here for the first time, along with the authors' examination of LSD's ramifications on creativity, imagination, and spirituality. In this book Marlene Dobkin de Rios, a medical anthropologist who has studied the use of hallucinogens in tribal and third world societies, considers the spiritual implications of these findings in comparison with indigenous groups that employ psychoactive substances in their religious ceremonies. The book also examines the nature of the creative process as influenced by psychedelics and provides artwork and poetry from the original experiment sessions, allowing the reader to personally witness LSD's impact on creativity. The studies recounted in LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process depict an important moment in the history of consciousness and reveal the psychic unity of humanity.

I feel like I'm one of those people that you talk about whose lives have been adventures in Marxism. I'm fifty years old, and since I spent my life as a construction worker raising a family, I'm at this stage still in college ... Your book was inspiring to me because it reminded me why I made the sacrifices I did to get an education ... the sheer joy of learning about ideas and the hope that education can make some kind of difference. He great thing about your approach to Marx is that you show that theory and the world of ideas can be exciting and intellectually rich, but also relevant to all workers, blue collar or otherwise. —Personal letter to the Author from Scott Smith, construction worker and student (Pittsburgh)

Described as “a continuous carnival” and “the crossroads of the world,” Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To esteemed scholar and author Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life. In this remarkable book, Berman takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour of Times Square, revealing a landscape both mythic and real. On the Town is a unique look through the lens of the ideas and works of art that inspired–or were inspired by–this landmark’s allure. Times Square pulses with life, drawing countless millions who long to be surrounded by too many in the midst of too much. Beyond the immense crowds, the intoxicating lights, the imposing architecture, and even the recent incursion of corporate headquarters that limn the Square’s present boundaries, there is an indefatigable humanity (and undeniable sexual tension) that, for more than a century, has nourished creative expression. Interleafing his own recollections with astute social commentary, Berman reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square’s voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Berman shows us Times Square as it is seen in Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photography, the movies of Busby Berkeley, John Schlesinger, and Martin Scorsese, and the stage choreography of Jerome Robbins. Conversely, we see how Times Square’s distinctive aura finds its source in a stunningly diverse list of performers, writers, and impresarios, including Theodore Dreiser, Florenz Ziegfeld, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Berman also celebrates the unsung heroes of Times Square–the artists, engineers, and hucksters behind the Square’s landmark signs that, throughout the decades, re-created raging waterfalls, blew smoke rings, bathed onlookers in the Square’s eerily welcoming light, and projected the image of what Americans want to be against a surface of who we really are. Part love letter, part revelatory semiotic exposition of a place known to all, On the Town is a nonstop excursion to the heart of American civilization, written by one of our keenest, most entertaining cultural observers.

Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history—including the idea that Western history is the foundation of everyone else's. Here, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides and the conceptions of history he wrought with a groundbreaking new book that shows what a difference an anthropological concept of culture can make to the writing of history.Sahlins begins by confronting Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War with an analogous "Polynesian War," the fight for the domination of the Fiji Islands (1843-55) between a great sea power (like Athens) and a great land power (like Sparta). Sahlins draws parallels between the conflicts with an eye to their respective systems of power and sovereignty as well as to Thucydides' alternation between individual (Pericles, Themistocles) and collective (the Athenians, the Spartans) actors in the making of history. Characteristic of most histories ever written, this alternation between the agency of "Great Men" and collective entities leads Sahlins to a series of incisive analyses ranging in subject matter from Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon and certain divine kings to the brouhaha over Elián Gonzalez. Finally, again departing from Thucydides, Sahlins considers the relationship between cultural order and historical contingency through the recounting of a certain royal assassination that changed the course of Fijian history, a story of fratricide and war worthy of Shakespeare.In this most convincing presentation yet of his influential theory of culture, Sahlins experiments with techniques for mixing rich narrative with cultural explication in the hope of doing justice at once to the actions of persons and the customs of people. And he demonstrates the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history—with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not. --

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits, and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to the dire. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of “religion” and the “supernatural.” The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights. In this, his last, revelatory book, Marshall Sahlins announces a new method and sets an exciting agenda for the field. He takes readers around the world, from Inuit of the Arctic Circle to pastoral Dinka of East Africa, from Araweté swidden gardeners of Amazonia to Trobriand Island horticulturalists. In the process, Sahlins sheds new light on classical and contemporary ethnographies that describe these cultures of immanence and reveals how even the apparently mundane, all-too-human spheres of “economics” and “politics” emerge as people negotiate with, and ultimately usurp, the powers of the gods.

Originally published in 1948, this powerful novel follows a U.S. Army infantry battalion in Europe through the last months of the Second World War - through the Battle of the Bulge, the Allied sweep across Germany, and the discovery of the Nazi death camps. Jacob Levy, a young soldier from St. Louis, has never given much thought to politics, world affairs, or his own Jewish heritage, but after the liberation of Dachau, he confronts the horror of the Holocaust and takes his own violent revenge. Jolted into a new understanding of humanity's connectedness, he comes to terms with his own Jewish identity and grapples with questions of individual moral responsibility that are still contemporary fifty years later. In her afterword, Martha Gellhorn traces the roots of the novel in her own experience as a war correspondent who first heard of the Nazi concentration camps during the Spanish Civil War and herself got to Dachau a week after American soldiers discovered the camp at the end of a village street.

“[Blending] cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern, Gellhorn is one of the most extraordinary women of our era.”— Chicago Sun-Times Spanning more than 40 years and settings that range from Depression-era America to the smartest London dinner parties to the highlands of East Africa, the novellas of Martha Gellhorn display the same qualities that have made her one of the most famous journalists of the twentieth century: an indelible sense of place, prose of breathtaking swiftness and precision, and an unerring fix on the hidden motives of her characters. Above all, Martha Gellhorn explores the ways men and women live privately—and often passionately—amid the rush of history. “Reading Martha Gellhorn for the first time is a staggering experience. She is not a travel writer or a journalist or a novelist: she is all of these, and one of the most eloquent witnesses of the twentieth century.”—Bill Buford, Granta “Martha Gellhorn is one of our very best writers. To the swift and vibrant medium of the [novella], she brings a richness of experience, a tenderness and depth of feeling.”— The Atlantic “Peerless and hilarious . . . Martha Gellhorn is a wittily astringent writer.”— Vogue

The rise of collective violence and genocide is the twentieth century's most terrible legacy. Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on our attempts to heal after such large-scale tragedy. Writing with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of the truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa; war-crime prosecutions in Nuremberg and Bosnia; and reparations in America, Minow looks at the strategies and results of these riveting national experiments in justice and healing.

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such "citizens of the world" in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education - critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship.

Achieving social justice is one of the key challenges facing the world today scholars of political theory have long grappled with issues arising from it however, as the history of ideas shows, the concept itself has undergone much change over the centuries and there is no watertight definition of what ‘justice’ connotes in the contemporary context going beyond the existing frontiers of social justice, this unique volume aims to develop theoretical concepts able to respond to real dilemmas facing society today the author closely examines the classical social contract theory, one of the most widely accepted approaches to social justice in the western tradition she focuses in particular on the ideas of one of the greatest names in contemporary political philosophy, john rawls, whose work developed the theory to new philosophical depths and complexity nussbaum moves in a fresh direction and suggests that there is an inherent limitation within the social contract theory, even in the work of rawls—it is premised on the idea of a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals she demonstrates that it is unable to address questions of social justice between unequal parties instead she goes on to develop a theory of social justice based on the ‘capabilities approach’, which she places generally within the tradition of ‘liberal conceptions’ the author analyses three social issues which could not be resolved, or even really addressed by traditional theories of justice—the problem of achieving justice for persons with physical and mental disability, of extending justice to all citizens of the world, and lastly the problem of doing justice in relation to the treatment of ‘non-human animals’ she helps us to think more clearly about the purpose of political cooperation and the nature of political principles—and to look to a future of greater justice for all

Analyzing the role of emotion in political life, draws from a range of global sources to suggest that the cultivation of emotions--specifically love--can inspire individuals to sacrifice for the common good.