This amusing and fascinating children's book is often called the Russian "Thousand and One Nights." Who is the old Genie Hottabych? This is what the author has to say of him: "In one of Scheherazade's tales I read of the Fisherman who found a copper vessel in his net. In the vessel was a mighty Genie -a magician who had been imprisoned in the bottle for nearly two thousand years. The Genie had sworn to make the one who freed him rich, powerful and happy. "But what if such a Genie suddenly came to life in the Soviet Union, in Moscow? I tried to imagine what would have happened if a very ordinary Russian boy had freed him from the vessel. "And imagine, I suddenly discovered that a schoolboy named Volka Kostylkov, the very same Volka who used to live on Three Ponds Street, you know, the best diver at summer camp last year . . . On second thought, I believe we had better begin from the beginning . . . "

Are you tired of eating the same food night after night because you cannot find vegan recipes designed for just one person? Then help is at hand. Here is a mouth-watering selection of quick and easy-to-prepare vegan menus, all suitable for one person. Savor the delights of Smoked Tofu a la King, Vegetable Pilau Special, Jambalaya, or Nutty Plum Crumble.

A lesson in the art of looking closely, Friedlander has produced a photographic essay about seeing photographically which is full of the strange, surreal found imagery, the jarring montages (really superimpositions in space), and the surgical framing that are Friedlander trademarks. The immediate subject is writing in public places - printed, painted, or hand-scrawled - that appears here first as single letters in alphabetical order, then, successively, numerals, combinations of numerals, and combinations of letters in signs and graffiti that contain messages of anger, violence, religion, sex, and love. There is no overall narrative, but the progression from elements to messages builds into a complexity of significance, ending with a graffito full of the lonely longing most graffiti betray: "Everyday I calls a phone to her. Every night I dreams for her." Thus a universal story is reflected, one that may be something of a projection of Friedlander's own mind, as, of course, are all these 'letters from the people'.

Mark Sloane receives a package full of incriminating evidence from a case being investigated by private eye Nick Stryker, who includes the cryptic message, If you are reading this, I'm dead. Original.

A collection of twenty-two personal narratives explores what should be done in the health care system with regards to death, dying, and palliative care.--

Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

"In these 23 original stories, mothers and fathers from all walks of life - straight, gay, single, surrogate, biological, adoptive - explore the challenges and rewards of parenthood. Here, among other adventures, parents fall hopelessly in love with newborns, secretly fear having made huge mistakes, race to finish birthing at home before the paramedics arrive, struggle with the bureaucracy of international adoption, despair of ever getting a one-year-old to nap, are nearly broken by colic, encounter other judgy parents in birthing class, learn how to parent children with special needs, and more. Together, these thoughtful, searing, often hilarious essays map the grand (and sometimes terrifying) journey that begins with each new life."--Page 4 of cover.

From Publishers Weekly In this "striking portrait" of Pittsburgh's prominent Children's Hospital, the author argues that the young receive superior care in institutions devoted solely to them. "Employing a journalist's 'fly on the wall' strengths of observation, rendering insights with novelistic verve, Gutkind recounts hospital procedures . . . and chronicles a procession of tragedies and triumphs," said PW. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Focusing on the lives of three mentally ill adolescents, the author exposes a national disgrace of incompetent care, neglect, and ineffective treatment

Since James Herriot first began his practice almost a century ago, new technologies and the changing concerns of animal owners have dramatically altered the veterinarian's world. Through a kaleidoscope of contrasting portraits, Lee Gutkind introduces an equally impassioned lot of doctors and their sometimes eccentric patients. Animal lovers will love this journey from tony, expensive Manhattan practices to mucky farms, from cutting-edge animal hospitals to zoos and aquatic parks.

"In his comprehensive history of the synagogue from the Hellenistic period through Late Antiquity, Lee Levine traces the origins and development of this dynamic and revolutionary institution. This revised paperback edition reflects the latest information in the field and includes a wealth of recently published material ranging from excavation reports and monographs to articles appearing in edited volumes and scholarly journals". --

The career of American artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was brief but extraordinarily intense. Throughout the 1960s, during the transition from Pop art to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and up until her self-imposed exile in the 1970s, Lozano created a genuinely radical and frequently obscene body of work that traversed a gamut of idioms. Her early paintings were executed in a messy cartoon style, oozing with violence and sexuality. By 1967, Lozano was responding to Minimalism and Op art with her abstract Wave paintings. It was also around this time that she initiated a series of actions that tested both the limits of art and acceptable conduct in society, such as smoking pot, masturbating and, mostly notoriously of all, boycotting women. This publication accompanies a retrospective of Lozano's works at Moderna Museet in Stockholm--works which after 40 years remain as witty, acerbic and shockingly fresh as ever.

Lee Lozano (1930–1999) brought a potent voice to the 1960s New York art scene. Equipped with an extraordinary intellectual reach and demonstrating an unusually expressive and mature sexuality, Lozano’s art―which includes paintings, drawings, and conceptual works―is as fresh today as it was more than 40 years ago. This handsome book presents selections of the artist’s early narrative and figurative drawings dating from 1960 to ‘64. It is the first publication focusing on Lozano’s drawings, and all of the featured works are previously unpublished. Her drawings can be exacting, demanding, and formally refined, such as her sexually charged depictions of tools, or freer gestural drawings using graphite with splashes of crayon color. Lozano also created text pieces that are part diary and part social chronicle. Conceived as a sort of artist’s sketchbook, the publication is completed by selections from the artist’s own diaries, which reveal her incredible wit, anger, intelligence, and struggles. Lee Lozano: Drawings leaves no doubt of how prescient her work has proven to be and why she is an artist who is attracting a great deal of attention today.

Stories of Biblical Mothers offers a new look at an often unnoticed group of women in the Hebrew Bible: the biblical mothers. The author's insightful analysis gives evidence that women of the Bible are able to obtain domestic and public influence through their status as mothers. This work reassesses the position of the biblical woman, and acknowledges that while marginalized, nevertheless as a mother she is both honored and powerful. Author Leila Leah Bronner adds to the ongoing conversation about the role and place of women in the Bible, and inspires further reflection on the biblical mother.

Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity is a collection of selected essays by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest that discusses the historical response of African American freedom movements to the colonial settler state of Israel and its role in American Imperialism in the Middle East. Among other topics and controversies, these essays provide independent analysis of Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Harold Cruse, the Nation of Islam, Israel's relationship to Apartheid South Africa, and the recent conflict between Alice Walker and the Anti-Defamation League. Brenner and Quest offer concise portraits of the Palestine freedom movement, the meanings of Zionism, and Black-Jewish disputes about ethnic pluralism in the United States. Through nuanced discussions of racism, capitalism, imperialism, and state power, their work helps to clarify one of the most controversial legacies of the Black Power movement.

The book describes two stages in the historical development of the notion of mathematical structures: first, it traces its rise in the context of algebra from the mid-nineteenth century to its consolidation by 1930, and then it considers several attempts to formulate elaborate theories after 1930 aimed at elucidating, from a purely mathematical perspective, the precise meaning of this idea. First published in the series Science Networks Historical Studies, Vol. 17 (1996). In the second rev. edition the author has eliminated misprints, revised the chapter on Richard Dedekind, and updated the bibliographical index.