In this collection of interviews from 1978 to 1995 Paley elaborates on the many forces that have influenced her and her writing. In these conversations she reveals not only her triple lives as writer, mother, and political activist but also her perspectives which over the years have become precise and solid. With authority, distinctness, and relentless honesty she speaks out on contemporary issues. She discusses American conditions at large, particularly those that are being neglected or denied. With firm authority Paley discusses topics of wide range, many of which she describes as personal discoveries. She includes politics and environmentalism, the family and human relationships, the impact of background and education, the moral importance of community, feminism and women's liberation, the sexual self and role enforcement, America's need for communality and women's creative response to it, the art of teaching, and the importance of friendship. Paley's conversations, like her writings, are refreshingly candid and radically different from the contemporary American mainstream.

Negotiating the divide between "respectable manhood" and "rough manhood" this book explores masculinity at work and at play through provocative essays on labor unions, railroads, vocational training programs, and NASCAR racing.

In a wide-ranging and compelling account of the life of metrical and free verse in the twentieth century, poet and critic Jon Silkin deepens our understanding of the way poetry works on us. He begins from the premiss that two modes of verse, free and metrical, engage the creative energies of poetry now, creating a rich, fertile environment capable of yielding work valuable to poetry itself and to the society which has given it life. With a practitioner's empathy Silkin reads the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Bunting and eight British poets from the post-second World War period to illustrate how free and metrical verse create, separately or together, a poetic harmony. Additionally, he includes crucial statements on modern poetry from poets themselves, concluding with a fine memoir of Basil Bunting by Connie Pickard, published in book-form for the first time.

Watershed events - including the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, September 11 2001 and the Iraq war - have created major challenges for American Jewry, leading to changes in its perceptions and environment. Through conversations with some of America's most influential Jewish leaders, Manfred Gerstenfeld sheds light on the how the tumultuous events of recent years have affected and will continue to influence the American Jewish population. These include issues surrounding education, assimilation and revitalization, relationships with other religious communities, anti-Semitism and generational change. Of enormous historical value, American Jewry's Challenge serves as a time capsule capturing American Jewry at the dawn of the 21st century.

Using pagan prose fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, Bowersock investigates the complex relationship among perceived and presented 'historical' and 'fictional' truths. Bowersock's superb lecturing style is successfully transferred into writing with force and eloquence, as he weaves accounts from a wide range of sources into his text, illuminating social attitudes of the period and persuasively arguing that fiction of the period was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives. In the second half of the first century emerges a new kind of fiction including outlandish tales of travel, romance and comic novels. Bowersock concentrates on secular literature, illuminating not only its literary motifs, but also reconstructing the societal context as one engrossed in fabrications and all kinds of revisions or rewriting. Using these less familiar materials as his points of reference, he reads into familiar Christian material, making linkages and casting new light on familiar subjects, as well as providing some provocative interpretations of familiar Christian texts. Bowersock uses close historical and literary analyses of specific passages of works, and pays attention to larger and more general issues and questions around the relationship between fiction and history and how we read them. This book will be of basic intellectual concern to all raised in the environment of Christian belief.

This work represents Murray Bookchin's riposte to the antihumanism, mysticism and antirationalism which are influencing many people's attitudes to environmental problems. Bookchin offers a critique of, among others, social Darwinists, deep ecologists, new agers, technophobes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. This intellectual tour-de-force offers a positive alternative approach to politics based on a refreshing confidence and belief in human potential.

The conviction that art must play a prominent role in everyday life has been strongly championed throughout the century, and the redevelopment of Britain after the Second World War provided an unprecedented opportunity for the siting of painting and sculpture in new architectural environments. Jacob Epstein, Victor Pasmore, Phillip King, Barry Flanagan and Eduardo Paolozzi are among the many outstanding artists who have contributed to the astonishing variety of work that enlivens public places. There has been no more avowed exponent of the creative collaboration between artist and architect than Eugene Rosenberg, who commissioned memorable pieces for many Yorke Rosenberg Mardall buildings. It was his fervent wish that achievements in this field should be given their due recognition, and this volume presents his personal choice of the finest examples, on display all over Britain and now brought together for the first time.

A study of the popular culture institutions created by the German Labor Movement after 1890, focusing on the role of visual art in the working class environment, both as an influence in the home and in the political agitation and propaganda of the political parties. Political art of this period reflected both a utopian belief in the success of the struggle and the harsh images of a revolutionary ideology, and represented a range of political beliefs, from Social Democracy to the Communist movement. Includes many high-quality bandw illustrations. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In the pages of Gary Barwin's latest collection of poetry, No TV for Woodpeckers, the lines between haunting and hilarious, wondrous and weird, beautiful and beastly, are blurred in the most satisfying ways. No stranger to poetic experimentation, Barwin employs a range of techniques from the lyrical to the conceptual in order to explore loss, mortality, family, the self and our relationship to the natural world. Many of these poems reveal a submerged reality full of forgotten, unknown or invisible life forms that surround us - that are us. Within this reality, Barwin explores the connection between bodies, language, culture and the environment. He reveals how we construct both self and reality through these relationships and also considers the human in relation to the concepts of "nature" and "the animal." As philosophical as it is entertaining - weaving together threads of surrealism, ecopoetics, Dada and more - No TV for Woodpeckers is a complex and multi-layered work that offers an unexpected range of pleasures.

From a critically acclaimed poet, politically and environmentally hot poems for the next millennium.