"Examines how inhabitants of the Oklahoma Panhandle throughout the 20th century used the semiarid lands that Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico did not want, and that Texas, after entering the Union as a slave state, could not have. Focuses particularly on agriculture and production of natural gas and helium"--Provided by publisher.

Alongside John Cage and Edgar Varese, Morton Feldman is regarded by many as one of the foremost American composers of the twentieth century. Evidence of his lifelong passion for music can be found in the numerous interviews and lectures he gave about his life and work. But despite his reputationand creative output, very little has been published on this charismatic figure. In Morton Feldman Says, editor Chris Villars has collected two decades of interviews, many available here for the first time, illustrating Feldman's creative process and his wide range of cultural interests and references,especially to visual art. Morton Feldman Says contains the first English translation of Sebastian Claren's biographical notes as well as conversations with Gavin Bryars, Kevin Volans, and Walter Zimmermann, as well as transcriptions of two of Feldman's lectures, held in Toronto (1982) andJohannesburg (1983).

Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

For almost twenty years, Ilan Stavans—described by the Washington Post as "Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast"—has interviewed path-breaking intellectuals and artists in a wide range of media. As host of the critically acclaimed PBS series La Plaza, he interviews guests on pressing issues that affect the Western Hemisphere today, asking hard-hitting questions on immigration, religion, bilingualism, race, and democracy. This book collects for the first time in one volume Stavans’s most provocative and enlightening interviews with Hispanics from both sides of the Rio Grande. Spontaneous and surprising, these conversations reflect Latino life in the United States in all its facets. Among the more than two dozen selections, Edward James Olmos talks about Hispanics in Hollywood; John Leguizamo describes how he shapes a stage show; author Richard Rodriguez reflects on his gang background; Esmeralda Santiago takes on the Puerto Rican stereotype; and Piri Thomas shares thoughts on the writing of Down These Mean Streets. "A conversation is a tango," writes Stavans, "for it takes two to dance it." Conversations with Ilan Stavans invites readers to catch the rhythm and enjoy these unique meetings of minds.

We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

Presents a history of Revisionist Zionism in America (the New Zionist Organization of America) as represented by Jabotinsky and his heirs, who fought government indifference, inter-Jewish organizational rivalries, and American antisemitism. The Revisionists raised the idea of a Jewish army to fight with the British against the Nazis and, in mid-war, made the rescue of European Jewry their top priority. Discusses strained relations with other American Zionist groups in terms of both goals and tactics, as well as relations with allies, like Peter Bergson and Baruch Korff. By learning to play politics, the Revisionists eventually got President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board. Their other main battle was to open British-ruled Palestine to Jewish immigration, which was blocked during the Holocaust. Concludes that Jabotinsky's followers achieved more for the rescue of European Jewry and the cause of Jewish statehood than either their supporters or detractors believed possible.

In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch's seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian spaceman was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism, of the forward march of history. When Gagarin went to Highgate to visit the tomb of Karl Marx, the local communists came out to cheer, David's father, a full-time worker for the Communist Party, and his mother among them. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? In a sense they were like a non-magical version of the wizards of J K Rowling's world, living part secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Where others went to church they went to Socialist Sunday School, where others watched the Black and White Minstrels they went to see the Red Army Choir (always providing that visas had been issued). Society's up was their down, its heroes were their villains and vice versa. Trade unions were never more noble than when militant, the blacks were right and the whites were wrong. Who wanted American TV when you could have Russian movies? A memoir of early life among communists and an exploration of the world that created that life, Party Animals first took David Aaronovitch back through his own memories of belief and action. But there was much more to it. He found himself studying the old secret service files, his mother's diaries and letters, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal. Only then did he begin to understand what had come before - both the obstinate heroism and the monstrous cowardice. And the elements that shape our fondest beliefs

The Unraveling of Scientism , a companion to Joseph Margolis's Reinventing Pragmatism , follows the thread of American analytic philosophy through the second half of the twentieth century, the period of its greatest influence and activity. Margolis finds that the distinctive features of analytic philosophy were effectively altered, at about mid-century, most pointedly by W. V. Quine. Surprisingly, this was a time of declining conceptual invention and originality among the leading strands of philosophy--pragmatism, logical positivism and the unity of science program, and the principal continental European movements. The Unraveling of Scientism centers on the primary commitment of analytic philosophy through the twentieth century to what Margolis calls "scientism"--the conviction that an unyielding reductionism, applied universally but in an exemplary way in the sciences, can provide a convincing account of the most important philosophical puzzles of the human world, those centered on the nature of the objective world, our knowledge of reality, language, and human existence. Margolis examines the principal puzzles that the analytic movement has addressed and argues that in recent years its claims have been effectively stalemated, perhaps even defeated.

You Wake Me Each Morning That is what listeners around the world have said to Connie for years, as they heard her radio broadcasts in this country and around the world. The first time she heard the phrase was from Sam Lewis, America's long - time Ambassador to Israel. Some listeners have called the voice sexy, authoritative, funny, snobby, or sophisticated. Connie tries to incorporate it all, as she tells the stories that make the news or change history. Of the many compliments she has received, the most important came from Nelson Mandela. The former South African President said he listened to her broadcasts for years while in prison. He told her, during a Washington news conference, "You Gave My People Hope." Then he went onto say, "You are not as big as I thought you were!" In her autobiography, Connie tells of the struggles of a one-woman news bureau. She recounts such events as the unrest in Washington in 1968; the killing of Robert Kennedy (she had one of the last interviews with him); the Invasion of Czechoslovakia, where she stayed for six months; a brief kidnapping in Lebanon in l982, and White House coverage of Presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama and beyond. Connie received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Journalism from the New Zealand National Press Club at the New Zealand Parliament on August 15, 2006. This is a book for people of all ages, but especially those who are working the hardest to find themselves. To all the message is - never give up, be different from the crowd, and have fun!

"This is a biography of labor and political activist Frank Lumpkin featuring his leadership of the struggle to recoup the pensions of the former work force at Republic Steel"--

From the beginning, myths have told of women who lived apart from men -- the Sirens who sang on the Aegean rocks, the Amazons of the Brazilian jungle, the self-reproducing women on islands in Polynesia, to mention only a few. As this theme emerged in her own fiction, Batya Weinbaum became intrigued by its persistence across time and cultures and began tracing it in literature and mythology, as well as in actual locales that are or were said to be islands of women. In this fascinating, interdisciplinary book, she explores how the myth of Amazons has served varying psychological needs in different cultures over time. Weinbaum first analyzes various historical interpretations and uses of the Amazon archetype, some designed to empower women, others created by men to disempower them. She next turns to the original Greek context, in Homer's epics and other aspects of Greek culture, and then traces how Amazons eventually evolved into negative representations of paganism. Moving from Rodriguez de Montalvo's fifteenth-century Sergas de Esplandian, which imagined an island of women in the New World, Weinbaum concludes with revealing fieldwork she conducted on Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) off the Yucatan Peninsula, which included giving birth with the participation of a native Maya midwife. Batya Weinbaum is Assistant Professor of English at Cleveland State University. She founded and edits the journal Femspec.

Spanish American fiction became a world phenomenon in the twentieth century through multilanguage translations of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Yet these "blockbusters" are only a tiny fraction of the total, rich outpouring of Spanish-language literature from Latin America. In this book, Naomi Lindstrom offers English-language readers a comprehensive survey of the century's literary production in Latin America (excluding Brazil). Discussing movements and trends, she places the famous masterworks in historical perspective and highlights authors and works that deserve a wider readership. Her study begins with Rodó's famous essay Ariel and ends with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 achievement of the Nobel Prize. Her selection of works is designed to draw attention, whenever possible, to works that are available in good English translations. A special feature of the book is its treatment of the "postboom" period. In this important concluding section, Lindstrom discusses documentary narratives, the new interrelations between popular culture and literary writing, and underrepresented groups such as youth cultures, slum dwellers, gays and lesbians, and ethnic enclaves. Written in accessible, nonspecialized language, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction will be equally useful for general readers as a broad overview of this vibrant literature and for scholars as a reliable reference work.

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.

Was it possible to achieve peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine in the 1930s? This study discusses the Fifth Avenue muti-millionaires who believed they could bring peace to the Middle East through secret diplomacy and a generous dose of "Baksheesh" (the Arabic word for bribery).

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies. The broken Aleph—first letter of the Hebrew alphabet—represents the chasm between the author, a secular Jew, and her cultural and religious heritage. The poems in this collection explore her efforts to repair that breach and to find her footing in the world, negotiating the path of history and tradition while fully alive to the present. Though her journey is personal, the reverberations of the work are universal, doing what the best poetry always does, permeating boundaries and opening up a space for wonder to enter the world.

Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as being a sequence of numerous misinterpretations and misrepresentations, these nineteen essays cover a broad range of topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. An essay on linguistics and culture discusses the shaping of Latin America's collective identity; Peru's modern history is approached as a bloody battle between enlightenment and darkness; and in critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, Stavans reflects on the dichotomy between pen and sword in the Hispanic world. In 'Letter to a German Friend', Stavans returns to his fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and in 'The First Book,' he connects his passion for literature to his initiation into Jewishness. Finally, in a meditation on Columbus's afterlife, he reflects on the many ways in which we reinvent ourselves in order to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds us.