A fine new collection of poems by Ginsberg that feature an important new work, the title poem "White Shroud".

Leon, a fourth grader at The Ethical School, tries to outwit the school bully and learn to sew for fanatical teacher Miss Cronheim, with unexpected help from his final project-- a doll with magical powers.

"As a New Left journalist Allen Young had worked to defend the Cuban Revolution during the 60s and the early 70s. Now in this personal essay, he reconsiders the Castro regime from the point of view of a gay man active in the Gay Liberation movement. He traces the rise of Cuban homophobia and examines the institutionalized persecution of gay people which has culminated in the recent waves of gay refugees seeking a measure of freedom in the United States"--Page 4 of cover.

This comprehensive study offers an analysis of the museum as a public institution, provides an account of its historical roots, and gives a forecast of its future. In the Foreword, S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, states: "Museums are becoming more and more important. For one thing, as Dr. Wittlin points out, museums provide immediate encounters with authenticity, or a reasonable simulacrum of it. They provide new ways of teaching and learning, and an introduction to processes of lifelong education, now a priority for everyone." An earlier book by Dr. Wittlin, The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education, was the direct predecessor of the present work. The historical chapters have been expanded, and whereas the former volume ended with the outbreak of the Second World War, this study considers the achievements that took place in all parts of the world from 1945 up to the present time. The author's earlier work, published in England, gained international acclaim as a definitive publication in the field and was praised for its philosophical depth, historical breadth, and perceptive insights into the character of a complex institution. Museological events of a scope without precedent are today in a stage of drafting and builidng. Dr. Wittlin examines all aspects of a museum's function: from the traditional functions as a depository, a center of research, and an educational agency to the newer, perhaps peripheral, functions that the author summarizes under the term "cultural center." All these purposes, though valid, must be constantly reexamined in the light of the "extending frontiers of knowledge, rising standards of general education, and of access to new techniques based on scientific advances." In a chapter on a "Twelve-Point Program for Museum Renewal" the main, broad facets of the institution are clearly and concisely discussed. Dr. Wittlin begins with a definition of the term museum established by the International Council of Museums and describes problems of institutional identity and funding, training of personnel, and determining visitor population. She also points up the fallacies in the assumption that mere exposure to exhibits results in learning and stimulation. This book is an impressive and scholarly presentation of the museum pictured through its past and examined in its present functioning as well as what it may offer in the foreseeable future. It is also entertainingly written. The "hottest" current issue, as Dr. Wittlin calls it, is ecology, the study of the interdependence of all living things not only among themselves but with the organic environment. The museum's role in this issue is postulated and discussed. The work is amply illustrated.

Book by Ben-Meir, Alon

Friendship is an outcome of, as well as a condition for, advancing interfaith relations. However, for friendship to advance, there must be legitimation from within and a theory of how interreligious relations can be justified from the resources of different faith traditions. Friendship Across Religions explores these very issues, seeking to develop a robust theory of interreligious friendship from the resources of each of the participating traditions. It also features individual cases as models and precedents for such relations—in particular, the friendship of Gandhi and Charlie Andrews, his closest personal friend. Contributors: Balwant Singh Dhillon, Timothy J. Gianotti, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Maria Reis Habito, Ruben L. F. Habito, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Stephen Butler Murray, Eleanor Nesbitt, Anantanand Rambachan, Meir Sendor, Johann M. Vento, and Miroslav Volf

Jews often consider Hinduism to be Avoda Zara, idolatry, due to its worship of images and multiple gods. Closer study of Hinduism and of recent Jewish attitudes to it suggests the problem is far more complex. In the process of considering Hinduism's status as Avoda Zara, this book revisits the fundamental definitions of Avoda Zara and asks how we use the category. By appealing to the history of Judaism's view of Christianity, author Alon Goshen-Gottstein seeks to define what Avoda Zara is and how one might recognize the same God in different religions, despite legal definitions. Through a series of leading questions, the discussion moves from a blanket view of Hinduism as idolatry to a recognition that all religions have aspects that are idolatrous and non-idolatrous. Goshen-Gottstein explains how the category of idolatry itself must be viewed with more nuance. Introducing this nuance, he asserts, leads one away from a globalized view of an entire tradition in these terms.

One of the biggest challenges for relations between religions is the view of the religious Other. The question touches the roots of our theological views. The Religious Other: Hostility, Hospitality, and the Hope of Human Flourishing explores the views of multiple religious traditions on how to regard otherness. How does one move from hostility to hospitality? How can hospitality be understood not simply as social hospitality but as theological hospitality, making room for the religious Other on theological grounds? What is our vision for the flourishing of the Other, while respecting his otherness? This volume is an exercise in constructive interreligious theology. By including Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic traditions, it approaches these challenges from multiple perspectives, highlighting commonalities in approach and ways in which one tradition might inspire another. Contributors: Vincent J. Cornell, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Richard P. Hayes, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Deepak Sarma, Stephen W. Sykes, Dharma Master Hsin Tao, Ashok Vohra

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodward. Amelia Rosselli, whose heroic, anti-fascist father was assassinated by Mussolini's henchmen when she was seven years old, grew up in the cities of Europe and in America as the "daughter with a devastated heart." In fierce and incandescent verse that draws upon the French and English she learned in exile, Rosselli expresses the pain, irony and deep emotion of a traumatized spirit; she committed suicide in 1996.

Poetry. Cross-Genre. Literary Nonfiction. Middle Eastern Studies. THE CAIRO NOTEBOOKS, a collection of travel writing by Ammiel Alcalay, blurs the lines between fiction, poetry, and documentation. "There is in what you hear of these CAIRO NOTEBOOKS the cruelty of compassion, the pain of love, the tearing apart of fateful encounters. Here, a novel, a poem, are fused like the impossible couplings they portray. Poetry, history and fiction come together so that they can, further down, be broken into parts, again, anew. All that makes the tragic pulse of the Arab East is here charted on the map of a real and still 'ideal' city, the way it is charted on the bodies of the tortured and dead"—Etel Adnan.

“SOPHISTICATED AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . TAUTLY WRITTEN . . . Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction.” –The New York Times Book Review “At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentz’s] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution.” –Entertainment Weekly “SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live.” –Los Angeles Times “MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorker ’s highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries, Martyrs’ Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world.” –Chicago Tribune “A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . . Martyr’s Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters–and yet it remains a lean thriller.” –The New York Observer

Cover is edgeworn and tanned.

In this fundamental analysis, Rapoport asks: Why do we have wars? Doesn't humanity always seem on the verge of self-annihilation? Is there something in human genetic structure that makes people want to kill each other? Perhaps this impulse is a matter of good versus evil, or just plain human nature. Rapoport moves beyond cliches by claiming that the sources of modern violence reside in the imbalance between a lag in the system of values inherited from the past and the structure of science and technology that awaits no revision of values to move ahead. As a result, Rapoport argues that the study of war and peace should be considered a science, just like biology or, for that matter, political science. The same rules of empirical engagement and experimentation should apply. Before we can have a theory of peace, we need a methodology of conflict. Using the writings of thinkers who have made significant contributions to the predominant ideas and ideals of our society, Rapoport weaves together the strands of independent thought and research into a single, thought-provoking work. After investigating the whys of violence, using ideological, psychological, strategic, and systemic perspective, Rapoport moves to an in-depth analysis of possible varieties of conflict resolution. He explores such mechanisms as mediation, education, and applying the results of scientific research. He documents the impact of ideologies countervailing dominant ones that place obstacles in the way of peacemaking. Rapoport argues that conciliation and game theories can be utilized to replace the concept of winner take all or total victory. The Origins of Violence is a needed contribution to our understanding of warfare, and provides a forward-looking perspective that can be of wide use to each of the policy sciences, starting with military strategy and ending with international development.

In Prayer and Laughter: The Religion and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia and Beyond is the culmination of a lifelong study of the Middle Ages by Anatoly Liberman, an internationally acclaimed medievalist and linguist. It contains an introduction, 21 chapters of different length, a bibliography, and indexes. The book opens with a bird's-eye view of the state of comparative mythology and proceeds with an analysis of the most important questions confronting a student of Germanic and Scandinavian religion. In his exposition, be it the characters of the Scandinavian gods, the creatures of lower mythology (such as dwarfs, trolls, and all kinds of devils), the nature of ancient rituals (such as initiation), shamanism, the origin of the runic alphabet, or the function of mythic animals, Liberman combines attention to detail with a broad view of the medieval world. His keen interest in the large picture is noticeable at every step, and he never loses sight of the methodological aspects the humanities pose (the use of structuralism beyond linguistics, among others), the idiosyncrasies of "the medieval mind," and the limits of reconstruction.

In its day, Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse was a primary source rebellion, passion and black humor. Calculated to assault, shock, intrigue and reflect our anxious millennium fill the pages of this Corpse reader. A heady invitation to enjoy one's intellectual freedom while it lasts, the volume inscribes central (and edgy) poetic controversies, eulogizes and condemns, realizes and surrealizes, translates and travels across space and time to place us in all those wild worlds visited by the bizarre legion of Corpse correspondents.

In the era of compulsive touch-ups and digital poses, perhaps it is time to re-read our body in order to rescue it. The thirty chapters of Sensitive Anatomy form a celebration of the body in its entirety. This is a poetic, political and erotic journey across the very matter that makes us. It is a book that reveals how we see ourselves and how we are made to see. It stands against the culture of Photoshop, against oppressive images, against edits and erasures. In this way, Neuman continues to extend the limits of short-form prose with irony and aplomb. Body as style, style as body.

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz (1923-2007) was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression." This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz's final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology--Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz "To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers."--Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America "Gorz's work was always within the Utopian tradition--a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz's Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense--we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination."-- Independent

This is an original, philosophical discussion in which Andreå Neher relates the lives of prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jews to traditional Jewish thought on issues of assimilation, the Holocaust, and liberal intellectualism.