Mia has a knack for putting into words the dilemmas, delights and dramas of women everywhere. With intrepid curisoity and a delicious sense of humour, Mia navigates her way throught the topics - great and small - of modern life.

"Renowned scholar Mary R. Lefkowitz has extensively revised and rewritten her 1981 classic to introduce a new generation of students to the lives of the Greek poets. Thoroughly updated with references to the most recent scholarship, this second edition includes new material and fresh analysis of the ancient biographies of Greece's most famous poets"--Back cover

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.

ABC-TV's Lynn Sherr writes a savvy, witty, and moving memoir about events that have shaped her life and her career as one of the first women to break through in broadcast television As a reporter for 40 years, most of them on television, Lynn Sherr has brought clarity and insight to many of the most compelling news events of our day—from politics to murder trials to the space program. Now this widely respected award-winning journalist lets us in on what she's seen "inside the box" as she steps outside for a reality check. She tells how television journalism has changed over the years, for better and for worse, and explores the critical state of TV news today. Her accounts of the political and cultural upheavals she covered also make this a social history of our time. When she first began in the industry, newspaper editors bluntly told her, "We don't hire girls," but Lynn persevered, both covering and experiencing the emergence of modern feminism. All that despite being fired from her first TV job! She also addresses the heartbreak of her husband's death followed by her own battle with colon cancer. Lynn Sherr opens up about those painful times with an honesty that will touch and inspire readers. Her personal accounts—growing up in Philadelphia, where her father was a pioneering professional basketball player; suddenly becoming a stepmom; slipping off to commune with giraffes—all underscore her insistence on always keeping one foot outside the box.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

Written after the independent weekly paper that employed the author was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin's death--this work is an account of daily life in communist Poland

Rostenberg and Stern run a New York antiquarian book firm, and for half a century have specialized in books by and about minorities that mainstream collectors neglect. Here they identify and describe works that foreshadow later developments in a range of fields. Among them are blood transfusion, feminist militancy, world federation, the free press, relativity, and the Chunnel. They also include eyewitness accounts of historical events. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The rare book dealers who delighted readers with the history of their bookselling days in "Old Books, Rare Friends" now offer the other side of their story -- an intimate look at the joys of a relationship that has lasted more than half a century. When their friendship and business partnership began in the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern were pioneers in a man's world. Now approaching their nineties, the duo, who -- among their many discoveries -- unearthed Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous blood-and-thunder stories, remains a vibrant institution in the rare book trade, even as the Internet changes their field -- and their community -- forever. After publishing "Old Books, Rare Friends," Rostenberg and Stern received a flood of fan mail asking about their personal lives, and they have responded with poignant honesty and the warmth for which they are famous, as they reflect on their lives and their remarkable partnership. "Bookends" recounts their fascinating histories: family backgrounds, business adventures, the men they did not marry, and their approach to the bittersweet trials of aging. More than just a dual memoir, "Bookends" is also a chronicle of the cultural changes of twentieth-century American life and a loving farewell to the golden age of book collecting. Filled with wisdom and humor, this volume is a tribute to Rostenberg and Stern's passion for the written word -- and for life itself. Catching us off guard with their candor, they offer their insights regarding their business, their way of life, and their worldview. Above all, they present the story of a special relationship. At a time when people find it increasingly difficult to connect, here wehave the seamless story of a shared life. It is the unique product of an earlier time, yet it is a timeless reflection on the very nature of friendship. Though their fantastic partnership is un-reproducible, the ideal they have established, for the integration of one life so completely with another, contains lessons for all of us. Without husband or children they created a loving home when this was uncharted territory for women. They nurtured a business and life partnership that has lasted more than half a century and has only gotten stronger with time. When the passing years began to claim one's hearing and the other's sight, they became each other's eyes and ears. A meditation on aging and togetherness, this book is also the narrative of two pioneering single, Jewish women making their way in tandem through a world largely organized to keep them in their place. It is a gentle, wise story, told in their inimitable style, sparse, unadorned, and honest. Their affirmations supersede their uncertainties. As they write, "Bookends support books and come in pairs...If the word encapsulates our past, it looks also to the future, and to the books -- lived together, written together -- that will follow." They confront the challenges of aging in a no-nonsense tone, and, in facing them, give us an ideal of enduring human friendship that can't help but touch the heart.

Text: English, Hungarian (translation)

What It Means to Serve the Public In a vigorous defense of public life, Senator Joseph Lieberman, renowned as one of our most articulate and respected politicians, defines the duty, the honor and the privilege of public life in the face of Americans' perennial cynicism about it. Drawing widely from his own experience as a politician and his pride in public service, Lieberman makes a passionate, hopeful argument for the value of public life -- its place and necessity in our democracy and our need for more Americans to embrace it if we are to sustain our self-government.

"An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies-those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Brooks Adams-were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas, or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways, and far from dramatic. But it has also been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. He grew up in a petit-bourgeois, Midwestern milieu, and the city of Chicago looms large in his life. He drew a lucky ticket in the parent lottery and his was a happy boyhood spent on playgrounds and hanging around drug stores. At high school dances, he was the rhumba king and at drive-in movies he was never allowed to go as far with girls as he so ardently desired. At twenty-six, after two years in the army, he found himself married, the father or stepfather of four children, and living in New York on the meager salary of a magazine subeditor. He was ablaze with ambition and fettered by frustration. He broke out by moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, to direct the city's anti-poverty program at the height of the Civil Rights movement. His writing career blossomed, he began teaching at Northwestern University, and, for twenty-five years, edited one of great intellectual magazines. Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status, from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel on print, and on. But for all the seriousness of Epstein's themes, this book is memorable for its comic point of view and the constant reminder of how unpredictable, various, and wondrously rich life can be"--

Giuseppe Verdi remains the greatest operatic composer that Italy, the home of opera, has ever produced. Yet throughout his lifetime he claimed to detest composing and repeatedly rejected it. He was a landowner, a farmer, a politician and symbol of Italian independence; but his music tells a different story. An obsessive perfectionist, Verdi drove collaborators to despair but his works lauded from the start as dazzling feats of composition and characterization.

"Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater into a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller's life--his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller's role as a public intellectual--this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller's psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller's most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller's early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller's work and his personality."--

John Houseman describes with extraordinary self-knowledge and grace a life full of fantastic episodes that took him from a bizarre childhood to a seemingly hopeless and conventional business career to his brilliant debut in the world of the theater.

When Joel Derfner's boyfriend proposed to him, there was nowhere in America the two could legally marry. That changed quickly, however, and before long the two were on what they expected to be a rollicking journey to married bliss. What they didn't realize was that, along the way, they would confront not just the dilemmas every couple faces on the way to the altar—what kind of ceremony would they have? what would they wear? did they have to invite Great Aunt Sophie?—but also questions about what a relationship can and can't do, the definition of marriage, and, ultimately, what makes a family. Add to the mix a reality show whose director forces them to keep signing and notarizing applications for a wedding license until the cameraman gets a shot she likes; a family marriage history that includes adulterers, arms smugglers, and poisoners; and discussions of civil rights, Sophocles, racism, grammar, and homemade Ouija boards—coupled with Derfner's gift for getting in his own way—and what results is a story not just of gay marriage and the American family but of what it means to be human.

Joel Chasnoff is twenty-four years old, an American, and the graduate of an Ivy League university. But when his career as a stand-up comic fails to get off the ground, Chasnoff decides it's time for a serious change of pace. Leaving behind his amenity-laden Brooklyn apartment for a plane ticket to Israel, Joel trades in the comforts of being a stereotypical American Jewish male for an Uzi, dog tags (with his name misspelled), and serious mental and physical abuse at the hands of the Israeli Army.

Hans Bethe, the German American physicist, was one of the world's leading scientific authority on energy. He spent a lifetime on energy-related questions and was a source of information about alternative sources of energy. This work provides a discussion of what the real options are in the energy field are. How much energy will we need, what it will cost, and what are its available sources? How does the process of energy conversion, whether nuclear, solar, or conventional oil and coal, actually work?