“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

FRAGILE EARTH v1.2 CONTAINS 12 NEW SETS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER IMAGES, including flooding on the Arabian Peninsular, a dust storm at Sydney Harbour, the expansion of Tehran’s city limits, and ice melting on Hudson Bay. Fragile Earth is a stunning photography app giving a birdseye view of climate change, urbanization and nature’s raw power. It shows what happens to our planet when rivers flood or dry up, mountains erupt, glaciers melt and cities sprawl outward. STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHY APPSee years pass under your fingertips by swiping across before-and-after images. Explore how Dubai has grown from a small city to a thriving metropolis over the last 10 years, or how the notorious Warming Island got its name since 1985.The top photography app contains some of the world’s best environmental images, giving you detailed ecological snapshots from around the globe. Beautiful, shocking and thought-provoking, Fragile Earth provides thought provoking portraits of our world – its beauty, vastness and vulnerability. SEE THE WORLD CHANGE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES The images can viewed by country/region, category and date. Each can also be shared via facebook, twitter or email. NEW to Fragile Earth v1.2:Flooding, Arabian Peninsula, Oman, Saudi Arabia and United Arab EmiratesCollapsing sea stack, The Twelve Apostles, Victoria, AustraliaDust storm, Sydney Harbour Bridge, New South Wales, AustraliaCity expansion, Tehran, IranRhone Glacier retreat, SwitzerlandWildfire Smog, St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, RussiaShrinking lake, Lake Urmia, IranShrinking sea and salt projects, The Dead SeaSea Ice in Bristol Bay, Alaska, United States of AmericaTohoku Tsunami one year on, Ishinomaki, JapanMelting ice, Hudson Bay, CanadaLandscape change, Gulf of Fonseca, Honduras and Nicaragua Developed by Aimer Media, the team behind The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms and The Worlds Heritage apps.

Final Edition is a one-issue-only political magazine written by people who are aesthetes and literary writers and edited by Wallace Shawn, who seriously believes that part of our national problem is that the people who run the country have a crude and minimal imaginative life and are too little acquainted with the quartets of Beethoven. The issue consists of five pieces: "Before the Election—Fragments from a Diary 2004" by Wallace Shawn The diarist broods on the analogy between the addiction to pornography and nationalistic obsessions, and he wonders whether a collection of people who vote in a kind of sleepwalking ignorance can ever be called a democracy. "Invitation to a Degraded World" by Jonathan Schell In this essay, Schell meditates on the comic book/disaster movie view of life, in which bin Laden and George Bush are both immersed, and discusses the "standing army" stationed in all of our homes, the media. "The Webern Variations" by Mark Strand Strand’s hauntingly delicious poem explores what is most poignantly beautiful, while exploring the themes of darkness, descent, decline, and nothingness. Wallace Shawn Interviews Noam Chomsky For those with no acquaintance with Chomsky, this could make a wonderful introduction, while offering surprising insights to those who know him well. Chomsky is electric with vitality, wit, and rage as he ranges ferociously across the present and ancient worlds, giving his thoughts on the development of the internet, the 2004 election, and the God of the Bible. In an odd way, the interview highlights the inspirational and optimistic quality of this enormously angry man. "The Twilight of the Superheroes" by Deborah Eisenberg In this brooding, passionate, and brilliant short story, Deborah Eisenberg paints a brutally honest portrait of New York City today and of our lives today, wherever we live. Through observing the lives of some sophisticated residents of the great metropolis, we encounter truths which are both poetic and deeply political.