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Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD: The Dislocations of the Real
by G. BistoenThe contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, has been criticized for its neglect of the political dimensions involved in the etiology and treatment of trauma. By means of a philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis, the depoliticizing potential of the biomedical approach is tied to a more general 'ethical crisis' in post-traditional societies. Via the work of Lacan, Žižek and Badiou on the act and the event, this book constructs a conceptual framework that revives the ethical and political dimensions of trauma recovery.
Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice
by Heather M. Boynton Jo-Ann VisTrauma and the exposure to traumatic events is part of life, making the need for current and informed social work research and training in this area essential. Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice highlights unique and diverse circumstances throughout a client’s lifecycle where trauma is experienced, how one’s spirituality is awakened or activated, and how this experience can intersect with interventions toward posttraumatic growth (PTG). More than just a primer on trauma effects, the book offers social workers insights into how to properly assess current resources and individual levels of distress. It also provides practical strategies on how spirituality and spiritual practices can be integrated into psychotherapeutic interventions at various levels of social work practice. Addressing the impact of trauma-related events and emphasizing the importance of spirituality, the book will inspire and provide transferable knowledge that social workers can use to meet the unique needs of the clients, families, and communities they serve.
Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women: Rising Like the Phoenix
by Kimberly BalsamPrevent victimization of sexual minority women by raising your awareness level! Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women: Rising Like the Phoenix is the first resource to examine trauma, violence, and stress as experienced by lesbian and bisexual women. You&’ll gain a better understanding of the stressors that these women experience, including the cultural/social trauma of living with homophobia and heterosexism as well as the individual traumas of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. This book contains never-before-seen data that investigates the prevalence, impact, and meaning of traumatic experiences in the lives of sexual minority women. In Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women, top researchers use direct quotes and case examples to illustrate and personalize the emotional strain these women endure. Furthermore, they address constructive individual and community responses that promote resilience and healing. The information and strategies contained in this book will help sexual minority women, as well as the practitioners who serve them, understand and heal from the impact of individual and cultural trauma. This book will increase your knowledge of: developmental issues facing lesbian and bisexual youths the impact of sexual abuse history on the "coming out" process ethnic/racial differences in trauma among lesbian and bisexual women the prevalence and impact of traumatic experience among HIV+ lesbian and bisexual women the unique stressors facing African-American lesbians-and how they cope organized religion&’s approaches to homosexuality and how this impacts lesbian and bisexual women Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women also shows how data on same-sex domestic violence and hate crimes can be gathered and used as a tool for social and political advocacy, bringing about positive changes that can improve the lives of many lesbian and bisexual women. This book is insightful reading for mental health, health, and social service professionals working with lesbian and bisexual clients or patients, and activists and individuals who work for organizations that serve the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender communities.
Trauma, Women’s Mental Health, and Social Justice: Pitfalls and Possibilities (Routledge Research in Gender and Society)
by Emma TserisThis book argues that while notions of trauma in mental health hold promise for the advancement of women’s rights, the mainstreaming of trauma treatments and therapies has had mixed implications, sometimes replacing genuine social change efforts with new forms of female oppression by psychiatry. It contends that trauma interventions often represent a "business as usual" approach within psychiatry, with women being expected to comply with rigid treatment protocols, accepting the advice given by trauma "experts" that they are mentally unstable and that they must learn to manage the effects of violence in the absence of any real changes to their circumstances or resources. A critique of trauma treatment in its current form, Trauma, Women’s Mental Health, and Social Justice recommends practical steps towards a socio-political perspective on trauma which passionately re-engages with feminist values and activist principles.
Trauma-Centered Group Psychotherapy for Women: A Clinician's Manual
by David Read Johnson Hadar LubinLearn effective PTSD group treatment The awareness of psychological trauma has grown exponentially in the past decade, and clinicians in many areas have increasingly found themselves confronted with the need to provide trauma-related services to clients. Still, there remains a serious lack of manuals that guide clinicians using group therapy to treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma-Centered Group Psychotherapy for Women: A Clinician’s Manual is the important, “how-to” resource that fills this void with a successful theory-based, field-tested model of group therapy for traumatized women. Concise and full of clinical examples, this helpful text includes a session-by-session guide for clinicians and a workbook for clients. Comprehensive and practical, Trauma-Centered Group Psychotherapy for Women: A Clinician’s Manual not only describes the theory, method, and rationale for this effective treatment, but also offers a complete, step-by-step clinician’s manual and client workbook to help implement the model and establish effective practice. Explained in-depth are unique methods such as the use of testimonial and ceremonial structures to heighten the therapeutic impact and case examples of individual client histories and progress through treatment. In addition, appendices detailing a treatment contract and a script for a trauma program “Graduation Ceremony” are also included. Chapters in Trauma-Centered Group Psychotherapy for Women cover: concepts of group therapy with traumatized populations developmental theory of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder usefulness and challenges of various formats of group therapy session-by-session instructions for clinicians session-by-session workbook for clients guidance in handling difficult treatment and clinical situations group therapy procedures and rules managing traumatic re-enactments empirical support for TCGP and much more!With a detailed bibliography and numerous diagrams, charts, and tables for visualizing information, Trauma-Centered Group Psychotherapy for Women is an ideal resource for mental health clinicians of all types, graduate students and educators, state mental health commissions and agencies, libraries, hospitals, and clinics.
Trauma-Informed Research in Sport, Exercise, and Health: Qualitative Methods (Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity)
by Kerry R. McGannon Jenny McMahonThis is the first book to examine trauma research in the context of sport, exercise, and health. It outlines evidence-based, trauma-informed research practices, which qualitative researchers can use when conducting trauma research to prevent causing further harm to participants while maintaining a strengths-based approach.Featuring the trauma research of leading qualitative sport, exercise, and health researchers from around the world, each chapter showcases the contributors’ trauma research and participant context, followed by the ‘what, why, and how’ of trauma-informed research practices that were implemented. This book includes work from a wide range of contexts, including gender-based violence in sport and coaching, abuse in sport, the aftermath of abuse and violence, physical activity after spinal cord injury, trauma and limb amputation, trauma and homelessness, trauma and autistic adults, and sport for care-experienced youth. It provides researchers interested in working with populations affected by trauma with a qualitative research resource to build on, and highlights new directions in conducting trauma-informed research.This is important reading for any researcher with an interest in trauma not only in sport, exercise, and health research but also in qualitative research contexts more broadly. It is a valuable resource for anyone working in athlete welfare, sport and exercise psychology, youth sport, sport development, physical activity and health, disability, gender, safeguarding, or social work.
Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors (Routledge Studies In Memory And Narrative Ser. #Vol. 2)
by Selma LeydesdorffTraumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.
Traumas Resisted and: Inquiring into Lost and Found Narratives in Music Education (Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education #36)
by Shelley M. Griffin Nasim NiknafsThis book focuses on the traumatic experiences within and through music that individuals and collectives face, while considering ways in which they (re)engage with their traumas in educational settings. The chapters delve into the physical, psychological, philosophical, sociological, and political aspects, as they relate to the reciprocal influences of trauma on musical practices and education. Readers are immersed in topics related to societal violence, physical injuries, grief, separation, loss, death, and ways of working through these in educational and artistic situations. In the introductory chapter, the co-editors draw attention to theoretical matters related to trauma through narrative inquiry in music education. The first section of the book, Separation Revisited, brings together notions of separation, focusing on how loss is emotionally and physically manifested when death, grief, and bodily injury are experienced. In the second section, (Re)Engaging with Lost and Found, readers are encouraged to imagine new possibilities considering trauma and loss in educational and musical spaces. These pieces offer deliberate ruminations moving the discourse toward (re)engagement in and through music education and artistic contexts. The co-editors conclude the book by drawing attention to narrative inquiry’s double-edged nature in stories of trauma and how the retelling of lost and found narratives offers a way to imagine lives otherwise—lives not smothered by grief and horror—through the conceivable reliving of unfathomable stories of experience. This book emerges from the 7th International Conference on Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (NIME7), October 2020, co-hosted by Brock University, Faculty of Education and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music, Ontario, Canada.
Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After
by Peter Leese Jason CrouthamelThis collection investigates the social and cultural history of trauma to offer a comparative analysis of its individual, communal, and political effects in the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to witness testimony, to procedures of personal memory and collective commemoration, and to visual sources as they illuminate the changing historical nature of trauma. The essays draw on diverse methodologies, including oral history, and use varied sources such as literature, film and the broadcast media. The contributions discuss imaginative, communal and political responses, as well as the ways in which the later welfare of traumatized individuals is shaped by medical, military, and civilian institutions. Incorporating innovative methodologies and offering a thorough evaluation of current research, the book shows new directions in historical trauma studies.
Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Performing Signs of Injury (Memory Studies: Global Constellations)
by Christopher J. ColvinThis book explores the practice of traumatic storytelling that emerged out of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and came to play a key role in the lives of the members of the Khulumani Support Group for victims of apartheid-era political violence. Group members found traumatic storytelling both frustrating and yet also an important form of memory work that shaped how they saw themselves in the post-apartheid era. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines how traumatic storytelling functioned not only as a kind of psychological healing and national political theatre, but also as a potent form of social relation, economic exchange, political activism, and expressive practice. With emphasis on the personal, social, and political significance of the act of traumatic storytelling, this volume asks why members of Khulumani, despite their many disappointments, continued to engage intensively in storying their experiences for themselves and others. Examining what powers storytelling held for both group members and their witnesses, and considering the ways in which storytelling enabled new senses of self and new understandings of what was possible in the years after the end of apartheid, this book considers what we might learn more broadly from the experiences of Khulumani about the possibilities—and limits—of traumatic-memory-making as an instrument of personal, social, and political repair. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and criminology with interest in justice and post-conflict societies.
Traumatic Stress and Its Aftermath: Cultural, Community, and Professional Contexts
by Sandra LeeExplore the aftermath of traumatic stress as it affects various populations, including therapists themselves! This book will educate you about the aftermath of traumatic stress as it impacts people in a variety of settings. It explores the factors that lead to increased or reduced vulnerability to the effects of traumatic stress, emphasizing the impact of cumulative/multiple trauma rather than the effects of a single traumatic incident, to help you design and implement effective prevention and intervention programs. The specific populations and groups addressed in this important book include: adolescent girls involved in armed conflict in Colombia&’s guerilla war urban African-American youth-a theoretical model for risk and resiliency people with strong spiritual/religious beliefs-how spirituality can affect a person&’s reaction to traumatic stress women in recovery in a community aftercare shelter female trauma therapists-factors affecting vicarious traumatization of helping professionals college students with histories of abuse Providing a framework for understanding traumatic stress-related issues based on a variety of methodologies and measures, Traumatic Stress and Its Aftermath addresses important questions, such as: What is the relationship between the experiences of trauma or other stressful life events, and subsequent traumatic stress? What are the protective factors that can buffer or ameliorate the development of traumatic stress in the face of adverse life experiences, trauma, or other stressful events? How do these questions evolve in different cultural or community contexts, and with different populations? What are the implications for interventions for community institutions and mental health workers? What roles do self-esteem and spirituality play in a person&’s reaction to traumatic stress? How do reactions to traumatic stress differ between women who have been sexually abused as children and women who have not? From editor Sandra S. Lee: "Contemporary developments in the study of traumatic stress are shifting. This book reflects an emphasis on the study of traumatic stress in normal community, cultural, or college student populations and groups, while other literature has focused on individuals specifically diagnosed with PTSD. In addition, Traumatic Stress and Its Aftermath: Cultural, Community, and Professional Contexts emphasizes the search for risk and protective factors and factors that can buffer the relationship between trauma exposure and subsequent distress."
Trauma–Informed Practices for 9-12 Theatre Education
by Jimmy Chrismon Adam W. CarterThis resource bridges the worlds of education, mental health, and the performing arts to offer a comprehensive roadmap for 9–12 theatre educators looking to promote safe, supportive, and creative spaces for their students. Written by a seasoned theatre educator and a licensed mental health clinician, this book explores trauma-informed teaching techniques tailored specifically for theatre classrooms, encompassing both acting and production processes. Chapters cover a broad range of topics, from fostering resilience in students to collaborating with caregivers, administrators, and communities across the educational journey. The authors introduce essential concepts such as intimacy direction and consent, ensuring ethical and inclusive practices. They also provide strategies for teachers to prioritize their own self-care. Core themes and objectives include: trauma-informed teaching, holistic theatre production, community engagement, ethical theatre practices, and educator wellness. Packed with practical exercises for exploration, discussion questions for book studies, and meticulously researched insights, this resource strikes a balance between therapeutic guidance and professional development. Ideal for 9–12 theatre educators in drama classrooms, after-school programs, and more, this guide equips you with the tools to support students who may have experienced trauma, empowering them in performing arts environments while maintaining healthy boundaries.
Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World (International Library of Sociology)
by Jennie Germann MolzLiving in a world that is increasingly ‘on the move’ means that many of us now rely on mobile devices, social media, and networking technologies to coordinate togetherness with our social networks even when we are apart. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the emerging practices of ‘interactive travel’. Today’s travellers are more likely than ever to pack a laptop or a mobile phone and to use these devices to stay in touch with friends and family members – as well as to connect with strangers and other travellers – while they are on the road. New practices such as location-aware navigating, travel blogging, flashpacking and Couchsurfing now shape the way travellers engage with each other, with their social networks, and with the world around them. Travel Connections prompts a rethinking of the key paradigms in tourism studies in the digital age. Interactive travel calls into question longstanding tourism concepts such as landscape, the tourist gaze, hospitality, authenticity and escape. The book proposes a range of new concepts to describe the way tourists inhabit the world and engage with their social networks in the twenty-first century: smart tourism, the mediated gaze, mobile conviviality, re-enchantment and embrace. Based on intensive fieldwork with interactive travellers, Travel Connections offers a detailed account of this emerging phenomenon and uncovers the new forms of mediated and face-to-face togetherness that become possible in a mobile world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, tourism and hospitality, new media, cosmopolitanism studies, mobility studies and cultural studies.
Travel Demand Management and Public Policy (Routledge Revivals)
by Eric FergusonThis title was first published in 2000: Describes policy innovations in transportation system management, planning and operations in the US that explicitly address interactions between transportation demands and travel behaviour in a mixed economy. The author shows how travel demand and management programmes function in the context of transportation supply and demand, investment, technology, pricing, management and marketing policies and procedures, with examples of voluntary, market-based and regulatory approaches to transportation and activity system management and institutional change. The author describes a variety of evaluation methods and models designed specifically for TDM programmes, and how these can be used to better inform decision-makers and other stockholders in the process of transportation policy formulation. TDM programmes have serious potential to increase the efficiency of a wide variety of transportation systems. Institutional obstacles are likely to prevent full implementation in the near future, but partial efforts are underway and likely to continue and succeed, under proper circumstances.
Travel and Movement in Clinical Psychology: The World Outside The Clinic
by Miraj DesaiThis book concerns clinical psychology, but it is most concerned with the world outside the clinic. That world—where culture, history, and economy are found—radically impacts the public’s mental health. However these worldly considerations often do not feature centrally in the science and practice of clinical psychology, a subfield of psychology seemingly dedicated to mental health. Desai offers a corrective by travelling out of the clinic and into the world, exploring ideas, movements, and thinkers that help broaden our approach to well-being, by situating it within its cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. The book aims to be an intercultural journey itself—encountering Buddhism, phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along the way. Featuring a Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, the book positions pressing matters such as social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice as integral components of good mental health work. The book will be of interest to readers interested in cultural and community approaches to psychological science and practice.
Travel, Discovery, Transformation (Culture And Civilization Ser.)
by Gabriel R. RicciThis latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world.The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel.The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development.
Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa
by Kathryn MathersTravel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa uses observations of American travelers to southern Africa to ask: why is Africa so important to Americans? These travel stories show how encounters with Africans lead to a problematic desire to save Africa. Kathryn Mathers argues that this is then seen as a way to resolve the tensions between aspirations for a globally responsible America and the current reality of its geopolitical role. This book draws fascinating new conclusions about the connections and disconnections on which contemporary American identity is formed.
Travel, Tourism and Art (Current Developments in the Geographies of Leisure and Tourism)
by Jo-Anne Lester Tijana RakićArt, in its many forms, has long played an important role in people’s imagination, experience and remembrance of places, cultures and travels as well as in their motivation to travel. Travel and tourism, on the other hand, have also inspired numerous artists and featured in many artworks. The fascinating relationships between travel, tourism and art encompass a wide range of phenomena from historical ’Grand Tours’ during which a number of travellers experienced or produced artwork, to present-day travel inspired by art, artworks produced by contemporary travellers or artworks produced by locals for tourist consumption. Focusing on the representations of ’touristic’ places, locals, travellers and tourists in artworks; the role of travel and tourism in inspiring artists; as well as the role of art and artwork in imagining, experiencing and remembering places and motivating travel and tourism; this edited volume provides a space for an exploration of both historical and contemporary relationships between travel, tourism and art. Bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and fields of study including geography, anthropology, history, philosophy, and urban, cultural, tourism, art and leisure studies, this volume discusses a range of case studies across different art forms and locales.
Travel, Tourism, and Identity (Culture And Civilization Ser.)
by Gabriel R. RicciTravel, Tourism and Identity addresses the psychological and social adjustments that occur when people make contact with others outside their social, cultural, or linguistic groups. Whether such contact is the result of tourism, seeking exile, or relocating abroad, the volume's contributors demonstrate how one's identity, cultural assumptions, and worldview can be brought into question.In some cases, the traveller finds that bridging the social and cultural gap between himself and the new society is fairly easy. In other cases, the traveller discovers that reorienting himself requires absorbing a new cultural history and traditions. The contributors argue that making these adjustments will surely enhance the traveller's or tourist's experience; otherwise the traveller or tourist will be at risk of becoming a marginalized figure, one disconnected from the society that surrounds him.This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series features a collection of essays on travel and tourism. The essays cover a range of topics from historical travels to modern social identities. They discuss ancient travels, contemporary travels in Europe, Africa and sustainable eco-tourism, and the politics of tourism. Essays also address experiences of Grenada's "Spice Island" identity, and the effects of globalization and migrations on personal identity.
Traveling Models and Practical Norms: The Misadventures of Social Engineering in Africa and Beyond
by Jean-Pierre Olivier de SardanPublic policies, development projects, and NGO interventions often have large gaps between the planning and execution. Standardized public policies, especially development ones, ignore the multiple contexts in which they are implemented. Local actors (those targeted by public policies or responsible for implementing them) play a major role in the implementation of planning and execution. Their many strategies for circumventing official directives and protocols follow implicit "practical norms" that are ignored by international experts. This book examines how different modes of governance that deliver services of general interest experience significant gaps between explicit rules and implicit practices, between planned actions and daily routines, in Africa and beyond.
Travelling Theory and Women’s Movements in Turkey: Imagining Europe (The Feminist Imagination - Europe and Beyond)
by Demet GulcicekDrawing on archival research, Travelling Theory and Women’s Movements in Turkey examines the imagination of Europe in the context of women’s rights movements in a self-defined non-European setting. It brings travelling theory, poststructuralist feminist theories and orientalist studies together to provide an original theoretical framework for understanding the complex and often contradictory imaginations of Europe. Such imaginations can be an object of desire, fantasy, hate and hostility in a non-European context. This volume sheds light on the manner in which local power dynamics are reproduced, negotiated and subverted during the travel of women’s and feminist movements. With a focus on the late Ottoman Empire, the book questions how ‘Other’ positions can be inhabited by the ‘Self’ and unpacks sexual and normative dimensions of demanding women’s rights in this context. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and gender studies with interests in feminist theory and notions of European and non-European categories.
Travelling Towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking (Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecomings #3)
by Nicola Frost Tom SelwynAs we grapple with a growing refugee crisis, a hardening of anti-immigration sentiment, and deepening communal segregation in many parts of the developed world, questions of the nature of home and homemaking are increasingly critical. This collection brings ethnographic insight into the practices of homemaking, exploring a diverse range of contexts ranging from economic migrants to new Chinese industrial cities, Jewish returnees from Israel to Ukraine, and young gay South Asians in London. While negotiating widely varying social-political contexts, these studies suggest an unavoidably multiple understanding of home, while provoking new understandings of the material and symbolic process of making oneself “at home.”
Travelling with the Argonauts: Informal Networks Seen without a Vertical Lens
by Małgorzata IrekDrawing on rich ethnographic materials from longitudinal fieldwork on informal trading routes across Europe, Travelling with the Argonauts offers a new perspective in the research of the social space, reflecting on how best to investigate amorphous social phenomena, such as informal networks. Breaking with much current theory, the approach detailed here – the ‘Restricted Verticality Perspective’ – examines the horizontal dimension of social relations, and understands informality not as marginal or substandard, but as life itself, as the real experience of ordinary people.
Travels With Casey: My Journey Through Our Dog-crazy Country
by Benoit Denizet-LewisA moody Labrador and his insecure human take a funny, touching cross-country RV trip into the heart of America's relationship with dogs."I don't think my dog likes me very much," New York Times Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis confesses at the beginning of his journey with his nine-year-old Labrador-mix, Casey. Over the next four months, thirty-two states, and 13,000 miles in a rented motor home, Denizet-Lewis and his canine companion attempt to pay tribute to the most powerful interspecies bond there is, in the country with the highest rate of dog ownership in the world. On the way, Denizet-Lewis--known for his deeply reported dispatches from far corners of American life--meets an irresistible cast of dogs and dog-obsessed humans. Denizet-Lewis and Casey hang out with wolf-dogs in Appalachia, search with a dedicated rescuer of stray dogs in Missouri, spend a full day at a kooky dog park in Manhattan, get pulled over by a K9 cop in Missouri, and visit "Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan in California. And then there are the pet psychics, dog-wielding hitchhikers, and two nosy women who took their neighbor to court for allegedly failing to pick up her dog's poop. Travels With Casey is a delightfully idiosyncratic blend of memoir and travelogue coupled with an exploration of a dog-loving America. What does our relationship to our dogs tell us about ourselves and our values? Denizet-Lewis explores those questions--and his own canine-related curiosities and insecurities--during his unforgettable road trip through our dog-loving nation.
Travels with Foxfire: Stories of People, Passions, and Practices from Southern Appalachia
by Phil Hudgins Jessica PhillipsSince 1972, the Foxfire books have preserved and celebrated the culture of Southern Appalachia for hundreds of thousands of readers. In Travels with Foxfire, native son Phil Hudgins and Foxfire student Jessica Phillips travel from Georgia to the Carolinas, Tennessee to Kentucky, collecting the stories of the men and women who call the region home. Across more than thirty essays, we discover the secret origins of stock car racing, the story behind the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the vanishing art of gathering wild ginseng, and the recipes of an award-winning cookbook writer. We meet bootleggers and bear hunters, game wardens and medicine women, water dowsers, sculptors, folk singers, novelists, record collectors, and home cooks—even the world’s foremost “priviologist”—all with tales to tell. A rich compendium of the collected wisdom of artists, craftsmen, musicians, and moonshiners, Travels with Foxfire is a joyful tribute to the history, the geography, and the traditions that define Appalachian living.