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Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age
by Alan LiuCan today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.
Outlaw Kingdom: Bill Tilghman Was The Man Who Tamed Dodge City. Now He Faced A Lawless Frontier (Gunfighter Chronicles)
by Matt BraunOutlaw KingdomMatt Braun In 1889, Bill Tilghman joined the historic land rush that transformed a raw frontier into Oklahoma Territory. A lawman by trade, he set aside his badge to make his fortune in the boomtowns. Yet Tilghman was called into service once more, on a bold, relentless manhunt that would make his name a legend for all time--in an epic confrontation with outlaw gang leader Bill Doolin.
In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France
by Peggy McCrackenIn medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
Bald Is Better with Earrings: A Survivor's Guide to Getting Through Breast Cancer
by Andrea HuttonThe breast cancer guide every woman needs for herself, her best friend, and her sister—a warm, practical, relatable handbook, that dispels the terror, taking you step-by-step through the process, from diagnosis to post-treatment.When Andrea Hutton was diagnosed with breast cancer, she wanted to know everything. She voraciously read books, articles, and websites and talked to everyone she knew. But nothing prepared her for what the surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation would feel like. Were there tricks that could ease her pain and discomfort? What was “fatigue” and how would it affect her? At what exact moment would her hair fall out and how? Hutton wanted what she could not find: a clear how-to guide for the cancer girl she had become.Bald Is Better with Earrings is Hutton’s answer for women diagnosed with breast cancer: a straightforward handbook, leavened with humor and inspiration, to shepherd them though the experience. Warm and down-to-earth, Hutton explains what to expect and walks you through this intense and emotional process: tests, surgery, chemo, losing your hair and shaving your head, being bald, radiation treatments.Hutton offers a wealth of invaluable advice—from tricks for surviving chemo, to treating your skin during radiation, to keeping track of meds—and includes a practical list of tips for each stage of the process at the end of every chapter. Compassionate, friendly, and shaped by Hutton’s first-hand knowledge, Bald Is Better with Earrings is the comprehensive, essential companion for anyone dealing with breast cancer.
No Bone Unturned: Inside the World of a Top Forensic Scientist and His Work on America's Most Notorious Crimes and Disasters
by Jeff Benedict“A fast and exciting read. . . . This survey of Owsley’s career will appeal to both science and legal buffs.” --Publishers WeeklyThe story of the Smithsonian’s brilliant forensic anthropologist and the 9,000-year-old skeleton that sparked his landmark lawsuit against the U.S. governmentWhen he is not studying ancient skeletons, Doug Owsley is enlisted by the State Department and the FBI to identify remains. He has worked on some of the most notorious tragedies in recent history—Bosnia, Waco, 9/11 and Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims among them. When an anthropologist in Kennewick, WA, calls Owsley to help study a 9,000 year-old caucasoid skeleton, he gets caught up in a battle against the Justice Department and Indian tribes who claim the skeleton is Native American and should be buried and not analyzed.Owsley, backed by scientists worldwide, files suit against the government and is now at the forefront of a landmark case—currently pending a ruling in the U.S. District Court—that may alter repatriation laws and have a significant impact on the classic views of Native Americans, migration patterns, and anthropology, as well as our understanding of prehistory.
A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress
by David Levering Lewis Deborah WillisAn incredible treasure trove of more than 150 illustrations detailing a small nation of African Americans prepared to make their mark on America
Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice Is Really About (History and Philosophy of Education Series)
by Sigal R. Ben-Porath Michael C. JohanekIf free market advocates had total control over education policy, would the shared public system of education collapse? Would school choice revitalize schooling with its innovative force? With proliferating charters and voucher schemes, would the United States finally make a dramatic break with its past and expand parental choice? Those are not only the wrong questions—they’re the wrong premises, argue philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath and historian Michael C. Johanek in Making Up Our Mind. Market-driven school choices aren’t new. They predate the republic, and for generations parents have chosen to educate their children through an evolving mix of publicly supported, private, charitable, and entrepreneurial enterprises. The question is not whether to have school choice. It is how we will regulate who has which choices in our mixed market for schooling—and what we, as a nation, hope to accomplish with that mix of choices. Looking beyond the simplistic divide between those who oppose government intervention and those who support public education, the authors make the case for a structured landscape of choice in schooling, one that protects the interests of children and of society, while also identifying key shared values on which a broadly acceptable policy could rest.
To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry
by Will BlytheAn obsessively personal history of the blood feud between North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams and what that rivalry says about class and culture in the SouthThe basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessities of hatred.As the season unfolds, Blythe, the former longtime literary editor of Esquire and a lifelong Tarheels fan, will immerse himself in the lives of the two teams, eavesdropping on practice sessions, hanging with players, observing the arcane rituals of fans, and struggling to establish some basic human kinship with Duke’s players and proponents. With access to the coaches, the stars, and the bit players, it is both a chronicle of personal obsession and a record of social history.
Voracious Science & Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (Animal Lives Ser.)
by John P. GluckThe National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection. Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments. At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.
Coevolution of Life on Hosts: Integrating Ecology and History (Interspecific Interactions Ser.)
by Dale H. Clayton Sarah E. Bush Kevin P. JohnsonFor most, the mere mention of lice forces an immediate hand to the head and recollection of childhood experiences with nits, medicated shampoos, and traumatic haircuts. But for a certain breed of biologist, lice make for fascinating scientific fodder, especially enlightening in the study of coevolution. In this book, three leading experts on host-parasite relationships demonstrate how the stunning coevolution that occurs between such species in microevolutionary, or ecological, time generates clear footprints in macroevolutionary, or historical, time. By integrating these scales, Coevolution of Life on Hosts offers a comprehensive understanding of the influence of coevolution on the diversity of all life. Following an introduction to coevolutionary concepts, the authors combine experimental and comparative host-parasite approaches for testing coevolutionary hypotheses to explore the influence of ecological interactions and coadaptation on patterns of diversification and codiversification among interacting species. Ectoparasites—a diverse assemblage of organisms that ranges from herbivorous insects on plants, to monogenean flatworms on fish, and feather lice on birds—are powerful models for the study of coevolution because they are easy to observe, mark, and count. As lice on birds and mammals are permanent parasites that spend their entire lifecycles on the bodies of their hosts, they are ideally suited to generating a synthetic overview of coevolution—and, thereby, offer an exciting framework for integrating the concepts of coadaptation and codiversification.
Making Peace with Your Past: The Six Essential Steps to Enjoying a Great Future
by Harold H. Bloomfield Phil GoldbergDo You: Harbor guilt or grudges from past relationships? Feel plagued by thoughts of regret? Think "Oh, no, not again!" when personal problems arise? Wonder why life hasn't turned out the way you wanted? Feel anxious or depressed about your future? Seem to be less happy as time goes by?If you answered yes to even one of these questions, this book can help you make peace with your past -- here and now.The past lives on in everything we think, feel, say, and do. Medical studies show that adults who've had adverse or traumatic past experiences are much more vulnerable to life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Now, world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Harold Bloomfield, bestselling author of Making Peace with Your Parents and Making Peace with Yourself, offers practical, scientifically proven techniques that can help you heal the wounds of the past; transform feelings of pain, shame, and blame into high self-worth; and reawaken to the magic and joy of being alive.
Shane Comes Home
by Rinker BuckOn March 21, 2003, while leading a rifle platoon into combat, Marine Lieutenant Shane Childers became the first combat fatality of the Iraq War. In this gripping, beautifully written personal history, award-winning writer Rinker Buck chronicles Shane's death and his life, exploring its meaning for his family, his fellow soldiers, and the country itself. It is the story of an intelligent, gifted soldier who embodied the soul of today's all-volunteer warrior class; of the town of Powell, Wyoming, which had taken Shane into its heart; and of the Marine detail sent to deliver the news to the Childers family and the extraordinary connection that formed between them.At once an inspiring account of commitment to the military and a moving story of family and devotion, Shane Comes Home rises above politics to capture the life of a remarkable young man who came to symbolize the heart of America during a difficult time.
Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good: From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond
by Cathy GereHow should we weigh the costs and benefits of scientific research on humans? Is it right that a small group of people should suffer in order that a larger number can live better, healthier lives? Or is an individual truly sovereign, unable to be plotted as part of such a calculation? These are questions that have bedeviled scientists, doctors, and ethicists for decades, and in Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good, Cathy Gere presents the gripping story of how we have addressed them over time. Today, we are horrified at the idea that a medical experiment could be performed on someone without consent. But, as Gere shows, that represents a relatively recent shift: for more than two centuries, from the birth of utilitarianism in the eighteenth century, the doctrine of the greater good held sway. If a researcher believed his work would benefit humanity, then inflicting pain, or even death, on unwitting or captive subjects was considered ethically acceptable. It was only in the wake of World War II, and the revelations of Nazi medical atrocities, that public and medical opinion began to change, culminating in the National Research Act of 1974, which mandated informed consent. Showing that utilitarianism is based in the idea that humans are motivated only by pain and pleasure, Gere cautions that that greater good thinking is on the upswing again today and that the lesson of history is in imminent danger of being lost. Rooted in the experiences of real people, and with major consequences for how we think about ourselves and our rights, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good is a dazzling, ambitious history.
The Magic Cup: An Irish Legend Retold
by Andrew M. GreeleyA Quest for the Holy GrailIn this novel of legendary Ireland, Andrew Greeley takes you back into a long-ago time of mists and magic, faith and love. Here you will meet Cormac MacDermot, the young king destined to lead Ireland out of paganism to Christianity; his aged father, now on the throne, and the seductive witch-queen who holds the country in thrall. Here also is the lovely slave girl Brigid. As light-footed as an Irish pixie, she will help Cormac seek the magic cup that will confirm his right to be High King of Ireland.Over mountain and river they will journey, beset by perils. But when their enemies capture Brigid, and Cormac strives to save her, he will see that the little slave girl is a great deal more than she seems.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
What's Your Story?: True Experiences from Complete Strangers (The Strangers Project)
by Brandon DomanEveryone has a story to share. What's yours?In 2009, Brandon Doman, who has always been curious about the people with whom we share our world, sat at a local coffeehouse and decided to ask passersby a simple question: "What's your story?"Providing only paper and pens, Doman created an exploratory space that instantly intrigued people to share their stories anonymously. Now, more than 10,000 stories later, the Strangers Project has become a momentous movement, engaging strangers of all ages and backgrounds to reflect, rejoice, heal, and connect through words.Published here for the first time, What's Your Story? showcases a selection of two hundred stories from the Strangers Project. Equal parts heartbreaking and humorous, this moving compendium lays bare our universal truths, desires, and sufferings, and illustrates the emotional power of storytelling and our shared humanity. To complete this beautiful collage of stories, a blank page is included at the end for readers to add their own personal story.With more than fifty color photographs and illustrations
The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel
by Nafisa HajiA free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, willful, intelligent Saira Qader rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, making the world her home. But when tragedy strikes, throwing Saira's life into turmoil, the woman who circled the globe to uncover the details of other lives must confront the truths of her own. In need of understanding, she looks to the stories of those who came before—her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father. As Saira discovers the hope, pain, joy, and passion that defined their lives, she begins to face what she never wanted to admit: that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not merely an intellectual preference.
American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny
by Christopher MillerAmerican Cornball is Christopher Miller's irresistibly funny illustrated survey of popular humor—the topics that used to make us laugh, from hiccups and henpecked-husbands to outhouses and old maids—and what it tells us about our country yesterday and today.Miller revisits nearly 200 comic staples that have been passed down through our culture for generations, many originating from the vaudeville age. He explores the (often unseemly) contexts from which they arose, why they were funny in their time, and why they eventually lost their appeal. The result is a kind of taxonomy of humor during America's golden age that provides a deeper, more profound look at the prejudices, preoccupations, and peculiarities of a nation polarized between urban and rural, black and white, highborn and lowbrow.As he touches on issues of racism and sexism, cultural stereotypes and violence, Miller reveals how dramatically our moral sensibilities have shifted, most notably in the last few decades. Complete with more than 100 period illustrations, American Cornball is a richly entertaining survey of our shifting comic universe.
City of War (The Rail Black Novels)
by Neil RussellHis enemies are the most dangerous people in the world. So are his friends . . .The sole heir to a media empire, Rail Black is larger than life, richer than almost anyone, and living in opulent seclusion in Beverly Hills. His "curse" is a need for excitement coupled with an oversized sense of justice, which impelled him into Delta Force. Now he helps people without options—and billionaires play by different rules.Caught in gridlock on the world's busiest freeway, Rail comes to the rescue of a naked woman escaping from a van. But Kimberly York is no ordinary victim, and Rail has invited violence into his life . . . again—as a sudden, shocking murder pulls him into a decades-old international conspiracy of greed, rare treasures, and human depravity. But no matter how powerful and well-armed, his adversaries can't escape Rail's wrath as he races into the darkness surrounding the American government's most astonishing secret: the City of War.
Get Rich Cheating: The Crooked Path to Easy Street
by Jeff KreislerIn these difficult times, there's only one proven path to ridiculous amounts of money: Cheating. Everyone's doing it—from sleazy CEOs to 'roided-up home run kings, silicone-enhanced starlets, and backroom-dealing congressmen—so why not you? Get Rich Cheating is your definitive guide to the illegal, immoral, and fun, detailing the schemes that have proven time and time again to generate more cash than God, Google, and the Treasury combined. No one ever bought a fleet of Bentleys with hard work, perseverance, and honesty. Simply by purchasing this book, you've already done more than most "ethical" people dare. Open it, savor the moment, and inhale deeply in the musk of your impending wealth—it's time to Get Rich Cheating.
Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
by Pardis DabashiAn examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction. The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.
Talking to Ourselves: A Novel
by Andrés NeumanA searing family drama from one of Latin America's most original voicesOne trip. Two love stories. Three voices.Lito is ten years old and is almost sure he can change the weather when he concentrates very hard. His father, Mario, anxious to create a memory that will last for his son's lifetime, takes him on a road trip in a truck called Pedro. But Lito doesn't know that this might be their last trip: Mario is gravely ill. Together, father and son embark on a journey takes them through strange geographies that seem to meld the different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. In the meantime, Lito's mother, Elena, restlessly seeks support in books, and soon undertakes an adventure of her own that will challenge her moral limits. Each narrative—of father, son, and mother—embodies one of the different ways that we talk to ourselves: through speech, through thought, and through writing. While neither of them dares to tell the complete truth to the other two, their individual voices nonetheless form a poignant conversation.Sooner or later, we all face loss. Andrés Neuman movingly narrates the ways the lives of those who survive loss are transformed; how that experience changes our ideas about time, memory, and our own bodies; and how the acts of reading, and of sex, can serve as powerful modes of resistance. Talking to Ourselves presents a tender yet unsentimental portrait of the workings of love and family; a reflection both on grief and on the consolation of words. Neuman, the author of the award-winning Traveler of the Century, displays his characteristic warmth, bittersweet humor, and wide-ranging intellect, giving us the rich, textured, and strikingly different voices and experiences of three singular characters while presenting, above all, a profound tribute to those who have ever had to care for a loved one.
Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories
by Stuart DybekIn this remarkable collection of bite-size stories, Stuart Dybek, one of our most prodigious writers, explores the human appetite for rapture and for trust. With fervent intensity and sly wit, he gives each tale his signature mix of characters—some almost ghostly, others vividly real—who live in worlds tinged with surreal potential. There are crazed nuns hijacking streetcars, eerie adventures across frozen ponds, and a boy who is visited by a miniature bride and groom every night in his uncle's doomsday compound. Whether they are about a simple transaction, a brave inquiry, a difficult negotiation, or shared bliss, the stories in Ecstatic Cahoots target the friction between our need for ecstatic self-transcendence and our passionate longing for trust between lovers, friends, family, and even strangers. Call it micro-fiction or mini-fiction, flash fiction or short shorts. Whatever the label, the marvelous encounters here are marked by puzzlement, anguish, and conspiratorial high spirits. In this thrilling collection, Stuart Dybek has once again re-envisioned the possibilities of fiction, creating myriad human situations that fold endlessly upon each other, his crackling prose drawing out the strange, the intimate, and the mysterious elements in each.
The Road to Enchantment: A Novel
by Kaya McLarenAs a young girl, Willow watched her mother leave their home in Washington State in a literal blaze of glory: she set the mattress of her cheating husband on fire in her driveway, roasting marshmallow peeps and hot dogs before the fire department arrived. And with that, she and Willow set off to New Mexico, to a new life, to a world of arroyos and canyons bordering an Apache reservation. Willow was devastated. Her eccentric mother believed in this new life and set about starting a winery and goat ranch. But for Willow, it meant initially being bullied and feeling like an outsider. Today, as a grown woman, Willow much prefers Los Angeles and her job as a studio musician. But things tend to happen in threes: her mother dies, her boyfriend dumps her, and Willow discovers she is pregnant. The DeVine Winery and Goat Ranch is all she has left, even if it is in financial straits and unmanageable back taxes. There is something, though, about the call of “home.” She's surprised to find that her Apache best friend Darrel along with the rest of the community seems to think she belongs far more than she ever thought she did. Can Willow redefine what home means for her, and can she make a go of the legacy her mother left behind? Told with Kaya McLaren’s humor and heart, The Road to Enchantment is a story about discovering that the last thing you want is sometimes the one thing you need.“This is a potent coming of true age novel. One that gently leads us to leave behind all we imagined as lost, encourages us to embrace what adventure of the simple day lies ahead. The Road to Enchantment carries us into that place beyond the dark hour where the power of story reigns, truth will not be denied, and all the magic of this life will be remembered.” –River Jordan
Mz N: A Poem-in-episodes
by Maureen N. McLaneThe acclaimed poet, memoirist, and essayist Maureen N. McLane here charts a new path into vital genre-bending territories. Not a novel, not a memoir, not a lyric, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes offers something else—“life . . . a continual allegory” (to invoke Keats): a life intense, episodic, female, sexual, philosophical, romantic, analytic. Tracking the growth of one poet’s mind, switchbacking its way through American English, Mz N toggles between story and song. This is a poetry both “furious / & alive.”Alive to the lash of love, the longueurs of adolescence, the limits of identity, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes is a bravura experiment in life-writing—an assaying, a testing, a transforming, an honoring of the tentative and the torqued. What is it to be contemporary, to be “one / among other ones” in a “cracking world”? How does a body vibrate into being? How is a mind made out of other minds? Seizing the queer realities of any life, Mz N explores how one is surprised, seduced, and struck into speech, thought, song, silence. “Then, what is life?” cried Shelley. So too Mz N.
A Defense of Ardor: Essays
by Adam ZagajewskiArdor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime: Such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they stake out. Bringing gravity and grace to his meditations on art, society, and history, Zagajewski wears his erudition lightly, with a disarming blend of modesty and humor. His topics range from autobiography (his first visit to a post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a dazzling thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry.Zagajewski gives an account of the place of art in the modern age that distinguishes his self-proclaimed liberal vision from the "right-wing radicalism" of such modernist precursors as Eliot or Yeats. The same mixture of ardor and compassion that marks Zagajewski's distinctive contribution to modern poetry runs throughout this eloquent, engaging collection.