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Book of Dreams: A Novel
by Davis BunnFor Dr. Elena Burroughs, life is divided into two chapters—before and after the death of her husband. Today marks the point that her span of being a wife is equal to her span of being a widow. Even her success as a psychologist and her worldwide acclaim for a book on the interpretation of dreams is dimmed by an unspoken If only. Then a new patient arrives, one so private only her first name is given. Impeccably dressed and escorted by two bodyguards, Sandra recounts a frightening series of recurrent nightmares. Elena agrees to consider her case more carefully, convinced that something ominous may be at work here. Elena’s interpretation of her dreams confirms that, indeed, the new patient and her family confront a powerful global network of dangerous forces. As the story unfolds, they face a key question of the Christian life: How do you understand and fulfill the will of God?
Loons of New Hampshire: Preserving a Natural Treasure (Natural History)
by Glenn A. KnoblockNoted for its stunning plumage and haunting cries, the common loon is an iconic symbol of nature in the Granite State. Once a familiar site on local ponds and lakes, by the early twentieth century their numbers had dwindled due to human activity. By the 1970s less than two hundred remained. It was only with the formation of the Loon Preservation Committee in 1975 by pioneer conservationist Rawson Wood that the plight of loons in New Hampshire changed for the better. Author Glenn Knoblock, in collaboration with leading experts from the organization, reveals the sometimes-mysterious nature of this beloved bird, its presence throughout the state's history, the threats it faces today and the extensive efforts to recover the population. The Loon Preservation Committee is the only organization in New Hampshire working directly on their behalf. A portion of the proceeds of the sales of this book will go directly to the organization to fund ongoing conservation efforts.
Gone the Hard Road: A Memoir
by Lee Martin"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life."Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself. A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.
The Empire of Illusion (Global African Voices)
by Aminata Sow FallIn Senegal, three modest families share a courtyard. This common space is a small paradise where they meet to cook, dine, talk, evoke memories, and grow together. At one Sunday family gathering, the usual post-meal conversation turns tense when Sada's adolescent son, Dieìry, asks why his father was so friendly with a government official at a televised ribbon-cutting the day before. The conversation quickly devolves into one about respect and duty.In Empire of Illusion, legendary Senegalese novelist Aminata Sow Fall, explores the powerful themes of family, respect, and ethics. What respect does a son owe his father—and vice versa? How does a family maintain a balance of debate and respect? How does a person maintain self-respect when forced to swim in ethically muddy waters? Aminata Sow Fall, the matriarch of Senegalese social-realist fiction delivers yet another trenchant examination of her society, and of the universal challenge of finding, keeping, and giving respect to oneself and others.
Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death (Religion And Postmodernism Ser.)
by Mark C. TaylorPost-war, post-industrialism, post-religion, post-truth, post-biological, post-human, post-modern. What succeeds the post- age? Mark C. Taylor returns here to some of his central philosophical preoccupations and asks: What comes after the end? Abiding Grace navigates the competing Hegelian and Kierkegaardian trajectories born out of the Reformation and finds Taylor arguing from spaces in between, showing how both narratives have shaped recent philosophy and culture. For Hegel, Luther’s internalization of faith anticipated the modern principle of autonomy, which reached its fullest expression in speculative philosophy. The closure of the Hegelian system still endures in the twenty-first century in consumer society, financial capitalism, and virtual culture. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, Luther’s God remains radically transcendent, while finite human beings and their world remain fully dependent. From this insight, Heidegger and Derrida developed an alternative view of time in which a radically open future breaks into the present to transform the past, demonstrating that, far from autonomous, life is a gift from an Other that can never be known. Offering an alternative genealogy of deconstruction that traces its pedigree back to readings of Paul by way of Luther, Abiding Grace presents a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and postmodernity’s will to power and mastery. In this new philosophical and theological vision, history is not over and the future remains endlessly open.
The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier, 1st–5th Centuries AD
by Derek WilliamsThe Roman Empire was one of the most powerful forces in history. However, few people realize that this vast empire was guarded by one frontier, a series of natural and man-made barriers, including Hadrian's Wall. It is impossible to have a true understanding of the Roman Empire without first investigating the scope of this amazing frontier.The boundary ran for roughly 4,000 miles--from Britain to Morocco via the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, the Syrian Desert, and the Saharan fringes; reinforced by walls, ditches, palisades, watchtowers, and forts. It absorbed virtually the whole imperial army, enclosed three and a half million square miles, and defended forty provinces (now thirty countries) and perhaps eighty million Roman subjects. In protecting the empire the frontier made a substantial contribution to the Pax Romana and ultimately to preserving the inheritance of future Europe. Yet this static mode of defense ran counter to Rome's tradition of mobile warfare and her taste for glory, born of centuries of conquest. The emperors' choice of a passive strategy promoted lassitude and conservatism, allowing the military initiative slowly to pass into barbarian hands.The Reach of Rome is the first book to describe the entire length of the amazing imperial frontier. It traces the political forces that created it and portrays those who commanded and manned it, as well as those against whom it was held. It relates the frontier's rise, pre-eminence, crises, and collapse and assesses its meaning for history and its legacies to the post-Roman world. Finally, it also tells the story of the explorers who rediscovered its lost works and describes the nature and location of the surviving remains. Includes thirty beautifully designed maps.
Addiction (Peter Zak Mysteries #2)
by G. H. EphronAmnesia, G.H. Ephron's acclaimed debut, introduced forensic neuropsychologist and expert defense witness Dr. Peter Zak. Returning in Addiction, Peter is back in the thick of things at the Pearce Psychiatric Center, coping with patients as well as everyday average administrative nightmares at the hospital, like budgetary concerns, construction, and colleagues' drug trials. And then the worst nightmare of all-the murder of a colleague.Such an event, if it weren't devastating enough, rekindles Peter's memories of the murder of his wife, which left Peter emotionally shattered and isolated; he's only recently begun to emerge. But he can't retreat this time; he must use his expertise to help reconstruct this baffling and intensely personal killing.Peter discovers his friend and former lover, Pearce psychiatrist Channing Temple, dead from a gunshot wound on hospital grounds. Her 16-year-old daughter Olivia is standing over the body, holding a gun. Did Olivia, who has been abusing Ritalin and other drugs, kill her mother? Peter thinks not, but she is quickly arraigned for murder, and he has only two weeks to find the killer before Olivia is sent to prison. In this tense and compelling second installment in a highly lauded series, the talented writing team known as G.H. Ephron tackles the dangers and misconceptions surrounding addiction...and the chaos of murder.
The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll: Unexpected Essays on Philosophy, Art, Life, and Death
by Ben-Ami ScharfsteinWhat if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice’s rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly synthesized thought. Combining a deep knowledge of psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of religions—not to mention philosophy—he demonstrates again and again the unpredictability of writing and thought and how they can teach us about our experiences. Scharfstein begins with essays on the nature of philosophy itself, moving from an autobiographical account of the trials of being a comparativist to philosophy’s function in the outside world to the fear of death in Kant and Hume. From there he explores an impressive array of art: from China and Japan to India and the West; from an essay on sadistic and masochistic body art to one on the epistemology of the deaf and the blind. He then returns to philosophy, writing on Machiavelli and political ruthlessness, then on the ineffable, and closes with a review of Walter Kaufmann’s multivolume look at the essence of humanity, Discovering the Mind. Altogether, these essays are a testament to adventurous thought, the kind that leaps to the furthest reaches of the possible.
What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life
by Marc LeepsonWhat So Proudly We Hailed is the first full-length biography of Francis Scott Key in more than 75 years. In this fascinating look at early America, historian Marc Leepson explores the life and legacy of Francis Scott Key. Standing alongside Betsy Ross, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and John Hancock in history, Key made his mark as an American icon by one single and unforgettable act, writing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Among other things, Leepson reveals:• How the young Washington lawyer found himself in Baltimore Harbor on the night of September 13-14, 2014• The mysterious circumstances surrounding how the poem he wrote, first titled "The Defense of Ft. M'Henry," morphed into the National Anthem• Key's role in forming the American Colonization Society, and his decades-long fervent support for that controversial endeavor that sent free blacks to Africa• His adamant opposition to slave trafficking and his willingness to represent slaves and freed men and women for free in Washington's courts• Key's role as a confidant of President Andrew Jackson and his work in Jackson's "kitchen cabinet"• Key's controversial actions as U.S. Attorney during the first race riot in Washington, D.C., in 1835. Publishing to coincide with the 200th anniversary of "The Star Spangled Banner" in 2014, What So Proudly We Hailed reveals unexplored details of the life of an American patriot whose legacy has been largely unknown until now.
Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception
by Dorothea E. OlkowskiDeleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception offers the only full-length examination of the relationships between Deleuze, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) succeeded one another as leading voices in French philosophy over a span of 136 years. Their relationship to one another's work involved far more than their overlapping lifetimes. Bergson became both the source of philosophical insight and a focus of criticism for Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Deleuze criticized Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as well as his interest in cognitive and natural science. Author Dorothea Olkowski points out that each of these philosophers situated their thought in relation to their understandings of crucial developments and theories taken up in the history and philosophy of science, and this has been difficult for Continental philosophy to grasp. She articulates the differences between these philosophers with respect to their disparate approaches to the physical sciences and with how their views of science function in relation to their larger philosophical projects. In Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Olkowski examines the critical areas of the structure of time and memory, the structure of consciousness, and the question of humans' relation to nature. She reveals that these philosophers are working from inside one another's ideas and are making strong claims about time, consciousness, reality, and their effects on humanity that converge and diverge. The result is a clearer picture of the intertwined workings of Continental philosophy and its fundamental engagement with the sciences.
Absolute Beauty: A Renowned Plastic Surgeon's Guide to Looking Young Forever
by Gerald ImberTwenty-five or sixty-five, we all want to look our vital, youthful best. The frustrating truth is that no matter how we wish it wasn't so, each day brings tiny changes, constantly chipping away at youth and beauty. Happily, with proper guidance most of this can be prevented, controlled, and reversed. It is a simple and sensible lifelong journey that will yield great rewards for all ages.Renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Gerald Imber changed the way men and women deal with aging in his books The Youth Corridor, which offered the first integrated strategy to control the signs of aging, and For Men Only, designed for the man who wants to stay trim and youthful but doesn't know where to turn for advice. Now, after vast improvements in science and surgery, Dr. Imber once again paves the way for people to find the path toward keeping their youthful appearance.In Absolute Beauty, Dr. Imber explores the new horizon for staying young-looking and the cutting-edge breakthroughs in areas such as:Minimally invasive facial surgeriesNew limited-incision faceliftsNew wrinkle fillersAnti-aging skin-care strategiesNew antioxidant strategiesAbsolute Beauty provides the crucial information needed to help you look your absolute best throughout your adult life. Dr. Imber's regimen will show you how to slow down the damage of time and help you turn back the clock. It will tell you how to protect your youthful good looks -- your absolute beauty -- by avoiding accelerating the changes that lead to aging and undoing the visible changes already present.This indispensable book covers all aspects of the modern cosmetic surgical experience and is a must-have guide for anyone considering plastic surgery or just wanting to stay young-looking.
Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture
by Dorothy C. Holland Margaret A. EisenhartIs romance more important to women in college than grades are? Why do so many women enter college with strong academic backgrounds and firm career goals but leave with dramatically scaled-down ambitions? Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart expose a pervasive "culture of romance" on campus: a high-pressure peer system that propels women into a world where their attractiveness to men counts most.
Mary’s Foolproof Dinners: 120 effortless recipes from my brand-new BBC series: The Sunday Times Bestseller
by Mary BerryMake every evening effortless with Mary!Whether it's a busy weeknight or a cosy weekend gathering, this collection of 120 brand-new, delicious recipes accompanies Mary Berry's latest BBC series and makes creating dinner completely foolproof!Mary’s Foolproof Dinners features all the fuss-free recipes from the show, each beautifully photographed with helpful cooking tips and techniques. From hearty one-pot wonders to sophisticated yet straightforward dinner party showstoppers and - of course - tempting traybakes and desserts. Each recipe is meticulously crafted by Mary to make every evening a foolproof success.Whatever you're planning for supper, Mary's Foolproof Dinners is your ultimate guide to hassle-free home cooking for all to enjoy.First week as bestseller in nielsen bookscan 202441
Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation (A Cookbook)
by Clarissa WeiExplore the taste and culture of Taiwan in this James Beard Award Finalist featuring never-before-seen exclusive recipes. &“A vibrant, strikingly-photographed guide to the soul of Taiwan, told through food&” (Serious Eats). 2024 IACP/JULIA CHILD FOUNDATION AWARD WINNER * NAMED A BEST COOKBOOK OF 2023 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, WIRED, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, LOS ANGELES TIMES, DELISH, EPICURIOUS, and SERIOUS EATSTaipei-based food journalist Clarissa Wei presents Made in Taiwan, a cookbook that celebrates the island nation&’s unique culinary identity—despite a refusal by the Chinese government to recognize its sovereignty. The expansive book contains deeply researched essays and more than 100 recipes inspired by the people who live in Taiwan today. For generations, Taiwanese cuisine has been miscategorized under the broad umbrella term of Chinese food. Backed with historical evidence and interviews, Wei makes a case for why Taiwanese food should get its own spotlight. Made in Taiwan includes classics like Peddler Noodles, Braised Minced Pork Belly, and Three-Cup Chicken, and features authentic, never-before-seen recipes and techniques like how to make stinky tofu from scratch and broth tips from an award-winning beef noodle soup master. Made in Taiwan is an earnest reflection of what the food is like in modern-day Taiwan from the perspective of the people who have lived there for generations. It is the story of a proud nation—a self-sufficient collective of people who continue to forge on despite unprecedented ambiguity.
Wellness by Design: A Room-by-Room Guide to Optimizing Your Home for Health, Fitness, and Happiness
by Jamie GoldDesign your home to optimize your healthy lifestyle with this room-by-room guide from certified kitchen designer and wellness design consultant Jamie Gold. Residential designer Jamie Gold has spent years exploring how simple changes to things like lighting, fixtures, storage, and outdoor space can impact our health and wellness. In Wellness by Design, Gold offers a room-by-room guide to refreshing your space so that it supports your wellness journey. Good news, it doesn&’t require a yoga room and can be done in small apartments as well as large houses. This book explains how simple changes can make a huge difference in how you feel every day. You&’ll learn: - How to maximize accessibility and organization in your kitchen for faster, healthier, and more delicious meals. - How to make easy fixes to your ventilation system to help ease symptoms of asthma and allergies - How to optimize your home office to eliminate back, neck, and foot pain. - How to enhance your bathroom tub and shower spaces to support fitness goals and simplify family life. - And much more! It&’s time for your home to work as hard as you do to support your health. With the right organization and interior design, your home can help you maintain and improve your health in a variety of ways, from improving health and preventing disease to encouraging clean eating, sustainable living, safety, fitness, serenity, and joy. Whether you&’re building your dream home or decorating your new rental, this book will help you keep your fitness goals and stay on track for a long and healthy life.
Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida (Studies in Continental Thought)
by David Farrell KrellIn 1974, thirty-year-old philosopher and translator David Farrell Krell began corresponding and meeting with Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Years later, he would meet Jacques Derrida and, through many letters and visits, come to know him well. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and Krell's warmly told personal recollections, Three Encounters presents an intimate and highly insightful look at the lives and ideas of three noted philosophers at the peak of their careers. Three Encounters offers a chance for readers to encounter these three great philosophers and their ideas, not merely through the lens of their biographies, but as "people" we come to know through their personal correspondence and Krell's recollections. Three Encounters demonstrates the intertwining of thought and lived experience.
The Nine Phases of Marriage: How to Make It, Break It, Keep It
by Susan Shapiro BarashFrom the author of Toxic Friends-a groundbreaking look at how to understand your marriage and create a more satisfying relationshipEvery marriage goes through nine phases. It is only by understanding the course our marriages run that we can truly begin to craft the perfect relationship. In The Nine Phases of Marriage, Susan Shapiro Barash breaks down and analyzes these phases, which are:- Phase One: Passion and Longing - Phase Two: Conforming: The Perfect Wife- Phase Three: Real Life: Child Centricity- Phase Four: Tension: One Bed: Two Dreams- Phase Five: Distance: Two Beds: Two Rooms- Phase Six: Fracturing: Midlife Divorce - Phase Seven: Second Chances: Remarriage and Renegotiating - Phase Eight: Balance: Concessions- Phase Nine: Successful CouplingWith this essential knowledge, spouses can successfully navigate the natural pitfalls and perils of their marriages and embark on a true partnership.
Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet
by Peter Willcox Ronald B. WeissA Man. A Mission. GREENPEACE CAPTAIN PETER WILLCOX has been a Captain for Greenpeace for over 30 years. He would never call himself a hero, but he is recognized on every ocean and continent for devoting his entire life to saving the planet. He has led the most compelling and dangerous Greenpeace actions to bring international attention to the destruction of our environment. From the globally televised imprisonment of his crew, the "Arctic 30," by Russian Commandos to international conspiracies involving diamond smuggling, gun-trading and Al-Qaeda, Willcox has braved the unimaginable and triumphed. This is his story--which begins when he was a young man sailing with Pete Seeger and continues right up to his becoming the iconic environmentalist he is today. His daring adventures and courageous determination will inspire readers everywhere.
Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution
by Mark Meckler Jenny Beth MartinThe definitive history of one of the most radical, revolutionary movements the country has ever seen, from those who started it allIn 2009, an unemployed mother of two and a politically inexperienced northern California attorney met on a conference call that would end up starting one of the largest grassroots political organizations in American history, the Tea Party Patriots. Fueled by the fires of passion and patriotism, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin have become the faces of the most powerful political movement in the country, empowering their more than twenty million members by using both high-tech advances and the time-tested American tradition of rallying in public. Promoting the basic principles of the Tea Party Movement—free market, limited government, and fiscal responsiblity—the Tea Party Patriots have become the largest tea party organization in the world. With unparalleled access to the inner workings of the movement, Meckler and Martin hope to explain how the Tea Party came to be, what it is and is not, and perhaps most important, provide the first comprehensive, forward-looking document outlining a plan to restore America to its prior greatness. Never before has there been such an audience for this material. Americans of all political stripes have been waiting for a thorough and informative account of this movement. Straight from the co-founders themselves, Tea Party Patriots promises to be the definitive source for a political revolution.
Perfect Is Overrated: A Novel
by Karen BergreenThink you want to be the perfect mom? Think again…..Kate Alger has finally found the cure for her post-partum depression. After years of suffering, all it takes to bring this mommy back to life were a few gruesome homicides! When someone starts offing the alpha-moms from Kate's daughter's preschool, Kate—who worked as an Assistant District Attorney before she had Molly—realizes it's time to get out of bed, dust off the skills and find out who is killing all the mommies she loves to hate.Wickedly funny and slightly twisted, Perfect Is Overrated is a romp through the life of one very needy mom, her cockeyed family, gorgeous ex-husband, and the entire insane, entitled, over-dressed , over-zealous, eternally jealous parent body at The Hawthorne Preschool.
The Good, the Bad, and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat
by Tom CoxHumorous and endearing, The Good, the Bad and the Furry is a heartwarming memoir about a man at the mercy of his unpredictable, demanding and endlessly lovable cats. Meet The Bear—a cat who carries the weight of the world on his furry shoulders, and whose wise, owl-like eyes seem to ask, Can you tell me why I am a cat please? Like many intellectuals, The Bear would prefer a life of quiet solitude with plenty of time to gaze forlornly into space and contemplate society's ills. Unfortunately, he is destined to spend his days surrounded by felines of a significantly lower IQ. There is Janet, a large man cat who often accidentally sets fire to his tail by walking too close to lighted candles; Ralph, a preening tabby who enjoys meowing his own name at 5AM; and Shipley, Ralph's brother, who steals soup but is generally relaxed once you pick him up and turn him upside down. And then there's Tom Cox, writing with wit and charm about the unexpected adventures that go hand-in-hand with a life at the beck and call of four cats.
Death Song (The Narc Series #8)
by Marc OldenAfter a narrow escape, Bolt goes after the mobster who tried to blow him upAs far as the record industry is concerned, Matteo DiPalma is a manager, a producer, and the hit-maker behind some of the decade&’s biggest chart successes. To the federal government, he is a crucial link between drug-hungry musicians and the Rosetti crime family that keeps them supplied with heroin and cocaine. When federal agents nail DiPalma on a trafficking charge, John Bolt and six other cops go to California to escort him back east. The shotguns they carry aren&’t to keep DiPalma from running, but to protect him from a Rosetti hit. The agents don&’t count on death from above.The mafia helicopter appears too quickly for the cops to react. Bolt is just outside the blast radius when the grenade hits the roof, vaporizing DiPalma and his guards. When the smoke clears, Bolt is bloodied but not broken—and ready to even the score.
The Louisville Anthology (Belt City Anthologies)
by Erin KeaneAn anthology of essays and poems by natives and transplants offering a refreshing variety of perspectives of the Kentucky city. What is Louisville&’s identity in the twenty-first century? Is it the southernmost midwestern city, the midwestiest southern town, or somewhere in between? Living on the border of two regions creates a hybrid sensibility full of contradictions that can be difficult to articulate beyond &“from Louisville, not Kentucky.&” In this collection of evocative essays and poems by natives and transplants, The Louisville Anthology offers locals and visitors a closer look at compelling private and public spaces around town. It&’s an attempt to articulate what defines Louisville beyond its most recognized cultural exports. Edited by Erin Keene, editor-in-chief at Salon.com, this is a portrait of a city caught between onward and remember-when. Here, readers will encounter stories about: · Louisville&’s early punk scene · Life as a transplant in Butcherville · A Trip to Cave Hill Cemetery · A Trek to find Muhammad Ali&’s Louisville · And more A perfect book for Louisville natives or for those looking for a more nuanced look at an often-stereotyped region of the country.
Composing Japanese Musical Modernity (Chicago Studies In Ethnomusicology Ser.)
by Bonnie C. WadeWhen we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra—someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper—and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan’s musical history, however, no such role existed—composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture. Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around them—or that they forged—during Japan’s astonishingly fast modernization. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made.
The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry
by Claudio E. BenzecryThe Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women’s shoes. We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation. Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming.