BiblioVault - Books by Anderson, Doug

Blues for Unemployed Secret Police

Poems by Doug Anderson

Doug Anderson

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Doug Anderson's "Blues For Unemployed Secret Police" dramatically reflects his experience of growing up in the sixties, serving as a field medical corpsman in Viet Nam, and confronting the modern era where "a good torturer can always find a job." With passion, humor, and strikingly original images, these poems illuminate everything from bad politics to love gone wrong.

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Classical American Pragmatism

ITS CONTEMPORARY VITALITY

Edited by Sandra B. Rosenthal, Carl R. Hausman, and Douglas R. Anderson

University of Illinois Press, 1999

This collection provides a thorough grounding in the philosophy of American pragmatism by examining the views of four principal thinkers—Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead—on issues of central and enduring importance to life in human society.
Pragmatism emerged as a characteristically American response to an inheritance of British empiricism.
Presenting a radical reconception of the nature of experience, pragmatism represents a belief that ideas are not merely to be contemplated but must be put into action, tested and refined through experience. At the same time, the American pragmatists argued for an emphasis on human community that would offset the deep-seated American bias in favor of individualism. Far from being a relic of the past, pragmatism offers a dynamic and substantive approach to questions of human conduct, social values, scientific inquiry, religious belief, and aesthetic experience that lie at the center of contemporary life. This volume is an invaluable introduction to a school of thought that remains vital, instructive, and provocative.

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Iñupiat of the Sii

Historical Ethnography and Arctic Challenges

Wanni W. Anderson

University of Alaska Press, 2024

Iñupiat of the Sii is a firsthand account of Wanni and Douglas Anderson’s lived experiences during eight field seasons of archaeological and ethnographic research in Selawik, Alaska, from 1968 to 1994. This study traces the Selawik village’s history, compares Selawikers' past and current lifeways, studies the interfacing of the traditional with the modern, and explores how specific events in the Selawik past continued to shape their lives.

This fascinating book records, preserves, and contributes to the knowledge of the history and cultural lifeways of the Siilaviŋmiut people using contextual and ethnographic writing styles that apply community-based, lived-experience, and sense-of-place approaches. The authors, who have remained in contact with Selawikers since the original research period, center Iñupiaq elders’ and local Iñupiaq historians’ continued commitments to historical knowledge about the past, their ancestors, and their vast repertoire of traditional cultural and environmental knowledge. They portray the particularity of Iñupiaq life as it was lived, sensed, and felt by Selawikers themselves and as experienced by researchers. Quoted observations, conversations, and comments eloquently acknowledge Iñupiaq insiders’ narrative voices.

Providing one of only a few ethnographic reviews of an Alaska Native village, Iñupiat of the Sii will appeal to general readers interested in learning about Iñupiaq lifeways and the experiences of anthropologists in the field. It will also be useful to instructors teaching college-level students how anthropological field research should be conducted, analyzed, and reported.

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Life at Swift Water Place

Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact

Edited by Doug D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson

University of Alaska Press, 2019

This is a multidisciplinary study of the early contact period of Alaskan Native history that follows a major hunting and fishing Inupiaq group at a time of momentous change in their lifeways. The Amilgaqtau yaagmiut were the most powerful group in the Kobuk River area. But their status was forever transformed thanks to two major factors. They faced a food shortage prompted by the decline in caribou, one of their major foods. This was also the time when European and Asian trade items were first introduced into their traditional society. The first trade items to arrive, a decade ahead of the Europeans themselves, were glass beads and pieces of metal that the Inupiat expertly incorporated into their traditional implements. This book integrates ethnohistoric, bio-anthropological, archaeological, and oral historical analyses.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume III

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2006

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume II

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2005

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume IV

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2007

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume IX

Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2012

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume V

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2008

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume VI

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2009

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume VII

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2010

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Tolkien Studies

An Annual Scholarly Review, Volume VIII

Michael D.C. Drout

West Virginia University Press, 2011

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

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Undress, She Said

Doug Anderson

Four Way Books, 2022

In Doug Anderson's newest collection, Undress, She Said, we accompany a speaker undaunted by the complex reckonings of history, evolving relationships, and an aging body, a speaker that, besieged by a storm, resolves to "set out into it, the wind / playing the rigging like a harp." Over and over in these pages, Anderson makes music of the gales and rain and turbulent sea. These poems voyage from the subtle violences of a religious upbringing to complex remembrances of time served in the Vietnam War to contemporary emergencies of real and political plagues. Yet, no matter the subject, compassion rudders these lyrics as they turn always and at last to myriad beloveds-the enigmatic Angel of Death, literary and mythological influences, kind strangers, the constantly elusive and elusively constant moon. These words reach out to the reader the way the poet addresses frozen joy from the confines of winter: "Red berry trapped in ice, / let me touch you."

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What Saves Us

Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

Edited by Martín Espada

Northwestern University Press, 2019

This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes.

There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-three poets featured include Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forché, Aracelis Girmay, Donald Hall, Juan Felipe Herrera, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Ocean Vuong, Bruce Weigl, and Eleanor Wilner. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or synagogue, the rage inflicted on women everywhere. They testify to poverty: the waitress surviving on leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act.

However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at the airport; another walks through the city and sees her immigrant past in the immigrant present; another declaims a musical manifesto after the hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a demonstration in the street, shouting in an ecstasy of defiance. The poets take back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.

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