Kafka and Cultural Zionism is an illumination of the individual Jewish identity of this major modernist German author. Through a thorough examination of Kafka's life, his influences, and his writings, Iris Bruce makes a case for Kafka's interest in Zionism and demonstrates the presence of Jewish themes and motifs in Kafka's literary works. In recognizing this essential part of Kafka's individual voice, Bruce hopes to provide a new perspective on Kafka and his writings that allows the reader to find the humor, playfulness, rebelliousness, and challenge that can be overlooked if the reader expects to find a Kafka who is disengaged from his ethnic and cultural identity, as well as the politics of his age.

 

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

The famous library of Alexandria, founded around 295 BCE by Ptolemaios I, housed the greatest collection of texts in the ancient world and was a fertile site of Hellenistic scholarship. Rudolf Blum’s landmark study, originally published in German in 1977, argues that Kallimachos of Kyrene was not only the second director of the Alexandrian library but also the inventor of two essential scholarly tools still in use to this day: the library catalog and the “biobibliographical” reference work. Kallimachos expanded the library’s inventory lists into volumes called the Pinakes, which extensively described and categorized each work and became in effect a Greek national bibliography and the source and paradigm for most later bibliographic lists of Greek literature. Though the Pinakes have not survived, Blum attempts a detailed reconstruction of Kallimachos’s inventories and catalogs based on a careful analysis of surviving sources, which are presented here in full translation.

This classic Swedish novel envisioned a future of drab terror. Seen through the eyes of idealistic scientist Leo Kall, Kallocain’s depiction of a totalitarian world state is a montage of what novelist Karin Boye had seen or sensed in 1930s Russia and Germany. Its central idea grew from the rumors of truth drugs that ensured the subservience of every citizen to the state.

Designed as a companion and study guide for the textbook Comprehending Technical Japanese, this book may also be used as a supplement to the textbook Basic Technical Japanese. It provides detailed explanations of the origin and meaning of the 500 kanji featured in CTJ, which were chosen for their frequency and significance in chemistry, physics, and biology.
    Each chapter is keyed to a chapter in CTJ, presenting twenty kanji, vocabulary that use those kanji, a kanji-card format for study and review, and the Japanese essay that appears at the close of each CTJ chapter, and its English translation.  This volume also introduces significant scientific vocabulary that include kanji  other than the 500 introduced in CTJ.

    The text of The Brothers Karamazov is removed from English-speaking readers today not only by time but also by linguistic and cultural boundaries. Victor Terras’s companion work provides readers with a richer understanding of the Dostoevsky novel as the expression of a philosophy and a work of art.
     In his introduction, Terras outlines the genesis, main ideas, and structural peculiarities of the novel as well as Dostoevsky’s political, philosophical, and aesthetic stance. The detailed commentary takes the reader through the novel, clarifying aspects of Russian life, the novel’s sociopolitical background, and a number of polemic issues. Terras identifies and explains hundreds of literary and biblical quotations and allusions. He discusses symbols, recurrent images, and structural stylistic patterns, including those lost in English translation.

This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield's fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime (34 years). Many of her most famous works, such as "Prelude" and "Bliss," are explicated, along with many of her less famous and unfinished stories.

Before World War I, the government reaction to labor dissent had been local, ad hoc, and quasi-military. Sheriffs, mayors, or governors would deputize strikebreakers or call out the state militia, usually at the bidding of employers. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, government and industry feared that strikes would endanger war production; a more coordinated, national strategy would be necessary. To prevent stoppages, the Department of Justice embarked on a sweeping new effort—replacing gunmen with lawyers. The department systematically targeted the nation’s most radical and innovative union, the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, resulting in the largest mass trial in U.S. history.
In the first legal history of this federal trial, Dean Strang shows how the case laid the groundwork for a fundamentally different strategy to stifle radical threats, and had a major role in shaping the modern Justice Department. As the trial unfolded, it became an exercise of raw force, raising serious questions about its legitimacy and revealing the fragility of a criminal justice system under great external pressure.

It was 1978, and gray wolves had been extinct in Wisconsin for twenty years. Still, there were rumors from the state's northwestern counties that they had returned. Dick Thiel, then a college student with a passion for wolves, was determined to find out. Keepers of the Wolves is his engrossing account of tracking and protecting the recovery of wolves in Wisconsin. Thiel conveys the wonder, frustrations, humor, and everyday hard work of field biologists, including the political and public relations pitfalls they regularly face.

This new edition brings Thiel's story into the twenty-first century, recounting his work monitoring wolves as they spread to central Wisconsin, conflicts of wolves with landowners and recreationalists, changes in state and federal policies, the establishment of a state wolf-hunting season in 2012, and Thiel's forecast for the future of wolves in Wisconsin.

Carlos Ramet focuses on the artistic development and cultural implications of the best-selling author of works such as Eye of the Needle (1978), The Pillars of the Earth (1989), and The Hammer of Eden (1998). Beginning with his earliest published novel, The Big Needle (1974), Ramet explores the tension between the popular and the serious that has underlain much of Follett’s work. Ramet examines this writer’s blending of genres, film adaptations of his novels, and his keen ability to extend his readership through a “hybridization” process. Ramet linguistically analyzes Follett’s flexibility with literary forms; explores archetypal patterns; and demonstrates that Follett’s involvement in British politics is reflected not only in his latest works but has been implied by his novels from the start.

Dramatism provides us with a seemingly endless array of stages from which to perform our analysis of human action. By enlarging or reducing the scope of our endeavors, as has been done throughout the present work, we can use the Dramatism method to reveal almost any sort of relationship.

As the role and influence of professional sports has increased in American life, so has the relationship between the U.S. Congress and the professional sports world. Since WW II, Congress has held dozens of investigations and debated hundreds of bills on subjects such as organized baseball’s antitrust exemption, the NFL’s television blackout policy, the role of organized crime in professional boxing, the league mergers in professional football and basketball, and franchise relocations.
    Lowe provides concise, interpretive narrative of Congress’s involvement in professional sports. Testimony is included from such colorful figures as Jackie Robinson, Casey Stengel, Pete Rozelle, Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, and Don King. Leading congressmen and senators are also included.

A woman living and communicating in multiple lands, Susana Chávez-Silverman conveys her cultural and linguistic displacement in humorous, bittersweet, and even tangible ways in this truly bilingual literary work. These meditative and lyrical pieces combine poignant personal confession, detailed daily observation, and a memorializing drive that shifts across time and among geocultural spaces. The author’s inventive and flamboyant use of Spanglish, a hybrid English-Spanish idiom, and her adaptation of the confessional "crónica" make this memoir compelling and powerful. Killer Crónicas confirms that there is no Latina voice quite like that of Susana Chávez-Silverman.

Includes a chapter that was awarded first prize in El Andar magazine’s Chicano Literary Excellence Contest in the category of personal memoir.

Life is A Kind of Dream. So is the art we make in response to life. In A Kind of Dream, five generations of an artistic family explore the ups and downs of life, discovering that for an artist even failure is success, because the work matters more than the self.
            The selves in this book include Nina, a writer, and her husband, Palmer, a historian, who, having settled into marriage and family life, are now faced with the bittersweetness of late life; BB and Roy, who make a movie in Mongolia; Tavy, Nina’s adopted daughter, a painter in her twenties who meets her birth mother for the first time; and Tavy’s young daughter, Callie, a budding violinist. Other vivid characters confront the awful fact of violence in America; try to cope with political ineptitude; and one devises his own code of sexual morality. Perhaps the most important character is Nina's dog, a salt-and-pepper cairn terrier of uncommon wisdom.
            Fame, death, rash self-destruction, laughter, the excitement of making good art, love, marriage, being a mother, being a father, the appreciation of beauty, and always life—life itself, life in all its shapes and guises—it’s all here.
            A Kind of Dream is the culminating book in a trilogy Kelly Cherry began with My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers and The Society of Friends. Each book stands alone, but together they take us on a Dantean journey from midlife to Paradise. Cherry’s prose is hallmarked by lyric grace, sly wit, the energy of her intelligence, and profound compassion for and understanding of her characters. Set in Madison, Wisconsin, A Kind of Dream reveals a surprisingly wide view of the world and the authority of someone who has mastered her art. It is a book to experience and to reflect upon.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

"This signal contribution to African history and the writing of history more generally has emerged from the scholarship of one who is ranked by many as among the foremost of the contemporary historians of sub-Saharan Africa." —The American Historical Review

This third edition of what has been described as “this minor classic” has been extensively revised to take account of advances in Nigerian historiography.
    The twenty million Yorubas are one of the largest and most important groups of people on the African continent. Historically they were organized in a series of autonomous kingdoms and their past is richly recorded in oral tradition and archaeology. From the fifteenth century onwards there are descriptions by visitors and from the nineteenth century there are abundant official reports from administrators and missionaries.
    Yoruba sculpture in stone, metal, ivory, and wood is famous. Less well-known are the elaborate and carefully designed constitutional forms which were evolved in the separate kingdoms, the methods of warfare and diplomacy, the oral literature, and the religion based on the worship of a “high god” surrounded by a pantheon of more accessible deities. Many of these aspects are shown in the drawings and photographs which have been used—for the first time—to illustrate this distinguished work.

By reconstructing the history of kings and clans in the Kivu Rift Valley (on the border of today's Rwanda and Zaire) at a time of critical social change, David Newbury enlarges our understanding of social process and the growth of state power in Africa. In the early nineteenth century, many factors contributed to the creation of new social relations  in the Lake Kivu region—ecological change, population movement, the expansion of the Rwandan state from the east, the rise of new political units to the west, and the movement of many population groups and their ritual forms through the area.  Newbury looks in particular at the role of clans in the establishment of a new kingdom on Ijwi Island in Lake Kivu.
     Drawing on detailed ethnographic observations of the social and ritual organizations of Ijwi society, an extensive  body of oral data, and evidence from written sources, Newbury shows that the clans of Ijwi were not static formations, nor did the establishment of a royal family on the island emerge from military conquest and internal social breakdown.  Instead, clan identities changed over time, and these changes actually facilitated the creation of kingship on Ijwi.  Through a detailed examination of succession struggles, of local factors influencing the outcome of such struggles, and of specific clan participation in public rituals that legitimize royalty, Newbury’s study illustrates the importance of clan identities in both the creation of state power and its reproduction over time.

This richly documented account of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm is told from the perspective of the kingdom's inhabitants. Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo's sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom's long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.

Vos underlines that Kongo's incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo's royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power.