In the summer of 1922, Ezra Pound viewed the church of San Francesco in Rimini, Italy, for the first time. Commonly known as the Tempio Malatestiano, the edifice captured his imagination for the rest of his life. Lawrence S. Rainey here recounts an obsession that links together the whole of Pound's poetic career and thought.

Written by Pound in the months following his first visit, the four poems grouped as "The Malatesta Cantos" celebrate the church and the man who sponsored its construction, Sigismondo Malatesta. Upon receiving news of the building's devastation by Allied bombings in 1944, Pound wrote two more cantos that invoked the event as a rallying point for the revival of fascist Italy. These "forbidden" cantos were excluded from collected editions of his works until 1987. Pound even announced an abortive plan in 1958 to build a temple inspired by the church, and in 1963, at the age of eighty, he returned to Rimini to visit the Tempio Malatestiano one last, haunting time.

Drawing from hundreds of unpublished materials, Rainey explores the intellectual heritage that surrounded the church, Pound's relation to it, and the interpretation of his work by modern critics. The Malatesta Cantos, which have been called "one of the decisive turning-points in modern poetics" and "the most dramatic moment in The Cantos," here engender an intricate allegory of Pound's entire career, the central impulses of literary modernism, the growth of intellectual fascism, and the failure of critical culture in the twentieth century. Included are two-color illustrations from the 1925 edition of Pound's cantos and numerous black-and-white photographs.

It was an enigma of the Vietnam War: American troops kept killing the Viet Cong—and being killed in the process—and yet their ranks continued to grow. When CIA analyst Sam Adams uncovered documents suggesting a Viet Cong army more than twice as large as previously reckoned, another war erupted, this time within the ranks of America’s intelligence community. Although originally clandestine, this conflict involving the highest levels of the U.S. government burst into public view during the acrimonious lawsuit Westmoreland v. CBS. The central issue in the suit, as in the war itself, was the calamitous failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to ascertain the strength of the Viet Cong and get that information to troops in a timely fashion. The legacy of this failure—whether caused by institutional inertia, misguided politics, or individual hubris—haunts our nation. In the era of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, Sam Adams’ tireless crusade for “honest intelligence” resonates strongly today.

On the occasion of the Capitol’s centennial in 2017, this book tells the remarkable story of the building—in all its incarnations—and the people who made history beneath its dome. The book covers the creation of the territorial capitol in 1837, the construction of the second capitol in the 1860s (and the fire that almost completely destroyed it in 1904), the eleven-year construction project that completed the third capitol in 1917, and the extensive conservation project of the 1990s that restored the building to its grandeur. Supporting the framework of this architectural history are colorful stories about the people who shaped Wisconsin from within the Capitol—attorneys, senators, and governors (from Henry Dodge to Scott Walker), as well as protesters, reformers, secretaries, tour guides, custodians, and even Old Abe, the Capitol’s resident eagle. Combining historical photographs with modern, full-color architectural photos, The Wisconsin Capitol provides fascinating details about the building, while also emphasizing the importance of the Capitol in Wisconsin’s storied history.