Books

George Grayson examines the influence of oil and the oil sector both within Mexican society and in its relations with other nations, as he traces the development of the oil industry from its beginnings in 1901 up until the 1980s.

Praise for Burkard’s first poetry collection, In a White Light“Burkard’s poetics will be considered new and strange to many readers, though Stevens, Zufosky, and Ashbery were scouts to this light-laden terrain. [His] book is a blessing.”—James Cervantes

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.

A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, “a London citizen” is sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental illness for the past five hundred years-from the viewpoint of the patients themselves.

The Deepening Shade is an elegant synthesis of the psychology of life-threatening illness. The book’s evocative power derives from the interweaving of clinical conceptualization with the words of patients and family members. Rather than focusing on death, Sourkes explores living with a life-threatening illness.

Finally, a comprehensive book that covers all aspects of choreography from the most fundamental techniques to highly sophisticated artistic concerns. The Intimate Act of Choreography presents the what and how of choreography in a workable format that begins with basics – time, space, force – and moves on to the more complex issues faced by the intermediate and advanced choreographer – form, style, abstraction, compositional structures, and choreographic devices.

McCaffery interprets the works of three major writers of radically experimental fiction: Robert Coover; Donald Barthelme; and Willam H. Gass.

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

Although Juan Peron changed the course of modern Argentine history, scholars have often interpreted him in terms of their own ideologies and interests, rather than seeing the effect of this man and his movement had on the Argentine people. These essays seek to uncover the man behind the myth, to define the true nature of Peronism.

A Narrative Cookbook Recounting the Southern Appalachian Way of Life in the Mid-Twentieth Century

This memoir introduces the family of Charles Hart Spencer and his wife Mary Acheson: seven children born between 1884 and 1895. It also introduces a large Victorian house in Shadyside (a Pittsburgh neighborhood) and a middle-class way of life at the turn of the century and includes family photographs taken by Mr. Spencer, who was a talented amateur photographer.

“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.

A profile of the Bolshevik attempt to build a a new state by mobilizing the working class, in effect building society, that in the end resulted in failed institutions and weakened bureaucracy.