Books

Char Miller chronicles the history of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies and describes its iconic national historic site, Grey Towers, offered by Pinchot’s family as a lasting gift to the American people. As a union of the United States Forest Service and the Conservation Foundation, the institute was created to formulate policy and develop conservation education programs. Miller explores the institute’s unique fusion of policy makers, scientists, politicians, and activists and their efforts to increase our understanding of and responses to urban and rural forestry, water quality, soil erosion, air pollution, endangered species, land management and planning, and hydraulic fracking.

A legacy of slavery, abolition, colonialism, and class struggle has profoundly impacted the people and culture of the Caribbean. In Tropic Tendencies, Kevin Adonis Browne examines the development of an Anglophone Caribbean rhetorical tradition in response to the struggle to make meaning, maintain identity, negotiate across differences, and thrive in light of historical constraints and the need to participate in contemporary global culture.

Examines the essential role of understanding in the scientific process, through three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice.

The revised collection of Larry Levis poems selected by David St. John. Each of Levis’s books was published to wide critical acclaim, and David St. John has collected together the best of his work from his first five books.

“Reading Jeffrey McDaniel’s gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.”—Major Jackson

Provides a comprehensive ethnography of writing in the Andes, and details the relationship between Andean peoples’ struggle to preserve their indigenous textual forms in the face of Western cirricula, with their struggle for land and power.

A probing examination of the prominent role of narcotics trafficking in contemporary Latin American cultural production. In her study, Gabriela Polit Dueas juxtaposes two infamous narco regions, Culiacan, Mexico, and Medellin, Colombia, to demonstrate the powerful forces of violence, corruption, and avarice and their influence over locally based cultural texts.

“These are enormously arresting, odd, wryly humorous, gripping poems. And the variety of subject matter is astounding. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed reading a book so much.”—David Budbill

Winner of the 2012 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Arthur Sze

Winner of the 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

Hyperboreal leverages the power of language and lyric as its poems contend with issues of Inuit cultural and biological extinction.

The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917. Heirs to the legacy of the People’s Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution. In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as “counter-revolutionaries” in the prototypical Soviet show trial. Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history. Smith reveals a complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle and demonstrates that the Civil War—and in particular the struggle with the SRs—was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.

Now, Now is concerned with questions of time and memory: how our perceptions are shaped, moment by moment, within the continuous meeting of past and future—of what happened, and what has not yet happened, but will.

Tatjana Aleksic examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance to sustaining communal ideologies in the Balkan region. Aleksic further relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of homogeneity and collective identity. She employs cultural theory, sociological analysis, and human rights studies to expose a historical narrative that is predominant regionally, if not globally.

Winner of the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Keeper is a book of lyric poems concerned with relationships of different sorts—with the natural world, with people and animals, and with the unseen and unknown.

Read a review on Keeper from the Valparaiso Poetry Review

Read a review of Keeper by Judith Kitchen, excerpted from the Winter 2014 issue of Georgia Review

Second Suburb uncovers the unique story of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and its significance to American social, architectural, environmental, and political history.

Winner of the 2011 Allen Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society: Best edited book in North American material culture.

The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary examines histories, journalism, and literature in the period between world wars to expose both the positive and the negative treatment of the Habsburg monarchy following its dissolution and the powerful influence of fiction and memory over history. Originally published in Polish, Adam Kozuchowski’s study analyzes the myriad factors that contributed to this phenomenon.

Winner of the 2016 Karl von Vogelsang Staatspreis fuer Geschichte der Gesellschaftswissenschaften (Austrian State Prize for the History of Social Sciences)