Daughters and rebels

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Joel M. Vance

"In this account, Joel Vance recreates what it was like for a city kid to have his life changed almost entirely when he is transplanted from his Chicago birthplace to his father's home country in rural Missouri - where basketball was the major social event and a night out might be a trip to the burger joint in town." "While Vance writes about his relatives and their roots in Missouri and Wisconsin, his focus is on his growing-up years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The anguish of adolescence is detailed, but lightened with Vance's special skill for humor. Dating, French kissing, drinking, hog castration, and vocational agriculture are just a few of the experiences that Vance recalls. His comical encounters with the local citizenry, his social misadventures, and his fumbling exploits on the high school basketball and baseball teams are interwoven with reflections on weightier matters, such as the mismanagement of the Missouri River and its wetlands by the Corps of Engineers. He shares his emotions, his dreams, and the realities of his high schools days, capturing the essence of the experiences of many who lived in the Midwest at midcentury." "Although Vance's writing is funny - sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - there are poignant moments, too, when the realities of life and death are immediate and personal. Any reader from a small-town background will identify with Vance's memories, and most city readers will understand Vance's confusion in coping with the move from Chicago to rural Missouri. Taking the reader back to a time when life was simpler and days seemed longer, this recollection of coming of age in a small Missouri town will provide hours of enjoyment."--Jacket.

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H.D

In this complete, unabridged edition of H.D.'s visionary memoir, The Gift, Jane Augustine makes available for the first time the text as H.D. wrote it and intended it to be read, including H.D.'s coda to the book, her "Notes," never before published in its entirety. Written in London during the blitz of World War II, The Gift re-creates the peaceful childhood of Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she was born in 1886. As an antidote to war's destructiveness, H.D. invokes the mystical Moravian heritage of her mother's family to convey an ideal world peace and salvation that would come through the spiritual power of women - a power that also endowed her with "the gift" of her own art. The Gift is key to intertextual studies of H.D.'s wartime oeuvre and to an understanding of the religious and gender concerns pervading her later work, especially the women-centered poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Augustine's introduction and annotations, based on extensive research in Moravian archives, provide a biographical and historical context to make this the definitive edition of The Gift, essential to students and scholars of H.D., modernism, and feminist literature.

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Michael Foreman

Memoirs of Foreman as a boy during the rebuilding of Britain after World War II. Foreman recalls victory bonfires, the ongoing rationing, prefab houses, baths in tin tubs, beaches first cleared of barbed wire and mines, and describes his development as an artist. Includes watercolor illustrations and period documents and photographs.

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Alfred Habegger

A brave British widow goes to Siam and-by dint of her principled and indomitable character-inspires that despotic nation to abolish slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon's best-selling book Anna and the King of Siam and Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I. But who was Leonowens and why did her story take hold? Although it has been known for some time that she was of Anglo-Indian parentage and that her tales about the Siamese court are unreliable, not until now, with the publication of Masked, has there been a deeply researched account of her extraordinary life.^ Alfred Habegger, an award-winning biographer, draws on the archives of five continents and recent Thai-language scholarship to disclose the complex person behind the mask and the troubling facts behind the myth. He also ponders the curious fit between Leonowens's compelling fabrications and the New World's innocent dreams-in particular the dream that democracy can be spread through quick and easy interventions.^ Exploring the full historic complexity of what it once meant to pass as white, Masked pays close attention to Leonowens's midlevel origins in British India, her education at a Bombay charity school for Eurasian children, her material and social milieu in Australia and Singapore, the stresses she endured in Bangkok as a working widow, the latent melancholy that often afflicted her, the problematic aspects of her self-invention, and the welcome she found in America, where a circle of elite New England abolitionists who knew nothing about Southeast Asia gave her their uncritical support. Her embellished story would again capture America's imagination as World War II ended and a newly interventionist United States looked toward Asia.