The Elephant Man

Sample

Rosalyn Schanzer

Explores how the characters and lives of King George III of England and George Washington affected the progress and outcome of the American Revolution.

Sample

Sandy Toussaint

"Phyllis Kaberry was one of an early - and largely forgotten - group of women anthropologists in Australia. Her pioneering fieldwork, later published as Aboriginal Women: Sacred and Profane (1939), led her to a distinguished academic career in London, where she died in 1977. Kaberry's approach was then a most unusual one: she investigated life from the vantage point of women, although not to the exclusion of men." "Fifty years later, Sandy Toussaint undertook her own fieldwork in some of the same communities, where she found people who still remembered Kaberry. In revisiting and re-evaluating Kaberry's work and intellectual legacy, Toussaint also caught glimpses of the private person behind it - eccentric, a little mysterious, with a restless, passionate mind." "Phyllis Kaberry and Me raises questions about the nature of biography, the doing and writing of ethnography, the representation and interpretation of culture, and the changes and continuities in Aboriginal Australia."--Jacket.

Sample

Sophie De Schaepdrijver

"In central Brussels stands a statue of a young woman. Built in 1923, it is the first monument to a working-class woman in European history. Her name was Gabrielle Petit. History has forgotten Petit, an ambitious and patriotic Belgian, executed by firing squad in 1916 for her role as an intelligence agent for the British Army. After the First World War she was celebrated as an example of stern endeavour, but a hundred years later her memory has faded. In the first part of this historical biography Sophie De Schaepdrijver uses Petit's life to explore gender, class and heroism in the context of occupied Europe. Petit's experiences reveal the reality of civilian engagement under military occupation and the emergence of modern espionage. The second part of the book focuses on the legacy and cultural memory of Petit and the First World War. By analysing Petit's representation in ceremony, discourse and popular culture De Schaepdrijver expands our understanding of remembrance across the 20th century."--

Sample

Willis Barnstone

Focusing on the five years Willis Barnstone spent following his graduation from Bowdoin College, the years of living, thinking, and beginning to write in France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and England from 1948 to 1953, this fascinating and moving memoir nonetheless expands beyond those years. On one side of that period are the poet and translator's grandparents' immigration to the United States, his parents' stormy relationship and his father's eventual suicide, his childhood growing up in the building where Babe Ruth lived, his first gestures toward a life of poetry in Hawthorne's room at Bowdoin, and his first acquaintance with cultures other than his own while digging privies in remote Indian villages in Mexico during a year off from college. On the other side of that period are Barnstone's continuing life as the gypsy scholar in China, Tibet, Turkey, and Argentina and his continuing friendship with his children and former wife and the finest writers and artists the world over.