The Lucy man

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Gabriel Ward Lasker

One of the founders of modern human biology and physical anthropology, Gabriel W. Lasker holds a well-established place in the history of science. In a classic article published in Science in 1969, Lasker advanced the idea of plasticity, the process of human adaptation to stressful environments by a series of modifications to the body during the course of physical growth and development. This concept was a factor that led the scientific community to give up its reliance on the notion of genetically fixed racial types. As he documents the rapidly changing field of anthropology and some of its leading figures, Lasker gives his readers a peek inside the lives of people who have defined what it means to be human - and one of those people is himself.

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Leonard P. Hindsley

The nuns and chaplains who lived at the Monastery of Engelthal, a fourteenth-century monastery near Nuremberg, Germany, were responsible for a remarkable collection of autobiographical and biographical texts during the 1300s. The Mystics of Engelthal is the first English-language book to unveil these writings and to examine the meanings contained within them.

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Alan Huffman

Provides a study of two hundred freed slaves from Mississippi who journeyed to Liberia to build a new colony, the cultural conflict between the colonists and native tribal peoples, and the repercussions of that conflict in modern-day Liberia.

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foreword by Paul Bowles

O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane collects the most significant letters from one of America's most evocative modern poets into a document as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's short life. He died at the age of thirty-two. Of the 1200 letters that survive, this edition selects over three hundred that best illustrate the complexity and textures of Crane's life - from family pressures to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality. These letters served as his notebook, his diary, his workshop, and confessional. Preserving ideas, observations, speculations and even drafts of poems, Crane's letters richly document his intelligence and imagination, as well as his alcoholism and self-destruction, more intimately than any biography. And whatever the myth of Crane's indulgences may hold, these letters show that Crane was dedicated as an artist striving to create uniquely American poetry.