The presence of the future

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Ezekiel Nieto Benzion

When Ezekiel Nieto Benzion's grandfather handed him the journals written by Dr. Judah Halevi, he pleaded, "Before I die, tell me about the men in these books. For 200 years, our family in the old country kept the stories safe. I want to know why." The writer of the journals, Judah Halevi, was a doctor, an engineer, a musician, and a family man, who lived in Bohemia during the Napoleonic Wars. But that was all he chose to say openly. Everything else he buried in codes and puzzles. Then, after years of writing, he hid the journals, hoping that someday the truth would be told. What is the truth? Who was he really? What was the terror that he said "jabbed its bony finger into my heart?" What deeds "stained my soul with blood?" And who was the Hawk who led him both into danger and out of his own terrors? You Shall Know Our Names is the first tale from the Judah Halevi journals. Guided by Judah Halevi's clues, Ezekiel Nieto Benzion traced the tales from an old cemetery in Prague to its glory on a Bohemian farm. By the journey's end, two men separated by two centuries become connected by name, heritage and their dream of a better future.

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Gary M. Fink, Merl E. Reed

Under the leadership of Gary M Fink and Merl E. Reed, Georgia State University has hosted the Southern Labor Studies Conferences approximately every two years. The conferences have yielded two previous volumes, published in 1977 and 1981, and this volume, which contains selected papers from the seventh conference held in 1991. As evidenced by the quality of these essays, the field of southern labor history has come into its own. Research interest is peaking: the practitioners are younger scholars, and much of their work emphasizes the new social and political history. While the topics covered in this volume usually reflect that methodology, their chronology ranges from the antebellum period to the 1970s, suggesting the variety of sources and changing research approaches that can be used in rendering new meaning to the past. Although the subject of gender was generally a minor theme in these sessions, work now being done leaves no doubt that at some future conference gender will attract a commanding amount of attention. In introducing and describing their respective areas, the associate editors, Robert M. Zieger (textile workers), Joe W. Trotter Jr., (African Americans), and Clifford M. Kuhn (labor politics), have provided a rich historiographical background. The essays in this volume will enlighten the reader on many important aspects of the history of southern labor, and they will also raise new questions to be explained by other scholars and future conferences.

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Peter G. Peterson

According to recent polls, more young Americans believe in UFOs than think they will ever receive a Social Security check. Yet most Baby Boomers, as they approach retirement age, believe they will continue to live their present lifestyle in retirement - without a fraction of the personal savings or pensions necessary to pay for the future they expect. When the 76 million members of the Baby Boom generation - the largest generation in our history - begin to retire in less than fifteen years, one American in five will be 65 years of age or older. This aging population - double today's load - will depend on as few as 1.6 working Americans to support each retired person. Who will support this nation of Floridas? In this short, powerful book, Peter G. Peterson, one of America's top investment bankers and a leading critic of our entitlement policy, spells out in the clearest possible language, with unmistakable numbers and easy-to-read charts, the disaster that lies ahead if we continue to ignore our low savings rate, our ballooning federal deficit, and our enormous unfunded and unsustainable commitments to retirees. Peterson reveals what politicians are afraid to admit: trillions of dollars of promised Social Security and Medicare benefits for which no funds have been provided. Shattering the myths surrounding this subject with hard facts and eye-opening views of the future, Peterson gives the most comprehensive and candid plan for a gradual, humane, fair, and realistic answer to the greatest challenge of the next century: transforming our political, economic, cultural, and social assumptions to adapt to the realities of the graying of America.

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Lucio Mariani

"Mariani has emerged as one of the few significant post-Montalian poets in Italy, and Molino is a graceful, experienced, thoroughly reliable translator. The result is an elegant book, an important book, bringing a distinctive voice into English."--Rosanna WarrenCulled from his entire career, the poems in Traces of Time cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. "Tiananmen, 20 Years Later," "Protocols of War," and "Checkmate" (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns "through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic," and confirm his place in contemporary poetry. "Protocols of War" (Baghdad is not far) Of this time you'll gather no memories for your eternal hunger. Can't you see the slags in the weave that enfolds the flesh of the living? Can't you see that the boxes and drawers where the silver of bygone days abounds have no room for trinkets or seashells of a present founded on plaster markets, lost facing a mirror seeking itself in the halls of the world? Don't you see that for the first time every man erects ruins for his heirs enacting inane protocols of war while the future slams its shutters tight so as to celebrate on statistical altars the glory of mindless marionettes maneuvered by nothingness, sprung in the bitter fields of oblivion? Of this time you'll gather no memories. Lucio Mariani is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Echoes of Memory (available in English from UPNE), as well as a volume of essays, a collection of short stories, and translations of works by César Vallejo, Tristan Corbière and Yves Bonnefoy. Anthony Molino is a translator from the Italian, an anthropologist, and a psychoanalyst. In addition to Lucio Mariani's two volumes, he has also translated works by Valerio Magrelli and Antonio Porta, among others"-- "Mariani has emerged as one of the few significant post- Montalian poets in Italy, and Molino is a graceful, experienced, thoroughly reliable translator. The result is an elegant book, an important book, bringing a distinctive voice into English." [Rosanna Warren] Culled from his entire career, the poems in Traces of Time cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. "Tiananmen, 20 Years Later," "Protocols of War," and "Checkmate" (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns "through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic," and confirm his place in contemporary poetry"--