This is a focus on the life and early career of George Schuyler one of the important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The text presents an understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period in African-American cultural history.
Setting / LocationNew York City
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreThe sage of Sugar Hill Lead Character
Marilyn French takes us into the private hell that became her life when, in 1992, after a series of false diagnoses, it was determined that she had esophageal cancer - from the grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy to the subsequent coma from which it was thought she had no chance of recovering, to the even more serious post-coma illnesses, to her miraculous return to life. With the insight, intelligence, and emotional honesty with which she has examined so many other women's lives in her fiction, Marilyn French now considers her own, as she battles with doctors and the medical establishment; as her family and friends surround her, giving her mysterious strength; and as she defies all diagnoses and prognostications and emerges whole and more than ever open to life. While this book is a consideration of what it feels like to be dying, and as such it is a musing on death, it is also centered on life: death has cast a mark on life which gives us a new vision of meaning and purpose. As French examines death's role in her life, she shares a sense of what pain and suffering can mean to a person who utterly denies transcendent thought, of how an experience of closeness to death affects the life we are living now.
One of the leading choreographers in ballet over the last half century, Antony Tudor is considered the most lyrical and emotionally powerful of modern ballet masters, acclaimed for his imaginative use of music and his commitment to dramatic plot. Comparable in achievement to George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, Tudor created over sixty ballets, including his masterpieces Jardin aux Lilas, Dark Elegies, Romeo and Juliet, and the incomparable Pillar of Fire. He was instrumental in the establishment of the American Ballet Theater and its rise to prominence as one of the world's great ballet companies. Now Judith Chazin-Bennahum, an accomplished author and a former ballerina and student of Tudor's, steps forward to deliver the first comprehensive, ballet by ballet examination of Tudor's choreography. Meticulously researched, lively and insightful, The Ballets of Antony Tudor: Studies in Psyche and Satire opens the way for dance aficionados to better appreciate and preserve the artistic legacy of one of this century's major innovators. Long-ago performances come thrillingly to life, from Tudor's fledgling efforts with Marie Rambert's Ballet Club in London, to his tenure as a founding member and principal choreographer of ABT, to his subsequent career as a contributor to the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and as a celebrated teacher at Juilliard. Chazin-Bennahum draws extensively from her interviews with Tudor before his death in 1987, and her own experience in his famous classes and rehearsals. Her superbly documented research uncovers program notes, reviews, rare photographs and stills of original productions, and interviews with scores of men and women who played a part in Tudor's achievement. Choreographers and dancers from Agnes de Mille and Nora Kaye to Jerome Robbins and Gelsey Kirkland discuss their debt to Tudor, and his role in the evolution of dance. While not a biography in the traditional sense, the book does shed fascinating light on the private life of Antony Tudor. He was born William Cook, the son of a butcher in London's East End, in 1908, and Chazin-Bennahum's analysis reveals how deeply his life informed his art. "I never do a ballet that does not concern the bourgeoisie," Tudor once said. Of course, Tudor's experience was shaped by more than class: Like Picasso, writes the author, Tudor was a child of our century, reacting to its wars, its destruction and its persecution of women and children in the language he knew best. Original and engaging, The Ballets of Antony Tudor brilliantly explicates the hidden desire, brutality, violence towards women, isolation, and unrequited love that are common themes in Tudor's ballets, illuminating the rich psychological nuance and intimacy of gesture with which he transformed his art.
Alison Buckholtz never dreamed she would marry a military man, but when she met her husband, an active-duty Navy pilot, nothing could stop her from building a life with himnot even his repeated attempts to talk her out of marriage. He didnt want her to have to make the kinds of sacrifices long required of the spouses of military personnel. They wed shortly after September 11, 2001 and, since then, their life together has been marked by long separations and unforeseen challenges, but also unexpected rewards.Standing By is Buckholtzs candid and moving account of her familys experiences during her husbands seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. With insight and humor she describes living near a military base in Washington State, far from home and in the midst of great upheaval, while trying to keep life as normal as possible for the couples two young children. But she is not alone in her struggle. In Standing By, Buckholtz portrays her friendships with other military wives and the ways in which this supportive community of women helps one another to endureto even thriveduring difficult times.Throughout Standing By, Buckholtz speaks honestly about the culture shock she experienced transitioning into the role of a military wife. Because she had been raised to conquer the world on her own terms rather than be a more traditional wife and mother supporting her husbands career, the world of the Armed Forces was at first as unfamiliar as a foreign land. But a remarkable and surprising series of events has challenged her long-held assumptions about the military, motherhood, and even the nature of American citizenship.A rare and intimate portrait of one of the tens of thousands of families who now wait patiently for their service member to return home safely, Standing By is a window into what matters most for families everywhere.Alison Buckholtzs articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Washington Post Magazine, Real Simple, Forbes Global, Salon.com and many other publications. She was a resident of Washington, D.C. before she married into the military and now lives in Washington State with her husband and two children. This is her first book.
First introduced in Freakonomics, here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrance into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure. In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT-two young and ambitious men a universe apart.
The sage of Sugar Hill by Jeffrey B. Ferguson | Literally Just Books
