Trading words

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Willard Spiegelman

"Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today. This volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. With his trademark perfect pitch, in engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the diverse landscape of British, American, and Latin poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by our greatest poets." "Ultimately, Imaginative Transcripts is less a survey of a field than a reflection of one man's literary interests and tastes. It is also an impassioned argument in favor of keeping the close reading of poetry, both in and out of the classroom, at the heart of a literary education."--Jacket.

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Thomas Sowell

Migrations and Cultures shows the persistence of cultural traits in particular racial and ethnic groups and the role these groups' relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of "human capital" from where they originated to the four corners of the earth. Each ethnic group has carried forth a particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles, whether settling in Russia, Brazil, Australia, or the United States. What are the effects of disseminating these patterns - both for the immigrants and for the host countries, in social as well as economic terms? Migrations and Cultures places the sagas of particular immigrant groups within the larger history of the nations sending and receiving these groups. The book also tells the story of the resentments engendered by the achievements of immigrant groups, even though these achievements have played a major role in the advancement of the human race in general. Whether considering the Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Indians, or Jews, Thomas Sowell brings context, insight, and reason to an inflamed debate that threatens to dissolve the social fabric of our country.

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Daiwei Kaotelaite zhu

Offering a social and biological account of why psychoactive goods proved so seductive, David Courtwright tracks the intersecting paths by which popular drugs entered the stream of global commerce. He shows how the efforts of merchants and colonial planters expanded world supply, drove down prices, and drew millions of less affluent purchasers into the market, effectively democratizing drug consumption.

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James Fenton

"Why should a poet feel the need to be original? How does genius apprentice itself? What connections exist between bad thinking and bad verse, or good verse and bad politics? In these sharp-eyed critiques and appreciations of the essential poets of our time, Whitbread Prize-winner James Fenton examines some of the most intriguing questions behind the making of poetry - questions of creativity and the "earning" of success, of judgment, tutorage, rivalry, and ambition." "In these lectures, many of which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Fenton makes sense of the last century in poetry, and he explores its antecedents and legacies with the lucidity, wit, and gusto that have made him famous."--BOOK JACKET.