Lost Libraries

Lost Libraries PDF Author: J. Raven
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230524257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

Lost Libraries

Lost Libraries PDF Author: J. Raven
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230524257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

Fire in the Minds of Men

Fire in the Minds of Men PDF Author: James H. Billington
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 0765804719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
This book traces the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of the century. Modern revolutionaries are believers, no less committed and intense than were Christians or Muslims of an earlier era. What is new is the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from forcible overthrow of traditional authority. This inherently implausible idea energized Europe in the nineteenth century, and became the most pronounced ideological export of the West to the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Billington is interested in revolutionaries--the innovative creators of a new tradition. His historical frame extends from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century to the beginnings of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century. The theater was Europe of the industrial era; the main stage was the journalistic offices within great cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, and St. Petersburg. Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were shaped as much by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany as the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The conversion of social theory to political practice was essentially the work of three Russian revolutions: in 1905, March 1917, and November 1917. Events in the outer rim of the European world brought discussions about revolution out of the school rooms and press rooms of Paris and Berlin into the halls of power. Despite his hard realism about the adverse practical consequences of revolutionary dogma, Billington appreciates the identity of its best sponsors, people who preached social justice transcending traditional national, ethnic, and gender boundaries. When this book originally appeared The New Republic hailed it as "remarkable, learned and lively," while The New Yorker noted that Billington "pays great attention to the lives and emotions of individuals and this makes his book absorbing." It is an invaluable work of history and contribution to our understanding of political life.

The Practice of Everyday Life

The Practice of Everyday Life PDF Author: Michel de Certeau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271459
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Female Masculinity

Female Masculinity PDF Author: Judith Halberstam
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322436
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.

A Dictionary of Confusable Phrases

A Dictionary of Confusable Phrases PDF Author: Yuri Dolgopolov
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786459956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Covering over 10,000 idioms and collocations characterized by similarity in their wording or metaphorical idea which do not show corresponding similarity in their meanings, this dictionary presents a unique cross-section of the English language. Though it is designed specifically to assist readers in avoiding the use of inappropriate or erroneous phrases, the book can also be used as a regular phraseological dictionary providing definitions to individual idioms, cliches, and set expressions. Most phrases included in the dictionary are in active current use, making information about their meanings and usage essential to language learners at all levels of proficiency.

Recollections of a Rebel Reefer

Recollections of a Rebel Reefer PDF Author: James Morris Morgan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description


Persons and Places

Persons and Places PDF Author: George Santayana
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Moronic Inferno

The Moronic Inferno PDF Author: Martin Amis
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9780099461869
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of essays on America by the author of London Fields, Money and Yellow Dog. At the age of ten, when Martin Amis spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, he was excited and frightened by America. As an adult he has approached that confusing country from many arresting angles, and interviewed its literati, filmmakers, thinkers, opinion-makers, leaders and crackpots with characteristic discernment and wit. Included in a gallery of Great American Novelists are Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Amis also takes us to Dallas, where presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is attempting to liaise with born-again Christians. We glimpse the beau monde of Palm Beach, where each couple tries to out-Gatsby the other, and examine the case of Claus von Bulow. Steven Spielberg gets a visit, as does Brian de Palma, whom Amis asks why his films make no sense, and Hugh Hefner's sybaritic fortress and sanitized image are penetrated. There can be little that escapes the eye of Martin Amis when his curiosity leads him to a subject, and America has found in him a superlative chronicler.

Mary Magdalen

Mary Magdalen PDF Author: Susan Haskins
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446499421
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
A dramatic, thought-provoking portrait of one of the most compelling figures in early Christianity which explores two thousand years of history, art, and literature to provide a close-up look at Mary Magdalen and her significance in religious and cultural thought.

Distancing

Distancing PDF Author: Martin Kantor MD
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313057303
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Kantor focuses on a misunderstood but common condition that brings severe and pervasive anxiety about social contacts and relationships. He offers psychotherapists a specific method for helping avoidants overcome their fear of closeness and commitments, and offers a guide for avoidants themselves to use for developing lasting, intimate, anxiety-free relationships. Fear of intimacy and commitment keeps avoidants from forming close, meaningful relationships. Types of avoidants can include confirmed bachelors, femme fatales, and people who form what appear to be solid relationships only to tire of them and leave with little warning, often devastating their partners/victims. Kantor takes us through the history of this disorder, and into clinical treatment rooms, to see and hear how avoidants think, feel, and recover. He offers psychotherapists a specific method for helping avoidants overcome their fear of closeness and commitments, and offers a guide for avoidants themselves to use for developing lasting, intimate, anxiety-free relationships. The avoidance reduction techniques presented in this book recognize that avoidants not only fear criticism and humiliation, but also fear being flooded by their feelings and being depleted if they express them. Acceptance is feared as much as rejection, because avoidants fear compromising their identity and losing personal freedom. Kantor describes the different therapeutic emphasis required for the four types of avoidants, including those who are withdrawn due to shyness and social phobia, such as people who intensely fear public speaking; those who relate easily, widely, and well, but cannot sustain relationships due to fear of closeness; those whose restlessness causes them to leave steady relationships, often without warning; and those who grow dependent on—and merge with—a single lover or family member and avoid relating to anyone else.