Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World

Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682190579
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
“I am inordinately proud of my travels and at the same time embarrassed by my pride in them. I feel alternately overflowing and empty, replete with gratitude for my good fortune, and abashed at the overentitled, obsessive nature of my need to continue. I feel sometimes like the most interesting man in the world, sometimes like the most obtuse. I am driven onward and yet, even as I chart my next adventure, I remain unsure why I should want to, unclear why I need to. And I do need to. The road beckons me, and always has. But am I running toward something? Running away? Is there a difference?” —from the foreword Tom Lutz is addicted to journeying. Sometimes he stops at the end of the road, sometimes he travels further. In this richly packed portmanteau of traveler’s tales, we accompany him as he drives beyond the blacktop in Morocco, to the Saharan dunes on the Algerian border, and east of Ankara into the Hittite ruins of Boğazkale. We ride alongside as he hitches across Uzbekistan and the high mountain passes of Kyrgyzstan into western China. We catch up with him as he traverses the shores of a lake in Malawi, and disappear with him into the disputed areas of the Ukraine and Moldova. We follow his footsteps through the swamps of Sri Lanka, the wilds of Azerbaijan, the plains of Tibet, the casinos of Tanzania, the peasant hinterlands of Romania and Albania, and the center of Swaziland, where we join him in watching the king pick his next wife. All along the way, we witness his perplexity in trying to understand a compulsion to keep moving, ever onward, to the ends of the earth.

Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World

Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682190579
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
“I am inordinately proud of my travels and at the same time embarrassed by my pride in them. I feel alternately overflowing and empty, replete with gratitude for my good fortune, and abashed at the overentitled, obsessive nature of my need to continue. I feel sometimes like the most interesting man in the world, sometimes like the most obtuse. I am driven onward and yet, even as I chart my next adventure, I remain unsure why I should want to, unclear why I need to. And I do need to. The road beckons me, and always has. But am I running toward something? Running away? Is there a difference?” —from the foreword Tom Lutz is addicted to journeying. Sometimes he stops at the end of the road, sometimes he travels further. In this richly packed portmanteau of traveler’s tales, we accompany him as he drives beyond the blacktop in Morocco, to the Saharan dunes on the Algerian border, and east of Ankara into the Hittite ruins of Boğazkale. We ride alongside as he hitches across Uzbekistan and the high mountain passes of Kyrgyzstan into western China. We catch up with him as he traverses the shores of a lake in Malawi, and disappear with him into the disputed areas of the Ukraine and Moldova. We follow his footsteps through the swamps of Sri Lanka, the wilds of Azerbaijan, the plains of Tibet, the casinos of Tanzania, the peasant hinterlands of Romania and Albania, and the center of Swaziland, where we join him in watching the king pick his next wife. All along the way, we witness his perplexity in trying to understand a compulsion to keep moving, ever onward, to the ends of the earth.

Exile

Exile PDF Author: Belén Fernández
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682191893
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Che Guevara left Argentina at 22. At 21, Belén Fernández left the U.S. and didn’t look back. Alone, far off the beaten path in places like Syria and Tajikistan, she reflects on what it means to be an American in a largely American-made mess of a world. After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking—through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America—to packing avocados in southern Spain, to close encounters with a variety of unpredictable men, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling—as of the present moment—continued survival. In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén Fernández has established herself as a one of the most trenchant observers of America’s interventions around the world, following in the footsteps of great foreign correspondents such as Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag.

The Critic as Amateur

The Critic as Amateur PDF Author: Saikat Majumdar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501341421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Can the criticism of literature and culture ever be completely professionalized? Does criticism retain an amateur impulse even after it evolves into a highly specialized discipline enshrined in the university? The Critic as Amateur brings leading and emerging scholars together to explore the role of amateurism in literary studies. While untrained reading has always been central to arenas beyond the academy – book clubs, libraries, used bookstores – its role in the making of professional criticism is often disavowed or dismissed. This volume, the first on the critic as amateur, restores the links between expertise, autodidactic learning and hobbyist pleasure by weaving literary criticism in and out of the university. Our contributors take criticism to the airwaves, through the culture of early cinema, the small press, the undergraduate classroom and extracurricular writing groups. Canonical critics are considered alongside feminist publishers and queer intellectuals. The Critic as Amateur is a vital book for readers invested in the disciplinary history of literary studies and the public role of the humanities. It is also a crucial resource for anyone interested in how literary criticism becomes a richly diverse yet shared discourse in the 20th and 21st centuries.

And the Monkey Learned Nothing

And the Monkey Learned Nothing PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384504
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Tom Lutz is on a mission to visit every country on earth. And the Monkey Learned Nothing contains reports from fifty of them, most describing personal encounters in rarely visited spots, anecdotes from way off the beaten path. Traveling without an itinerary and without a goal, Lutz explores the Iranian love of poetry, the occupying Chinese army in Tibet, the amputee beggars in Cambodia, the hill tribes on Vietnam’s Chinese border, the sociopathic monkeys of Bali, the dangerous fishermen and conmen of southern India, the salt flats of Uyumi in Peru, and floating hotels in French Guiana, introduces you to an Uzbeki prodigy in the market of Samarkand, an Azeri rental car clerk in Baku, guestworkers in Dubai, a military contractor in Jordan, cucuruchos in Guatemala, a Pentecostal preacher in rural El Salvador, a playboy in Nicaragua, employment agents in Singapore specializing in Tamil workers, prostitutes in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, international bankers in Belarus, a teacher in Havana, border guards in Botswana, tango dancers in Argentina, a cook in Suriname, a juvenile thief in Uruguay, voters in Guyana, doctors in Tanzania and Lesotho, scary poker players in Moscow, reed dancers in Swaziland, young camel herders in Tunisia, Romanian missionaries in Macedonia, and musical groups in Mozambique. With an eye out for both the sublime and the ridiculous, Lutz falls, regularly, into the instant intimacy of the road with random strangers.

The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387880
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness. You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.

Portraits

Portraits PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781644282168
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
For years, when traveling, I found myself getting in conversations with people when I took their pictures, and started to consult with them--showing them the digital shot, then retaking it until we had one they were happy with. It gave us a reason to interact, and a way to do so, even when we shared no language in common. These portraits are the result of those extended sessions, those moments of accidental intimacy on the road. Readers of my three travel books (Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World, And the Monkey Learned Nothing, and The Kindness of Strangers) may recognize some of the people, because a number of them feature in those stories. But each stands on its own--each a testament to the human ability to connect across the fault lines that keep us precariously divided. And each is a tribute to the accidental intimacy of the road.

Aimlessness

Aimlessness PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553064
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity. Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages—intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.

American Nervousness, 1903

American Nervousness, 1903 PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Paper edition of a 1991 study. The subject is "a cultural complex--a disease called neurasthenia" (from the preface), examined at a specific historical "moment"--1903. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Moral Foods

Moral Foods PDF Author: Angela Ki Che Leung
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824876709
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia investigates how foods came to be established as moral entities, how moral food regimes reveal emerging systems of knowledge and enforcement, and how these developments have contributed to new Asian nutritional knowledge regimes. The collection’s focus on cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons across Asia brings into view a broad spectrum of modern Asia that extends from East Asia, Southeast Asia, to South Asia, as well as into global communities of Western knowledge, practice, and power outside Asia. The first section, “Good Foods,” focuses on how food norms and rules have been established in modern Asia. Ideas about good foods and good bodies shift at different moments, in some cases privileging local foods and knowledge systems, and in other cases privileging foreign foods and knowledge systems. The second section, “Bad Foods,” focuses on what makes foods bad and even dangerous. Bad foods are not simply unpleasant or undesirable for aesthetic or sensory reasons, but they can hinder the stability and development of persons and societies. Bad foods are symbolically polluting, as in the case of foreign foods that threaten not only traditional foods, but also the stability and strength of the nation and its people. The third section, “Moral Foods,” focuses on how themes of good versus bad are embedded in projects to make modern persons, subjects, and states, with specific attention to the ambiguities and malleability of foods and health. The malleability of moral foods provides unique opportunities for understanding Asian societies’ dynamic position within larger global flows, connections, and disconnections. Collectively, the chapters raise intriguing questions about how foods and the bodies that consume them have been valued politically, economically, culturally, and morally, and about how those values originated and evolved. Consumers in modern Asia are not simply eating to satisfy personal desires or physiological needs, but they are also conscripted into national and global statemaking projects through acts of ingestion. Eating, then, has become about fortifying both the person and the nation.

Crying

Crying PDF Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393321036
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This provocative and indispensable book provides a natural and cultural history of our most mysterious and complex human function: our ability to shed tears. All humans, and only humans, weep. Tears are sometimes considered pleasurable, sometimes dangerous, mysterious, deceptive, or profound. Tears of happiness, tears of joy, the proud tears of a parent, tears of mourning, tears of laughter, tears of defeat --what do they have in common? Why is it that at times of victory, success, love, reunion, and celebration the outward signs of our emotions are identical to those of our most profound experiences of loss? Why We Cry looks at the many different ways people have understood weeping, from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through the latest neurophysiological research. Despite our most common romantic assumptions, what this brilliant book tells us is that tears are never pure, they are never simple.