An unusual, searching, and poignant memoir of one man's quest to make sense of depression George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong sufferer from clinical depression. In How To Be Depressed, ......
Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic
A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the ......
Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In Paradigm Lost, Ian S. Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question and offers a provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no ......
Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy ......
Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies-and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable. A Brief History of Doom ......
"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies-citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may ......
Dilip da Cunha integrates history, art, cultural studies, hydrology, and geography to tell the story of how rivers have been culturally constructed as lines granted a special role in defining human habitation and everyday practice. What we take to be natural features of the earth's surface, according to da Cunha, are products of human design and a ......
In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland. Taking as his starting point the assumption that the major cultural gulf in the Middle Ages was less between the wealthy and the poor than between ......
In Dynamics of Difference in Australia, Francesca Merlan examines relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people from the events of early exploration and colonial endeavors to the present day. From face-to-face interactions to national and geopolitical affairs, the book illuminates the dimensions of difference that are revealed by these ......
