A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960
Peasants in southern Africa have too often been portrayed as technologically backward, chronically underemployed, and politically passive. Such views, says Elias Mandala in this finely particularized study of the lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, partake more of myth than reality. Peasants are first and foremost laborers, he points out, who spend ......
Sweden--where 86 percent of mothers of preschool children are in the labor force--is an ideal place to examine new models for the successful combining of working and parenting. In that country, a concerted effort--by government, organized labor, and other institutions--has been made to equalize the burdens of parenting between men and women, and ......
An internationally acclaimed Grammy and Tony Award-winning conductor, John DeMain has been a fixture of Madison, Wisconsin, for more than three decades, serving as music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Madison Opera. In Working with My Heroes, written with the late Greg Hettmansberger, DeMain recounts ......
How do we make sense of our suffering? World of Dew grapples with this question by embracing impermanence, the death of a loved one, the transmutation of an old belief, the adoption of a new culture. Lindsay Stuart Hill navigates the space "where 'lost' still differs from 'gone'" and the dream of reversal or undoing remains: "Turn your back to a ......
Hermann Budzislawski and the Making of Twentieth-Century Socialism
In Writing Against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1920s through the post-World War II era by focusing on the life of one influential member of that group, Hermann Budzislawski (1901-78). In the 1930s, Budzislawski served as the editor in chief of the prominent ......
Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness
Russian-Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin (1926-82), a doctor by trade, wrote primarily "for the drawer," fearing professional consequences if he were to publish his fiction. Despite Tsypkin's almost complete lack of readership during his lifetime, his work has received international posthumous recognition, with Susan Sontag calling his work "among the ......
In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. "When will you be home?" Steve asked. "I have news." So began the Hollars family's year of plenty--a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family's daily ......
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, and always compelling, the stories in this collection explore the many manifestations of being Jewish in a modern and largely secular world. Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters, mostly American, who are struggling with love, relationships, faith, tradition, and most of all family and the ties that bind. A ......
