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Nonfiction
In 1997 the celebrated Italian novelist and essayist Gianni Celati accompanied his friend, filmmaker Jean Talon, on a journey to West Africa which took them from Mali to Senegal and Mauritania. The two had been hoping to research a documentary about Dogon priests, but frustrated by red tape, their voyage became instead a touristic adventure. The vulnerable, prickly, insightful Celati kept notebooks of the journey, now translated by Adria Bernardi as Adventures in Africa. Celati is the privileged traveler, overwhelmed by customs he doesn't understand, always at the mercy of others who are trying to sell him something he doesn't want to buy, and aware of himself as the Tourist who is always a little disoriented and at the center of the continual misadventures that are at the heart of travel.
Celati's book is both a travelogue in the European tradition and a trenchant meditation on what it means to be a tourist. Celati learns to surrender to the chaos of West Africa and in the process produces a work of touching and comic descriptions, in the lucid and ironic prose that is his hallmark. Hailed as one of the best travelogues on Africa ever written and awarded the first Zerilli-Marimó prize, Adventures in Africa is a modest yet profound account of the utter discombobulation of travel.
Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In "Adventures in the Orgasmatron," Christopher Turner tells the revolution's story--an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression.
Central to the narrative is the orgone box--a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her "orgastic potential." The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia.
In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers--efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.
An astounding work of doubles by Albert Goldbarth, "a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart" (Joyce Carol Oates)
Albert Goldbarth's first book of essays in a decade, The Adventures of Form and Content is about the mysteries of dualities, the selves we all carry inside, the multiverses that we are. This collection takes its shape from the ACE Doubles format of the 1950s: turn this book one way, and read about the checkered history of those sci-fi and pulp fictions, or about the erotic poetry of Catullus and the gravelly songs of Springsteen, or about the high gods and the low-down blues, a city of the holy and of the sinful; turn this book the other way, and read about prehistoric cave artists and NASA astronauts, or about illness and health, or about the discovery of planets and the discovery of oneself inside an essay, or about soul ships and space ships, the dead and the living; or turn the book any way you want, and this book becomes an adventure of author and reader, form and content.
Goldbarth's essays have pioneered and inspired new forms of nonfiction writing for thirty years. Robert Atwan, the series editor for The Best American Essays, praises his work by stating, "These essays are a whole new breed . . . Goldbarth has spliced strands of the old genre with a powerful new genre--and the results are miraculous." The Adventures of Form and Content is a new, ingenious work of hilarity and humanity that reminds us of the capabilities and impossibilities of art.
Now a major motion picture starring Daniel Auteuil (Sade, Girl on the Bridge, Jean de Florette) directed by Nicole Garcia (Place Vendome)
Acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrère, whose fiction John Updike described as stunning (The New Yorker) explores the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.
You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you are indebted for your food, and for the privilege of staying home from school when you let on that you are sick. Therefore you ought to respect their little prejudices, and humor their little whims, and put up with their little foibles until they get to crowding you too much.
When Mark Twain wrote the sparky short story Advice to Little Girls in 1865, he probably didn't mean for it to be shown to them. Or maybe he did, since we all know Twain was a rascal. Now, author and illustrator Vladimir Radunsky has created a picture book based on Twain's text that adds all the right outlandish touches.
Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. He wrote two major classics of American literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur, and inventor. Whether or not it was Mark Twain's actual intention for little girls to read this humorous short story, it's clear that he did not talk down to children, but rather expected them to stretch themselves in order to grasp sophisticated, adult meaning.
Vladimir Radunsky has illustrated many books to great acclaim. Recently, Radunsky has been moving farther and farther away from the traditional picture book and into other more innovative forms. The most recent example is a work published by HarperCollins of hip-hop poetry for children, where the graffiti art has migrated from the walls into a printed book. Radunsky has published more than thirty books for children, mostly in the United States. Many of them were translated and published in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.
This brilliant and eye-opening look at the new phenomenon called the aerotropolis gives us a glimpse of the way we will live in the near future and the way we will do business too.
Not so long ago, airports were built near cities, and roads connected the one to the other. This pattern the city in the center, the airport on the periphery shaped life in the twentieth century, from the central city to exurban sprawl. Today, the ubiquity of jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks has turned the pattern inside out. Soon the airport will be at the center and the city will be built around it, the better to keep workers, suppliers, executives, and goods in touch with the global market.
This is the aerotropolis: a combination of giant airport, planned city, shipping facility, and business hub. The aerotropolis approach to urban living is now reshaping life in Seoul and Amsterdam, in China and India, in Dallas and Washington, D.C. The aerotropolis is the frontier of the next phase of globalization, whether we like it or not.
John D. Kasarda defined the term "aerotropolis," and he is now sought after worldwide as an adviser. Working with Kasarda's ideas and research, the gifted journalist Greg Lindsay gives us a vivid, at times disquieting look at these instant cities in the making, the challenges they present to our environment and our usual ways of life, and the opportunities they offer to those who can exploit them creatively. "Aerotropolis "is news from the near future news we urgently need if we are to understand the changing world and our place in it."
Providing both a theoretical framework and practical strategies, this resource will help teachers, counselors, and related service providers develop understanding and empathy to improve outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students with disabilities. The text features narrative portraits of six immigrant families and their children with disabilities, including their cultural histories and personal perspectives regarding assessment, diagnosis, Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings, and other instances in which families engaged with the special education process. Using guiding questions for reflection and "Talk Back" comments from preservice students throughout the text, readers are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality and to develop nuanced and dynamic understandings of CLD children, youth, and families--countering persistent and stereotypical deficit views.
Book Features:
"Insightful and well-written . . . [Suzman chronicles] how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth." --Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN KIND and HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW
WASHINGTON POST'S 50 NOTABLE WORKS OF NONFICTION IN 2017
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2017
A vibrant portrait of the "original affluent society"--the Bushmen of southern Africa--by the anthropologist who has spent much of the last twenty-five years documenting their encounter with modernity.
China, in the past five years, has developed a proactive global policy and is emerging as a new global power with particular focus on developing countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. What is the role of Africa in China's emerging global foreign policy? In 1998, China's aid to Africa was $107 million. By 2004, it had reached $2.7 billion, 26% of its international assistance that year. In 2005, Africa-China trade reached $40 billion, 35% up from the previous year. China is interested mainly in four sectors: infrastructure projects, regional banks such as the African Development Bank, training of African professionals particularly in economic management, and institutions of higher education with the goal of establishing Chinese language programs. The human factor is also important. Chinese Diaspora is fast increasing. For example, in Zambia, it grew from 3,000 to 30,000 in ten years and, in South Africa, from practically none to 300,000. African countries constitute a new market for Chinese products. They also provide a source of raw materials. Today, the continent supplies 30% of China's import of oil and gas, Angola being the largest supplier with 522,000 barrels of oil per day to China. The last five years, Chinese oil companies spent $15 billion acquiring oil fields and local companies. The appetite for raw materials goes beyond oil and gas and China's foreign political strategy is primarily to solve its own domestic problems and protect its interests in the global arena. Will Africa be a pawn or a player in this emerging geopolitical game? Will China's deepening relations with the continent represent a new opportunity for African countries to negotiate a new partnership and skillfully use it to the best advantage of their citizens? These are some of the questions contributors to the volume have tried to answer by examining various facets of these deepening relations and underlining areas of concerns as well as the opportunities for mutually rewarding relations.
So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa's rich diversity, communities, and histories.
Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries' colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent's struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships. With biting wit, he takes on the phenomenon of the white savior complex and brings to light the damage caused by charity campaigns of the past decades, revisiting such cultural touchstones as the KONY 2012 film. Entering into the rivalries that energize the continent, Faloyin engages in the heated debate over which West African country makes the best jollof rice and describes the strange, incongruent beauty of the African Cup of Nations. With an eye toward the future promise of the continent, he explores the youth-led cultural and political movements that are defining and reimagining Africa on their own terms.
The stories Faloyin shares are by turns joyful and enraging; proud and optimistic for the future even while they unequivocally confront the obstacles systematically set in place by former colonial powers. Brimming with humor and wit, filled with political insights, and, above all, infused with a deep love for the region, Africa Is Not a Country celebrates the energy and particularity of the continent's different cultures and communities, treating Africa with the respect it deserves.
