Lecturas literarias shares same methodology, design, icons, and so forth as Punto y aparte. Each reading is accompanied by pre- and post-reading activities as well as by role-playing, creative-writing, and other follow-up activities that students can use to expand on the themes presented in each reading. Students are exposed to literary terminology. With each reading, a different aspect of literary analysis is presented (e.g., the use of dialogue, tone, narrative voice). Students are then asked to apply this new knowledge in a deeper analysis of the reading as a creative work.
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.
Metas is an exciting new version of the best-selling intermediate Spanish textbook Punto y aparte, created in response to requests from reviewers for a version of Punto y aparte with enough material to be used over the entire second year. Metas achieves this goal by essentially doubling the amount of material in each of the six main chapters of Punto y aparte (originally designed as a fourth-semester book), and then by dividing each of these expanded chapters (now called Unidades in Metas) into two self-contained sections (Capítulo A and Capítulo B) to make the amount of material more manageable. Thus, Metas offers the same 12-unit structure found in most intermediate Spanish textbooks (6 units x 2 chapters each = 12 manageable chapters). In terms of grammar, Metas focuses on key grammatical structures (los puntos clave) critical to the seven communicative functions or goals (las siete metas comunicativas) that are central to intermediate-level study. The seven communicative functions are: Description (Descripción) Comparison (Comparación) Reactions and recommendations (Reacciones y recomendaciones) Narrating in the past (Narración en el pasado) Talking about preferences (Hablar de los gustos) Hypothesizing (Hacer hipótesis) Talking about the future (Hablar del futuro) By organizing the text around key grammatical structures, Metas retains the framework of Punto y aparte, resulting in a logical and manageable progression. Additionally, the continual reinforcement and recycling of all seven communicative functions offer students many opportunities to communicate, produce, and create with the language, rather than to simply review the scope and sequence of Spanish grammar of their first-year course.
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Middle Eastern immigration to Mexico is one of the intriguing, untold stories in the history of both regions. In So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico, Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp presents the fascinating findings of her extensive fieldwork in Mexico as well as in Lebanon and Syria, which included comprehensive data collection from more than 8,000 original immigration cards as well as studies of decades of legal publications and the collection of historiographies from descendents of Middle Eastern immigrants living in Mexico today. Adding an important chapter to studies of the Arab diaspora, Alfaro-Velcamp's study shows that political instability in both Mexico and the Middle East kept many from fulfilling their dreams of returning to their countries of origin after realizing wealth in Mexico, in a few cases drawing on an imagined Phoenician past to create a class of economically powerful Lebanese Mexicans. She also explores the repercussions of xenophobia in Mexico, the effect of religious differences, and the impact of key events such as the Mexican Revolution. Challenging the post-revolutionary definitions of mexicanidad and exposing new aspects of the often contradictory attitudes of Mexicans toward foreigners, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico should spark timely dialogues regarding race and ethnicity, and the essence of Mexican citizenship.
