Carol Zapata-Whelan describes her son's struggle with the rare genetic disease Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP), focusing on the time of diagnosis at age nine to his first year in college (he matriculated as a pre-med student at the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2004). Zapata-Whelan illustrates how this struggle with FOP has shaped and strengthened her family, and how, as a mother, the experience has taught her to put her trust in the universe, and live life one day at a time. Through her son's remarkable grace and strength in dealing with his disease, she has learned that an unexpected encounter with suffering can be a blessing as well. Through flashbacks and anecdotes, Zapata-Whelan leads the reader through the ups and downs of dealing with FOP in everyday life, while offering insight, hope and guidance throughout.
A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity.
Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority. Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters. The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life. Perched among peaks that loom over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority. Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters. The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life.
Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature's modernist revolution. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except "The Cantos."
In The Senses of Modernism, Sara Danius develops a radically new theoretical and historical understanding of high modernism. The author closely analyzes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and James Joyce's Ulysses as narratives of the sweeping changes that affected high and low culture in the age of technological reproduction. In her discussion of the years from 1880 to 1930, Danius proposes that the high-modernist aesthetic is inseparable from a technologically mediated crisis of the senses. She reveals the ways in which categories of perceiving and knowing are realigned when technological devices are capable of reproducing sense data. Sparked by innovations such as chronophotography, phonography, radiography, cinematography, and technologies of speed, this sudden shift in perceptual abilities had an effect on all arts of the time.Danius explores how perception, notably sight and hearing, is staged in the three most significant modern novels in German, French, and British literature. The Senses of Modernism connects technological change and formal innovation to transform the study of modernist aesthetics. Danius questions the longstanding acceptance of a binary relationship between high and low culture and describes the complicated relationship between modernism and technology, challenging the conceptual divide between a technological culture and a more properly aesthetic one.
Praised highly by Mann himself, Weigand's book (originally published in 1933) is an essential piece of criticism on Mann's monumental novel. In his study of The Magic Mountain Weigand comments on the novel's genre and organization before dissecting the themes of disease and mysticism, Mann's use of irony, and other aspects of this masterpiece of German literature.
Thomas Mann once told Susan Sontag that he considered The Magic Mountain to be his greatest novel. And few in his own day doubted the preeminence of this modernist classic. But many have argued that the age of literary modernism has passed. If this is so, how might we best understand Mann's masterpiece now? In this book of wide-ranging and original essays, which also includes a memoir of Thomas Mann by Susan Sontag, various scholars and critics explore the meanings of The Magic Mountain for the contemporary imagination.
In this dual biography of Erika and Klaus Mann, the eldest children of German author Thomas Mann, Andrea Weiss offers a view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their time. The book starts with Erika and Klaus's childhood. The account of the make-believe world they created shows an early sign of their talents and of the intensity of their relationship. Both were writers, and performance artists. Erika was known as the founder of a political cabaret in pre-war Berlin. Other themes in the book are their artistic achievements under the shadow of a famous father, their homosexuality, the political commitment as anti-fascists in Nazi Germany, and the exile in the United States in World War II. Klaus later became a heroin addict and commited suicide in 1949.
