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Memoirs Of An Obscure Professor
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Book Synopsis Memoirs of an Obscure Professor by : Paul F. Boller
Download or read book Memoirs of an Obscure Professor written by Paul F. Boller and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the heyday of McCarthyism, the Chicago Tribune, offended by something he had written, contemptuously dismissed Paul Boller as "an obscure professor" - he was then teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Some forty-five years later, reflecting on the incident, Boller wrote an essay on what it was like to be an obscure professor at one of America's less publicized campuses in a conservative community during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That essay became the foundation for this collection of autobiographical selections reflecting the interests and pursuits of a man who gained national recognition, both inside the academic community and beyond, but still values his obscurity. Whether it is a study of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge or an account of his Navy service as a translator of Japanese during World War II, Boller brings to his writing a fresh approach and a lively and wry wit.
Book Synopsis Memoirs of an Obscure Professor and Other Essays by : Paul F. Boller
Download or read book Memoirs of an Obscure Professor and Other Essays written by Paul F. Boller and published by . This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Unexpected Professor by : John Carey
Download or read book The Unexpected Professor written by John Carey and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship. He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin, Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times. This is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.
Book Synopsis Captain Professor by : Michael Howard
Download or read book Captain Professor written by Michael Howard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-08-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the Military Cross in the Second World War, the author recounts how between battles he befriended the young film director Franco Zefirelli. His account of beating the Germans out of Italy with Bishop Simon Phipps and the ballet critic Richard Buckle is hilarious. This memoir gives insight into the history of Britain in the post war years.
Book Synopsis Not Quite What I Was Planning by : Larry Smith
Download or read book Not Quite What I Was Planning written by Larry Smith and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time. One Life. Six Words. What's Yours? When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-sized pieces. From authors Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford to comedians Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.
Download or read book The Home Place written by J. Drew Lanham and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic
Book Synopsis All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me was to Work by : Edith Bradley Rendleman
Download or read book All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me was to Work written by Edith Bradley Rendleman and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work... "Starting around 1950, people stopped raising chickens, milking cows, and raising hogs. They just buy it at the store, ready to eat. A lot buy a steer and have it processed in Dongola and put it in their freezer. What a difference! Girls have got it so easy now. They don't even know what it was like to start out. And I guess my mother's life, when she started out, was as hard again as mine, because they had to make everything by hand. I don't know if it could get any easier for these girls. But they don't know what it was like, and they never will. Everything is packaged. All you do is go to the store and buy you a package and cook it. Automatic washers and dryers. I'm glad they don't have to work like I did. Very glad." Edith Bradley Rendleman's story of her life in southern Illinois is remarkable in many ways. Recalling the first half of the twentieth century in great detail, she vividly cites vignettes from her childhood as her family moved from farm to farm until settling in 1909 in the Mississippi bottoms of Wolf Lake. She recounts the lives and times of her family and neighbors during an era gone forever. Remarkable for the vivid details that evoke the past, Rendleman's account is rare in another respect: memoirs of the time--usually written by people from elite or urban families--often reek of nostalgia. But Rendleman's memoir differs from the norm. Born poor in rural southern Illinois, she tells an unvarnished tale of what it was really like growing up on a tenant farm early this century.
Book Synopsis Memoirs of an Addicted Brain by : Marc Lewis
Download or read book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain written by Marc Lewis and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping, ultimately triumphant memoir that's also the most comprehensive and comprehensible study of the neuroscience of addiction written for the general public. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "We are prone to a cycle of craving what we don't have, finding it, using it up or losing it, and then craving it all the more. This cycle is at the root of all addictions, addictions to drugs, sex, love, cigarettes, soap operas, wealth, and wisdom itself. But why should this be so? Why are we desperate for what we don't have, or can't have, often at great cost to what we do have, thereby risking our peace and contentment, our safety, and even our lives?" The answer, says Dr. Marc Lewis, lies in the structure and function of the human brain. Marc Lewis is a distinguished neuroscientist. And, for many years, he was a drug addict himself, dependent on a series of dangerous substances, from LSD to heroin. His narrative moves back and forth between the often dark, compellingly recounted story of his relationship with drugs and a revelatory analysis of what was going on in his brain. He shows how drugs speak to the brain - which is designed to seek rewards and soothe pain - in its own language. He shows in detail the neural mechanics of a variety of powerful drugs and of the onset of addiction, itself a distortion of normal perception. Dr. Lewis freed himself from addiction and ended up studying it. At the age of 30 he traded in his pharmaceutical supplies for the life of a graduate student, eventually becoming a professor of developmental psychology, and then of neuroscience - his field for the last 12 years. This is the story of his journey, seen from the inside out.
Download or read book Golem Girl written by Riva Lehrer and published by One World. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vividly told, gloriously illustrated memoir of an artist born with disabilities who searches for freedom and connection in a society afraid of strange bodies “Golem Girl is luminous; a profound portrait of the artist as a young—and mature—woman; an unflinching social history of disability over the last six decades; and a hymn to life, love, family, and spirit.”—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas WINNER OF THE BARBELLION PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures? In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to "fix" her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured. Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. Their work is daring, edgy, funny, and dark—it rejects tropes that define disabled people as pathetic, frightening, or worthless. They insist that disability is an opportunity for creativity and resistance. Emboldened, Riva asks if she can paint their portraits—inventing an intimate and collaborative process that will transform the way she sees herself, others, and the world. Each portrait story begins to transform the myths she’s been told her whole life about her body, her sexuality, and other measures of normal. Written with the vivid, cinematic prose of a visual artist, and the love and playfulness that defines all of Riva's work, Golem Girl is an extraordinary story of tenacity and creativity. With the author's magnificent portraits featured throughout, this memoir invites us to stretch ourselves toward a world where bodies flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human. “Not your typical memoir about ‘what it’s like to be disabled in a non-disabled world’ . . . Lehrer tells her stories about becoming the monster she was always meant to be: glorious, defiant, unbound, and voracious. Read it!”—Alice Wong, founder and director, Disability Visibility Project
Book Synopsis Holding the Center by : Howard Wesley Johnson
Download or read book Holding the Center written by Howard Wesley Johnson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoir of a former MIT President, as well as professor, corporate director, and advisor to American government agencies and to museums and foundations. Howard Wesley Johnson has been associated with MIT for more than forty years and been a major influence on the modernization and expansion of many of its programs. He will be most remembered as a management educator and as MIT's president during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s. The title of his memoirs reflects his central, usually lonely position in those days, trying to hold together an institution often torn apart by the turmoil of the times. Johnson was more successful at navigating the minefields on campus than were many other college and university presidents, perhaps because he was always willing to listen to both sides and because his values were in the right place--against the war in Vietnam, in favor of increased participation in the university by women and minorities, and concerned about environmental issues. As a professor and administrator at MIT, a corporate director, and an advisor to American government agencies and to museums and foundations, Johnson consistently sought both to understand and to apply the principles of good management.
Book Synopsis The Professor and the President by : Stephen Hess
Download or read book The Professor and the President written by Stephen Hess and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2014-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a conservative president makes a liberal professor from the Ivy League his top urban affairs adviser? The president is Richard Nixon, the professor is Harvard's Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Of all the odd couples in American public life, they are probably the oddest. Add another Ivy League professor to the White House staff when Nixon appoints Columbia's Arthur Burns, a conservative economist, as domestic policy adviser. The year is 1969, and what follows behind closed doors is a passionate debate of conflicting ideologies and personalities. Who won? How? Why? Now nearly a half-century later, Stephen Hess, who was Nixon's biographer and Moynihan's deputy, recounts this fascinating story as if from his office in the West Wing. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) described in the Almanac of American Politics as "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson", served in the administrations of four presidents, was ambassador to India, and U.S. representative to the United Nations, and was four times elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. Praise for the works of Stephen Hess Organzing the Presidency Any president would benefit from reading Mr. Hess's analysis and any reader will enjoy the elegance with which it is written and the author's wide knowledge and good sense. -The Economist The Presidential Campaign Hess brings not only first-rate credentials, but a cool, dispassionate perspective, an incisive analytical approach, and a willingness to stick his neck out in making judgments. -American Political Science Review From the Newswork Series It is not much in vogue to speak of things like the public trust, but thankfully Stephen Hess is old fashioned. He reminds us in this valuable and provocative book that journalism is a public trust, providing the basic information on which citizens in a democracy vote, or tune out. — Ken A
Book Synopsis A History of the Book in America by : David Paul Nord
Download or read book A History of the Book in America written by David Paul Nord and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier. The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures. Contributors: David Abrahamson, Northwestern University James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-Madison Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006) James Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert W. Frase (d. 2003) Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology Dan Lacy (d. 2001) Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University Elizabeth Long, Rice University Beth Luey, Arizona State University Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C. David Paul Nord, Indiana University Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University David Reinking, Clemson University Jane Rhodes, Macalester College John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University Linda Scott, University of Oxford Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press Ilan Stavans, Amherst College Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge Trysh Travis, University of Florida Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University
Download or read book The Art of Memoir written by Mary Karr and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well. For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate. Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.
Download or read book Old In Art School written by Nell Painter and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence). Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school––in her sixties––to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement––bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).
Book Synopsis I Live a Life Like Yours by : Jan Grue
Download or read book I Live a Life Like Yours written by Jan Grue and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A quietly brilliant book that warms slowly in the hands." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times I am not talking about surviving. I am not talking about becoming human, but about how I came to realize that I had always already been human. I am writing about all that I wanted to have, and how I got it. I am writing about what it cost, and how I was able to afford it. Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three. Shifting between specific periods of his life—his youth with his parents and sister in Norway; his years of study in Berkeley, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam; and his current life as a professor, husband, and father—he intersperses these histories with elegant, astonishingly wise reflections on the world, social structures, disability, loss, relationships, and the body: in short, on what it means to be human. Along the way, Grue moves effortlessly between his own story and those of others, incorporating reflections on philosophy, film, art, and the work of writers from Joan Didion to Michael Foucault. He revives the cold, clinical language of his childhood, drawing from a stack of medical records that first forced the boy who thought of himself as “just Jan” to perceive that his body, and therefore his self, was defined by its defects. I Live a Life Like Yours is a love story. It is rich with loss, sorrow, and joy, and with the details of one life: a girlfriend pushing Grue through the airport and forgetting him next to the baggage claim; schoolmates forming a chain behind his wheelchair on the ice one winter day; his parents writing desperate letters in search of proper treatment for their son; his own young son climbing into his lap as he sits in his wheelchair, only to leap down and run away too quickly to catch. It is a story about accepting one’s own body and limitations, and learning to love life as it is while remaining open to hope and discovery.
Book Synopsis The Anguish of Surrender by : Ulrich A. Straus
Download or read book The Anguish of Surrender written by Ulrich A. Straus and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was one of a handful of men selected to skipper midget subs on a suicide mission to breach Pearl Harbor’s defenses. When his equipment malfunctioned, he couldn’t find the entrance to the harbor. He hit several reefs, eventually splitting the sub, and swam to shore some miles from Pearl Harbor. In the early dawn of December 8, he was picked up on the beach by two Japanese American MPs on patrol. Sakamaki became Prisoner No. 1 of the Pacific War. Japan’s no-surrender policy did not permit becoming a POW. Sakamaki and his fellow soldiers and sailors had been indoctrinated to choose between victory and a heroic death. While his comrades had perished, he had survived. By becoming a prisoner of war, Sakamaki believed he had brought shame and dishonor on himself, his family, his community, and his nation, in effect relinquishing his citizenship. Sakamaki fell into despair and, like so many Japanese POWs, begged his captors to kill him. Based on the author’s interviews with dozens of former Japanese POWs along with memoirs only recently coming to light, The Anguish of Surrender tells one of the great unknown stories of World War II. Beginning with an examination of Japan’s prewar ultranationalist climate and the harsh code that precluded the possibility of capture, the author investigates the circumstances of surrender and capture of men like Sakamaki and their experiences in POW camps. Many POWs, ill and starving after days wandering in the jungles or hiding out in caves, were astonished at the superior quality of food and medical treatment they received. Contrary to expectations, most Japanese POWs, psychologically unprepared to deal with interrogations, provided information to their captors. Trained Allied linguists, especially Japanese Americans, learned how to extract intelligence by treating the POWs humanely. Allied intelligence personnel took advantage of lax Japanese security precautions to gain extensive information from captured documents. A few POWs, recognizing Japan’s certain defeat, even assisted the Allied war effort to shorten the war. Far larger numbers staged uprisings in an effort to commit suicide. Most sought to survive, suffered mental anguish, and feared what awaited them in their homeland. These deeply human stories follow Japanese prisoners through their camp experiences to their return to their welcoming families and reintegration into postwar society. These stories are told here for the first time in English.
Book Synopsis Essays on the Presidents by : Paul F. Boller
Download or read book Essays on the Presidents written by Paul F. Boller and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since he first began writing in the 1950s, Dr. Paul F. Boller Jr. has had a passion for sharing the humorous, intriguing, and little-known or widely misunderstood aspects of the American presidency. Boller has authored many beloved books on American presidents, the first ladies, presidential anecdotes, quotes, campaign strategies, and common myths. This wide variety of topics has been collected for the first time in Essays on the Presidents, along with new essays and forewords. Boller's prose, distinct and inviting, causes the reader to see what is often overlooked in the history of American presidents: their humanity. Boller has searched for those patriotic narratives we have all heard at some point in our lives—whether from our schoolteachers, coworkers, or various trivia books—and corrects the misconceptions many Americans deem as truth in a lighthearted and truly characteristic voice. From Washington's relationship with the Jews to the electioneering and stump-speaking associated with American presidential campaigns, readers will not only see the significant changes in the presidential office since its conception, but also Boller’s lifetime of research and his expertise in the field of American history. Personality—of the most interesting presidents and of Boller himself—is an important theme throughout this collection. The in-depth retelling of treasured American stories will captivate readers and keep them exploring for more nuggets of truth. Boller tracks the relationship between Americans and the presidents, uncovering the intricate nature of presidential responsibilities and the remarkable men whose leadership shaped the office into what it is today. Celebrating the commanders-in-chief and the career of the nationally-recognized American historian and TCU Emeritus Professor of political science, Essays on the Presidents serves as a unique perspective on American history that fans of both Boller and the presidents will enjoy.
