Follow up work to White Cloud's successful and highly acclaimed May 2011 book I Speak For Myself: American Women on Being Muslim. With this second book... in the I Speak For Myself series, American Muslim men speak out on their lives and how their Muslim beliefs play out in private and on the public stage. Contributors include high profile figures in the American Muslim community, representing a new generation that is making a profound impact inside and outside the Muslim world.

Winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award.“Matthew Dickman’s all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure... principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character—free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”—Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge"Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us...that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love....The background, then, is a downbeat America resolutely of the moment; the style, though, looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara....(Dickman's) work sings with all the crazy vereve of the West." —Los Angeles Times"Toughness with a smile....(Dickman) breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O'Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times." —New Haven ReviewAll American Poem plumbs the ecstatic nature of our daily lives. In these unhermetic poems, pop culture and the sacred go hand in hand. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the “people from the community that I come from”—a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon—to get his poems. “Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald’s, the word ‘ass.’”There is no one to save usbecause there is no need to be saved.I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowedthe front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dresscovered in a million beadsslinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,I take her hand in mine. I spin her outand bring her in. This is the almond grovein the dark slow dance.It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapingfor joy . . .Matthew Dickman is from Portland, Oregon, and has been honored with writing fellowships from the Michener Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Based on more than two years of fieldwork conducted in a Yemeni community in southeastern Michigan, this unique study examines Yemeni American girls'... attempts to construct and make sense of their identities as Yemenis, Muslims, Americans, daughters of immigrants, teenagers, and high school students. All American Yemeni Girls contributes substantially to our understanding of the impact of religion on students attending public schools and the intersecting roles school and religion play in the lives of Yemeni students and their families. Providing a valuable background on the history of Yemen and the migration of Yemeni people to the United States, this is an eye-opening account of a group of people we hear about every day but about whom we know very little.Through a series of intensive interviews and field observations, Loukia K. Sarroub discovered that the young Muslim women shared moments of optimism and desperation and struggled to reconcile the America they experienced at school with the Yemeni lives they knew at home. Most significant, Sarroub found that they often perceived themselves as failing at being both American and Yemeni. Offering a distinctive analysis of the ways ethnicity, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status complicate lives, Sarroub examines how these students view their roles within American and Yemeni societies, between institutions such as the school and the family, between ethnic and Islamic visions of success in the United States. Sarroub argues that public schools serve as a site of liberation and reservoir of contested hope for students and teachers questioning competing religious and cultural pressures. The final chapter offers a rich and important discussion of how conditions in the United States encourage the rise of extremism and allow it to flourish, raising pressing questions about the role of public education in the post-September 11 world.All American Yemeni Girls offers a fine-grained and compelling portrait of these young Muslim women and their endeavors to succeed in American society, and it brings us closer to understanding an oft-cited but little researched population.

Allan Houser (Haozous, in his native language) was a Chiricahua Apache, whose family once belonged to Geronimo's guerrilla band. After the remnants of... this group were released in 1913 from decades of internment by the United States Government, the artist's family moved to a farm in Oklahoma, where Houser was born in 1914. In his teens, Houser attended the Santa Fe Indian School, where he first studied art. Although immersed in Apache tradition, as a student Houser was fascinated by art from all over the world, and he resisted the school's attempt to force him to work in what was considered the proper "Native American style" of flat forms, bright colors, and "Indian" subjects. Instead, he mastered a number of styles, from straightforward representation to abstraction, and throughout his career remained alert to developments in the work of his contemporaries. Houser's sculpture, considered his finest work, can be seen in many collections both in the United States and abroad. Among his most famous works are Sacred Rain Arrow, which welcomed athletes to the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Offering of the Sacred Pipe, which was created for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In 1992, Houser because the first Native American to receive the United States' highest art award, the National Medal of Arts. A retrospective exhibition of Houser's work will inaugurate the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian in September 2004, and will surely generate new interest in this truly American artist.

Many of the papers in this volume were first presented at the Third International Great Apes of the World Conference, held July 3-6, 1998 in Kuching,... Sarawak, Malaysia. The editors of this volume, the first in a two-volume series, are world renowned, having dedicated most of their lives to the study of great apes. The world's premiere primatologists, ethologists, and anthropologists present the most recent research on both captive and free-ranging African great apes. These scientists, through deep personal commitment and sacrifice, have expanded their knowledge of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. With forests disappearing, many of these studies will never be duplicated. This volume, and all in the Developments in Primatology book series, aim to broaden and deepen the understanding of this valuable cause.

"Alla Prima" is a practical and comprehensive guide to direct painting (characterised by bold, expressive brushwork and a painterly, atmospheric... surface), particularly as it is expressed though the work of the author's mentor, Arthur DeCosta, the legendary master teacher. The book covers the history of the direct methods in both Europe and America. From there, it covers detailed step-by-step lessons and invaluable discussions on drawing structure, broken and smooth brushwork and colour development. Further lessons on colour mixing, palettes and materials, brush technique, drawing and paint layering, portraiture, still life, figure and landscape painting are provided, all through illustrated steps, analysis and historical information.Throughout, the book features the work of the European masters of the direct approach, from the old masters (Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez) and the late 19th and early 20th century masters (Degas, Renoir, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Cezanne) to the American Prime masters (Sargent, Whistler, Henri, Eakins, Bellows) who spawned such vibrant late 20th century painters as Alice Noel, Wayne Thichaud and Jim Dinc.

Whether they're decorating Easter trees or celebrating Wagner's birthday by playing recordings of his Ring cycle operas and incinerating a model of... Valhalla on an outdoor barbecue to the closing strains of "Gotterdamerung," Americans know both how to create and how to celebrate holidays! Jack Santino's guide to such frivolity is a wonderfully readable exploration of holidays, periods of festivity, and life-cycle rituals and celebrations. Santino draws on history, anthropology, popular culture, and folklore to show the intricate relationships between holidays and the roles that celebrations and rituals play in people's lives. Jack Santino, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University, is the author of Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters and Halloween and Other Festivities of Death and Life.

As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous... borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead.All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line."

Three years after the publication of his much-heralded, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World, Edward P. Jones returned with an elegiac,... luminous masterpiece, All Aunt Hagar's Children. In these fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, Jones resurrects the minor characters in his first award-winning story collection, Lost in the City. The result is vintage Jones: powerful, magisterial tales that showcase his ability to probe the complexities and tenaciousness of the human spirit. All Aunt Hagar's Children is filled with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is the city's ordinary citizens, not its power brokers, who most concern Jones. Here, everyday people who thought the values of the South would sustain them in the North find "that the cohesion born and nurtured in the south would be but memory in less than two generations."

This volume explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of... visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, throughout the 19th century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.

Set in a colorfully painted but crumbling housing project near a Buffalo, New York, steel mill, this "novel full of wisdom, grace and poetry" (Newsday)... traces two decades in the lives of the project's residents. At the heart of this collective portrait is the Taylor family: Sam, Mary Kate, and their five children. For the Taylors and their neighbors, this is a time of tremendous optimism. The oldest boy, Mikey, shows special promise at school. Sam eats alongside his white coworkers at the local diner after his shift in the mill's inferno. The door to the white world seems to be opening. But time fades optimism: the steel industry falters, men lose their jobs. Mikey learns to distrust hope. The miracle of this heartbreaking story is its warmth in the face of tragic disappointment. All-Bright Court illuminates the dignity, faith, and humor that enable people to endure a world bound by devastating reality.

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz... (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of "all but her life." By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead. Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors. Gerda's beautifully written story gives an invaluable message to everyone. It introduces them to last century's terrible history of devastation and prejudice, yet offers them hope that the effects of hatred can be overcome.

In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, Mary Clearman Blew gives us a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their... connection to Montana’s natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents’ arrival in 1882 in Montana--still a territory then--Blew relates the stories that make up her life.