Final Book Research Articles

Medicine Through the Lens of Humanity: Exploring the Legacy of Oliver Sacks, the Storyteller Neurologist.

In an era of medicine when a paternalistic approach was the norm, neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks infused his care with humanity, centering a dialogue that emphasized his patients' perspective and personhood. For most of his life, he encountered significant personal challenges, and struggled with prosopagnosia and an internal conflict with his sexuality. Instead of allowing these challenges to hold him back, he transformed them into the driving force behind a career that uniquely combined the scientific beauty of neurology and a humanistic patient-centered approach with the power of literature. Through non-fiction works like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he translated the overwhelming complexities of neurological disorders into stories that touched the hearts of readers around the world, making the science of the brain more accessible and human. In his later years, Dr. Sacks grappled with his mortality and the broader questions of aging and life's purpose, themes central to his final book, Gratitude. His reflections emphasized the importance of aligning healthcare with patients' personal values and goals. Dr. Sacks' legacy is marked not only by his professional contributions and literary achievements but also by his deep compassion and innovative approach to patient care, which continues to influence modern medical practice and inspire an ongoing discourse about the intersection of science, humanity, and individual experience.

Fanon, temporality and pedagogy: Combatting racist (non-)relationalities of self and other

This article addresses relations between concepts of ‘self’, ‘other(s)’ and ‘othering’ through a reading of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s psychoaffective phenomenological and pedagogical narrative approach, reading his work as phenomenological and educational as well as critiquing phenomenology, psychology, educa invites renewed attention to the geopolitical tion and (of course) psychiatry. While most—especially educational—commentators base their engagement with Fanon’s revolutionary materialist phenomenology of racialised embodiment and consciousness on his first book, Black Skin White Masks and attend to his final book, Wretched of the Earth as expressing his core political and philosophical analyses, this article focuses in particular on Fanon’s second and middle book, A Dying Colonialism, evaluating the political possibilities of the specific narrative temporalities elaborated there. Notwithstanding its rather dismissive reception, it is argued that this, middle, book—written during, and as a document of, the Algerian liberation struggle—expresses and develops Fanon’s psychopolitical and performative philosophy of subjective and objective transformation from alienation to emancipation. This philosophy works pedagogically, in imagining the transformation of relations between others, as well as between self and others, including relations between coloniser and colonized, as also between and within selves.

Simon Armitage and the Lay of the Land: Walking, Writing, Publishing

ABSTRACT The publication of Walking Home (2012), by Simon Armitage with its subsequent series of site-specific poems Stanza Stones (2013), coincides with the confirmation that a new wave of nature writing has swept over British bookshops. By walking from north to south instead of the conventional approach to this challenging route, the poet transforms what might have been an individual and subjective experience into a collective one; the shared dimension of the text corresponds to the fluidity of the medium he has chosen since the final book (and Stanza Stones) turns this project into a surprising object which embodies the complex position held by Armitage in his attempt to connect land and poetry in a down-to-earth manner. This paper therefore examines how the two books correspond to this new ethos of nature writing, in which writing, reading and publishing seem to become part of a singular process.

Review of the Book “The Trauma of Birth and Its Significance for Psychoanalysis” Published By Otto Rank in 1924.International Psychoanalytic Publisher.Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich (The Trauma of Birth, Martino Fine Books, Eastford, Connecticut, 2010).

Review of the Book “The Trauma of Birth and Its Significance for Psychoanalysis” Published By Otto Rank in 1924.International Psychoanalytic Publisher.Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich (The Trauma of Birth, Martino Fine Books, Eastford, Connecticut, 2010).

The Psychosocial Benefits of Biblioguidance Book Clubs.

Pedagogical approaches that support young people's well-being and maximize their potential are among the Journal of School Health research priorities. A unique form of observational learning called biblioguidance could be a pedagogical approach. We, a team of researchers and teachers, implemented biblioguidance book clubs with 10th-grade health education students. While the initial focus was health literacy skills, we also aimed to generate psychosocial benefits. Those benefits are the focus of the current descriptive phenomenological research. A final book club reflection captured the benefits students received and documented their transformation. We randomly selected 42 reflections from the sample pool (n = 168) and coded them via descriptive document analysis. The results indicate that the book clubs provided psychosocial benefits. Students identified with the stories and characters, gained insight into others' perspectives, lived experiences, and "ways of the world," and were, in many ways, transformed. Some students even experienced catharsis, citing hope, validation, and feeling less alone. Biblioguidance book clubs could offer an innovative pedagogical approach to advance students' psychosocial well-being and engage them as active participants in their own learning and health.

Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside

Socialist artist, wood engraver, and writer Clare Leighton transformed the interwar wood engraving revival from a niche movement within fine book publishing into an everyday art for the people when in 1935 she brought out with leftist publisher Victor Gollancz her authored and illustrated Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle. Read alongside Country Matters (1937), a second illustrated countryside book that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton, Four Hedges becomes a key 1930s text because it realigns modernist values associated with the wood engraved productions of small presses with the more democratic values of mass-reproduced trade books. Combining feminist biography, close reading, and modernist and middlebrow book history, this article argues that the wood engraved books that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton contribute to rather than resist or exist outside of the radical 1930s once they are located within Leighton's rural arts practice and Gollancz's publishing ventures, including his publication of George Orwell's legendary urban documentary, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

Resizing Sykes: Ian O’Donnell in conversation with David Skarbek

Ian O’Donnell's latest book, Prison Life: Pain, Resistance, and Purpose, is published by New York University Press. It was welcomed by a review symposium in The Prison Journal as ‘an important new book … a catalyst for energizing sociology of punishment scholarship’ written by ‘the indisputable elder of Irish criminology’ (Gido et al., 2023: 160). Contributors to the symposium described ‘a tour de force’ (Kimmett Edgar) and ‘an impressive contribution’ (Ashley Rubin) that is ‘elegantly written and sophisticated’ (Cormac Behan) and ‘raises critical questions about penal variations in legitimacy, order, and the experience of punishment’ (Bethany Schmidt). It was hailed as ‘a fine book that illuminates essential relational dimensions of human dignity … an outstanding work from a mature and sensitive scholar who understands the complexities and rewards of writing about prisons’ (Derek Jeffreys) and ‘a gem in contemporary penological literature’ (Gorazd Mesko). The editors of Incarceration decided to mark the publication of Prison Life by commissioning a dialogue between its author and David Skarbek, a professor at Brown University who has written extensively about prison governance.

Love and Horror: ‘Ircastrensis’ Unmasked

Abstract This note identifies, for the first time, the author of Love and Horror, a mock-heroic parody of the gothic novel published under the pseudonym ‘Ircastrensis’ in 1812. The Revd Henry Barry (1781-1850) wrote at least one other novel before settling into a comfortable life as a Wiltshire rector and unsuccessful dabbler in British history and Shakespearean emendation; among his several children was the much better known Victorian novelist Emma Newby (1826-1899), who in 1862 edited her father’s final book, a ‘manual of happiness’.

“Great Historians Are Biological Freaks”: Siegfried Kracauer's Philosophy of History

Abstract This text examines Siegfried Kracauer's unfinished final book, the posthumously published History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969). While Kracauer's Weimar writings have long been celebrated, History, apart from a few key early texts, has only recently been given critical attention. Written in English in New York in the 1960s, the book lies at the intersection of film theory and historical philosophy. One of the key contributions of History, I argue, is that it offers a filmic technology of historical thought that might intervene in the emergent systems of temporal management and control that haunted the 1960s and continue to condition our experience of time to this day. Kracauer's name for his counter-technology is “the anteroom,” and its function is to aid utopian thought and practice, what he calls “the emergence of something new, something beyond the jurisdiction of nature.”

In Memory of Tom Greening: A Life of Humble Service to Humanistic Psychology

Tom Greening was an existential-humanistic psychologist who practiced for more than 50-years in the same psychotherapy office where he began working with James F. T. Bugental. He served for 34 years as the editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Tom was also a prolific poet with 10 books of poetry, including his final book, Into the Void: An Existential Therapy Faces Death Through Poetry. In this brief article, I reflect on my personal experiences with my friend and colleague, Tom Greening, and highlight some of his most important contributions.

An Ante Litteram Critique of Orientalism: The Case of Abu’l-Faḍā’il-i-Gulpāyigānī and E.G. Browne

Since the late 1970s, the term Orientalism has been closely associated with Edward Said (d. 2003) and his influential monograph of the same name. First published in 1978, Orientalism advanced a number of critiques about the discipline of “Oriental Studies”, its frequently condescending portrayal and depiction of the Eastern world, and the complex relationship between knowledge and power in the context of the Middle East. As revolutionary as a number of Said’s theses have been, in his critique of Orientalism and in particular his penetrating analysis of the relationship between knowledge and power, Said was not breaking entirely new ground. In fact, seven decades earlier, a voice from the Orient itself, the Persian Bahā’ī scholar Mīrzā Abu’l-Faḍā’il-i Gulpāyigānī (d. 1914), expressed a similar, albeit embryonic, critique of Orientalism. Abu’l-Faḍā’il’s analysis, presented in the opening chapters of his final book Kashfu’l-Ghiṭā’, focused on one of the foremost Orientalists of his time, the Cambridge scholar Edward Granville Browne (d. 1926). Rather than studying the extent to which Browne fits the paradigm of Orientalism (a topic some scholars have previously expressed views on), this article explores ways in which Abu’l-Faḍā’il’s critique of Browne’s study of the Orient can be viewed as a nascent prefiguration of some of the theses developed and advanced by Said decades later. Gulpāyigānī’s precedence as a Bahā’ī scholar in discerning and addressing the link between Western scholars’ knowledge production and the colonial power relations of their respective governments with the countries or areas they studied, helps correct a misconception forged about Bahā’īs. Historical narratives produced in anti-Bahā’ī polemics decades after Gulpāyigānī’s death created a master-narrative that cast Bahā’īs as agents of colonial powers, sweeping under the rug counterarguments such as those posed by Gulpāyigānī’s critique. The authors of this article have been motivated by this corrective goal.

Povijest arhitekture kao dinamički proces

Renate Wagner-Rieger focused her research on Austrian medieval architecture in addition to her studies of the ”Wiener Ringstrasse” especially when she participated in significant public Middle Ages art exhibitions. The shows were supported by catalogue essays, which were finally collected in her final book. As a response, she covered a wide range of architectural history in her lectures.

The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History ed. by Jeremy Milloy and Sangster Joan (review)

Reviewed by: The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History ed. by Jeremy Milloy and Sangster Joan James Naylor Milloy, Jeremy and Joan Sangster, eds.–The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 200 p. Discussions of violence in the workplace make one think of the latest headlines; in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the violence directed at health care workers looms large. Examples are not hard to come by. Stories of nurses being advised not to wear their scrubs on their way to their hospital shifts boggle the mind. A feature on the CBC Radio show White Coat, Black Art on the ways in which the quotidian violence in a big-city Emergency Room has been exacerbated by the multiple effects of the pandemic, and the opioid crisis, was sadly not surprising. These are, of course, “in-your-face” examples of workplace violence in a sector bearing the brunt of a combination of crises and very much under the spotlight. I was aware of the campaign by the Canadian Federation of Nurses’ Unions that declared “Violence is not part of the job” but, as they effectively acknowledge, it clearly is. Violence runs deeper in health care and far beyond. One of the contributions to this edited collection focuses on nursing: Sarah Jessup relates the story of the murder of Lori Dupont, a recovery room nurse in Windsor, Ontario, at the hands of her sexual harasser. At first glance, this is a case of intimate partner violence; when she rejected his advances, he killed her and himself. But it is very much a workplace story. The perpetrator was a doctor, and the hierarchies of hospitals are deeply entrenched and run along multiple lines of professional authority, gender, and management. What ensued, as Jessup articulately explains, was a struggle to recognize harassment and gender-based violence as an issue of workplace health and safety. We tend to look at violence as episodic and exceptional. Today, it is in health care and the pandemic. In the past, it may have been workers’ battles with police or mining disasters. But the editors and authors of this fine book explore a range of work experiences, past and present, to point out that violence pervades the world of work in many ways and for many reasons. And, to echo the nurses, it is far too often hidden or trivialized, becoming just “part of the job.” In realms which we may consider as having been particularly dangerous, such as sex work in early-nineteenth-century Montréal, violent encounters were multifarious as danger lurked, it seemed, from all directions. Mary Anne Poutanen explores how workplaces, homes, and the streets were places of danger from a range of clients, employers, authorities, and often their peers. They and other workers were embedded in a culture of violence. James Schmidt considers the violence perpetrated by workers themselves by examining Progressive Era reform schools in Iowa. He places the abuse of children within a longer history of corporal punishment where the limits of abuse were vague and shifting. As Schmidt notes, it is hard not to think of the abuse at Indian residential schools, rooted in both settler colonialism and settler notions of adult authority, and aimed at instilling, among other things, settler work habits. Chad Pearson further explores this legacy by drawing what might seem to be a tenuous connection between the antebellum wars to remove the Seminoles from Florida and the kidnapping—and forced relocation to an island near [End Page 228] Honduras!—of 13 leaders of a 1901 cigar workers’ strike in Tampa. The mastermind of the latter action was a leader of the anti-union Tampa “Citizens Committee” and historian (and enthusiast) of antebellum Florida society and the wars against the Seminoles. The language and goals of the two campaigns, 60 years apart, were remarkably similar. The West, of course, exists in American mythology as a particular place of violence and Aaron Goings’ story of Billy Gohl is fascinating. Gohl was a union leader in early-twentieth-century Grays Harbor, Washington, practising “militant, sometimes violent, forms of labour activism...

Matthew Hunter. The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage

In this fine book, Matthew Hunter develops a nuanced and sophisticated set of arguments, most importantly by reversing some of the standard approaches to the topic of style. Rather than opposing style as an aesthetic category to performative speech acts and everyday interaction, Hunter makes a compelling case for considering ‘styles’ as forms of action, ways of ‘making things happen without saying so’ (25). Equal but opposite to classical speech acts, charismatic styles produced highly desired effects on the London stage, implicitly giving definition to the situations of their use as specific genres of successful social performance. Audience members, Hunter argues, could not but feel compelled to try to reproduce these performative effects in their own lives. Rather than thinking of plays as representing everyday social interaction forms, the book unveils a dynamic whereby the theatre’s more perfected interaction styles feed the aspirations and spur the imitation of playgoers seeking affirmation or even celebrity in their own lives.

Le Spleen de Paris: An ‘unknown’ masterpiece?

The article explores the origins of Baudelaire’s final book, Paris Spleen. Little Prose Poems [ Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèmes en Prose ] in relation to the poet’s recently discovered letter to the publisher A. Houssaye. Supplying a Russian translation of this dedication to Houssaye, penned by Baudelaire as a preface to the Little Prose Poems , the author also offers its interpretation. The closing paragraphs contain an analysis of the principal and manifesto-like aspects of the dedication. Stating that no one can say about his new work that it has ‘neither head nor tail,’ Baudelaire alludes to the trite expression which describes ‘incoherence’ in French, but which the poet effortlessly transforms into an expanded metaphor of a serpent. In other words, rather than merely dedicating his poems to the editor-in-chief of La Presse , the poet lavishes on him a ‘poisoned gift.’ The poet loathed the newspaper civilisation, but, unlike the ‘aristocratic party’ of French literature, could not afford to withdraw into an ‘ivory tower’ and so had to resort to stratagems to cooperate with the Fourth Estate. The dedication to Houssaye effectively constitutes such a ploy.

Alfred Russel Wallace's Unrealized Last Book: Insights from the Plan for Darwin and Wallace

In honour of the two hundredth birthday of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) we present a transcription and analysis of the plan for Wallace's unrealized final book. Recently come to light, Darwin and Wallace was to have been a volume of eight chapters published by the well-known London publishing house of John Murray in the spring of 1915, a project derailed by Wallace's death at the age of 90 in November 1913. Drawing on letters, manuscripts and contemporary published works, we show how the chapter outlines illuminate Wallace's late-life thinking about his and Darwin's working methods, the factors contributing to their independent discovery of natural selection and contemporary challenges to Darwin–Wallace evolutionary gradualism and natural selection by the neo-Lamarckian, mutationist and early Mendelian schools during the period dubbed the ‘eclipse of Darwinism’. Wallace's planned book provides insight into how the co-founder of modern evolutionary biology saw his legacy in relation to Darwin's, and his role as fierce and eloquent defender of his and Darwin's theory during a fascinating period in the history of evolutionary biology. In the emergence of neo-Darwinism in the ‘Modern Synthesis’ period, Wallace's contributions were largely omitted, an oversight that Darwin and Wallace may have prevented had it been realized.

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

The Killing of Sambuka

The episode in the final book of Valmiki’s Ramayana, in which Rama executes a Sudra ascetic named Sambuka, has garnered critical discussion and creative reimagining over the centuries since it was composed. This paper situates the episode as a late addition of the Uttarakanda and its place therein, considering relevant semantic developments of the terms dharma and tapas, and changes in the rigidity of caste boundaries that allegedly took place during this time. Analysis of both pre-modern and modern creative engagements with the Sambukavadha reveal adjustments to the ways in which Rama, Sambuka, and the Brahmana advisors are portrayed and the values and concerns that these changes reflect in the corresponding social and cultural milieux. Finally, the episode as it appears in Anand Neelakanthan’s mythical novel, Asura: Tale of the Vanquished: The Story of Ravana and His People, is considered as recent addition to the living storytelling tradition.

Brown over Rietveld

In the post-war historiography of Dutch modern architecture, the monograph of Gerrit Rietveld written by the American architectural historian Theodore Morey Brown (1958) played a pioneering role. The Work of G. Rietveld, Architect was the first monograph of a by then already internationally renowned Dutch architect and since it was written in English it was also the only source of detailed information about Rietveld for an international readership. Brown was the first art historian in the Netherlands to write a dissertation on a living architect; as such, his book signalled the start of modern architectural history as practised by art historians. Yet despite the fact that it is almost impossible to overstate the significance of Brown’s study, the book remains until this day a curiosity. Why was the first scholarly work on Rietveld written by an American scholar and published in the English language? Who was Theodore Morey Brown and how did he end up at a Dutch university in the 1950s? This article examines the history of Brown’s book: its genesis from a research initiative by post-war Dutch professors of art history to the contents of the final book. It also discusses the international historiographical debate in which Brown participated. Brown’s book heralded a new era in the relationship between the art historian and the architect, one that was connected with the challenge to write contemporary history from an ideologically engaged attitude. As an ‘operative history’ Brown’s book was distinguished by its collaborative nature. While it was a book about a single architect written by a single historian, in the background there was a ‘team Rietveld’ consisting of, among others, the historian Pieter Singelenberg and the designer Truus Schröder-Schräder, who were vital to its creation. Only with the help of these people could the work of Rietveld be made accessible to a foreign scholar who, upon arrival in the Netherlands, did not speak the Dutch language. This article argues that Brown’s book was important not only for the historiography on Rietveld. The book also had an institutional significance as it ushered in the study of modern architectural history by art historians in the Netherlands.

Human Rights and the Novel After UNDRIP: On Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy

Abstract: This essay extends Joseph Slaughter's argument that the genre of the novel and human rights discourse are "mutually enabling fictions," by examining three novels by the celebrated Native American author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) created in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP presented a significant innovation in human rights discourse, extending the concept of human rights not just to individuals but to whole communities and transnational collectivities of Indigenous people. Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016) have been grouped together as her "Justice Trilogy" for their common thematic exploration of justice as a concept in its various legal, theological, metaphysical, and personal meanings. And yet the books all remain essentially unsatisfying in their inability to resolve the central question of whether justice was, or ever can be, done. I propose that this is because the real aim of the books is not to elaborate on a unitary concept of justice at all, but rather to think through the problem of the enabling conditions of justice, namely human rights. Together, the novels loosely describe a history of human rights discourse related to Native Americans, with The Plague of Doves exploring the absence of human rights and the impossibility of justice in the moment of non-Indigenous settlement of the Great Plains, and The Round House exploring justice and human rights in the context of the compromised sovereignty of reservations during the era of "self-determination." The final book, LaRose , explores problems of justice, mourning, and revenge in the context of a fictional world in which cultural rights and Indigenous sovereignty are taken as givens; in other words, within a regime of human rights similar to what is proposed in UNDRIP.