Man Stood Research Articles

The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo

K. Sello Duiker Thirteen Cents Ohio University Press Written in a combination of Afrikaans, local dialect, and South African English, Thirteen Cents is the disturbing story of Azure, an orphaned child eking out an existence on the brutal backstreets of Cape Town. Azure’s voice resonates with a disarming innocence even as he recites the horrors of surviving in a world of violence, gangsters, pimps, and pedophiles. Dazai Osamu Blue Bamboo Ralph McCarthy, tr. Kurodahan Press The seven stories in Blue Bamboo were originally translated into English in 1993 but have been out of print for several years. This delightful new translation showcases Dazai Osamu’s masterful prose style in stories ranging from traditional folktales to imaginative autobiographical sketches. Each story is prefaced with helpful and engaging background notes by the translator. Nota Bene Island, Lahiri masterfully delineates place and mood. The bulk of the novel takes place in America, and much of it in academia, environments she captures skillfully, contrasting the crush of humanity in Calcutta with the almost barren seascapes of Rhode Island. But more than anything this is a novel about individual human beings trying to forge happiness out of the crucible of obligation and duty. Subhash marries Udayan’s very young widow, Gauri, and raises a child fathered by his brother. Therein may be enough complication, but the novel is made even more wrenching by Gauri’s chilly personality and withdrawal from love and even, in some ways, from life. Lahiri takes us into Indian life and custom just enough to have us viscerally feel the clash of cultures that Subhash encounters when he relocates to America. She also deftly limns the gradual assumption of American values that makes him, in the end, very much an American. Juggling ideas and details, abstracts and concretes, from Hindu philosophy to Descartes, Lahiri’s wideranging reference points enrich this novel and underscore the university ambience in which much of it is set. It is true that the reader never warms to Gauri, a distant, cold, and academic character, but the reader’s heart is warmed by Subhash and his overwhelming love for the character who brings meaning to his life: Bela, the daughter he shares with a ghost. In the end, the reader is rooting wholeheartedly for each of them to define and then find happiness. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Davide Longo. The Last Man Standing. Silvester Mazzarella, tr. New York. MacLehose (Random House, distr.). 2013. isbn 9781623650346 In this dystopian novel, Davide Longo explores the true human nature that comes out during times of desperation . The Last Man Standing is set in a downward-spiraling modernday Italy. The roads and towns are being taken over by young groups of thugs, and nomadic people are banding together to find sustenance by any means necessary. Houses are being broken into, businesses burned down, and people brutally murdered every day for basic necessities like food and clothing. Amid this chaos is the protagonist, Leonardo, who struggles with his own demons. Once a highly respected writer, a scandalous affair has ruined his marriage and career. One day Leonardo’s ex-wife unexpectedly shows up to leave her ten-yearold son, Alberto, and their seventeenyear -old daughter, Lucia, in Leonardo’s care. As the town in which Leonardo lives begins to plummet into a wasteland with local shops burned down, January–February 2014 • 59 60 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews housesrobbed,andresidentsmurdered, Leonardo decides to take the children and journey up to Switzerland for safe haven. However, through a darkening social situation and a series of progressively unfortunate events, Leonardo andthechildrenarelefttowalkthrough the snowy northern Italian lands in the winter months, robbed of transportation and amenities. Along the way, they are attacked by a group of thugs, taken to the group’s base camp, and held in custody by the tyrannical ruler, Richard. Richard makes Lucia his mistress, Alberto joins the band of thug boys, and Leonardo is literally caged with animals. Life goes on like this for months until finally, strengthened by past events, Leonardo builds up the courage to escape the camp with Lucia and a few others. As they head toward the Italian coast, they meet unlikely friends and temporary residents...

The influence of age and surface compliance on changes in postural control and attention due to ankle neuromuscular fatigue

The reduction in the quality and integration of sensory information with aging could increase the alterations in postural control associated with muscle fatigue observed in younger adults. This study aimed to compare changes in postural control and attentional demands due to ankle muscle fatigue, with intact and reduced proprioceptive information at the ankle, between young and older adults. Eleven young (24 ± 4 years) and 13 older (65 ± 4 years) men stood quietly on a force platform (blindfolded) under four experimental conditions (combinations of firm (FS)/compliant (CS) surfaces and single/dual tasks), before and immediately after a fatiguing exercise. The fatiguing exercise, performed on a dynamometer, consisted of maintaining an isometric contraction of the plantarflexors at 50 % of maximum until exhaustion. Both COP sway area and COP sway velocity were greater on the CS compared to FS and increased with fatigue for both groups in all conditions. COP sway area showed a greater increase with fatigue in older adults when standing on the CS. Reaction time (secondary task) increased significantly after fatigue, but only for older adults when standing on the CS. The effects of fatigue on postural control are more important when proprioceptive information at the ankle is altered. In particular, older adults had more difficulty and may have needed more attention to stand quietly, compared with young adults.

LAST MAN (WITH)STANDING The character-disaster film

Abstract

Food as a Weapon

Food played a crucial role in the Nazis' vision of a new European order under German control. More food had to be produced and markets had to be reorganized. Agricultural sciences under the Nazi regime worked to increase productivity, breed new plants and to improve existing species. In the war against the Soviet Union, food was explicitly used as a weapon to defeat the enemy. This paper focuses on Richard Walther Darré and Herbert Backe, who were in charge of agriculture and food throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The two men stood at the crossroads of agricultural sciences and politics, and the continuity between their ideas and policies illustrates the relation between agricultural sciences and the Nazi state.

CRISIS IN CALIFORLORNIA: CREATIVE PROTEST AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled with dangerous agrochemical runoff, this stream offers an idyllic place for students, staff, and faculty to stroll or sunbathe. One day toward the end of the spring quarter of 2010, a young man stood in that beautiful but toxic water, protected by hip-high waders. He wore a cowboy hat and overalls and looked like a character from the 1849 Gold Rush. With a pan in his hands, he called out to passersby to watch as he demonstrated his solution to student financial problems. A sign planted in the ground near him said: gold: the tuition solution. He cried out to passersby, “It's an old California tradition, and it's the only way I can pay for school!” He had several gold-painted rocks to prove that one could still strike it rich, and he offered them to passersby. As a small crowd gathered around to observe this Swiftian “modest proposal,” he made his point about the desperate situation students have found themselves in at the University of California.

Could Wind Have Parted the Red Sea?

Crossing of the Red Sea, painting by Nicolas Poussin (1634). The sun sank over the eastern Nile Delta. A man stood on the shore of a great sea of reeds. As twilight fell upon the land of Egypt, he ...

The Traitor of Zion

Ben Stroud the traitor of zion fiction 85 They had become something of a fascinationof mine: communes cut out of the interior, new societies where all were equal and either Jesus or Liberty reigned. Some days, after reading an account of a blind prophetess leading her followers to Illinois, or of a mill town where all shared labor and wealth equally, I yearned to give up my life and join them. I felt as if I lived in a hurtling age. It seemed all humanity stood on a precipice, that in the distance, beyond the coal smoke and the tangle of telegraph wires, could be spied a shining metro­ polis where men would be re-formed. But I spent my days stuck in my father’s shop—at twenty-three I was his peer in making the fiddles and other cheap instruments we sold to travelers embarking from the docks— and my nights in drink with friends. I need only walk the streets of my Baltimore, pass a slave carrying bricks on his crooked back or a rheumy-eyed sailor, ruined by the sea, begging alms and ale, to feel the rottenness in my soul. Men could not be changed, and I, one among millions, would never make it to any dream city. Even so, the yearning never left me. One night, during yet another of our regular debauches, I rose without a word and left my friends in a steaming oyster house. I had seen notices in the paper of a Hebronite meeting: their leader and revelator, Josiah Kershaw, was touring the East to summon new followers to the city he was raising on Peaine Island, a wilderness in the far northern reaches of Lake Michigan. All week the papers had mocked Kershaw. To them he was a gross fabricator —the great paradise he promised a myth, the prophecies on which he claimed his authority pure forgeries. But I was intrigued. His talk of harmony, of plain lives lived according to rule, stirred my hopes. I had passed the last weeks in a violent melancholy, pining for a woman who didn’t even know me, a ship captain’s young wife, and increasingly I had seen my future, bound by an invisible chain to the worktable, just like my father. And so, unsteady on my feet after five whiskeys, I searched for the inn where the meeting was to be held. By the time I found it my heart beat heavily and sweat dripped from my skin. My nerves were electric with anticipation. Eyes turned to look at me when I stumbled into the room. The meeting was already underway. At the front a graybeard clutched a Bible and kept his eyes shut as he recited a prayer. I sat in the back, gripping my knees to keep from swaying. The graybeard droned on. 86 ecotone People yawned and scratched their noses. After fifteen more minutes of this—the prayer was unending!—I could barely master myself. I was an imbecile. There was nothing for me here. I glanced at the door, but before I could rouse the courage to get back up, the graybeard sat and another man stood. “Those who walk in the way of the Lord will receive His blessings ,” he shouted, and with those words—and that marshal’s voice— I was seized. My drunkenness lifted from me. My eyes steadied, my mind ceased to yaw, my limbs stiffened with sober life. I recognized Kershaw from the newspaper illustrations. He was tall and spare, with a trimmed auburn beard and a high forehead seemingly shaped for the guarding of truths. His eyes glittered as if catching the wonders of his heavenly Guide. He paced before us, and something in him called to me. Without knowing why, I hungered for his blessing. Five years earlier, he told us, he had beenacoalshoveler in Chautauqua County. It was then that angels, and at last the Lord, had first shown themselves to him and revealed a golden scroll hidden in a cave. On this scroll he found descriptions of Peaine Island. It was the Lord’s chosen site for a holy city, a place where men would live in...

Last Man Standing: The American Who Stayed During the Rwandan Genocide - An Interview with Carl Wilkens

Carl Wilkens is a peace activist and an educator who headed up the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International in Rwanda (ADRA). He was the only American who chose to remain in Kigali, Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. His choice to remain in the country during that time of brutal atrocities resulted in the prevention of the murder of hundreds of children. Wilkens was featured in Frontline’s “Ghosts of Rwanda” and in “The Few Who Stayed: Defying Genocide,” an American Radio Works documentary broadcast on National Public Radio. He has received several humanitarian awards, including awards from Saint John’s School of Theology Seminary and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor who devotes much of his time to promoting activism for peace. Wilkens and his wife, Teresa, founded World Outside My Shoes (see http://worldoutsidemyshoes.org), a nonprofit educational and professional organization committed to inspiring and equipping people to enter the world of “the other,” which Wilkens indicates may be under our own roof or on the other side of the globe. The Wilkenses also started Pedaling for Peace (pedaling2Peace.org) and travel around the United States sharing their stories of hope. Jerri Shepard, Associate Professor in the School of Education at Gonzaga University, spoke with Wilkens on June 8, 2010.

Screening the Dykes of Oz: Lesbian Representation on Australian Television

This article provides a survey of lesbian representation in Australian-made television programming. Beginning with the 1970s, when Australia led the Anglophone world in terms of queer representation on television, the article discusses major instances of queer women appearing on Australian television including in such shows as Prisoner, Home & Away, Neighbours, All Saints, The Secret Life of Us, Last Man Standing, and Kick.

An adventure in relative time-keeping

teresting contrast to an objective reader. Allegations that are forthrightly rebutted, a waspish tone set against reasoned calmness, hearsay versus the protagonist’s own words. In sum, an entertaining interlude in a diet of other journals. The following episode, of which I was a witness, says something about Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his relationship to Arthur Eddington. About two decades ago, Chandra was awarded the Michelson–Morley Prize by Case Western Reserve University. In the public lecture that followed, he spoke about black holes and such. When he had finished and sat down, the chairman invited questions and comments from the audience. A man stood up and made a short, complicated speech ending with “Can Professor Chandrasekhar explain the paradox?” Chandra returned to the podium and, in his characteristically soft voice, said he was reminded of his good friend Eddington, who once told him, “When you really understand physics, there are no paradoxes.” B. S. Chandrasekhar (b.s.chandrasekhar@lrz.badw-muenchen.de) Walther Meissner Institute Garching, Germany

The Good Samaritan?

The Good Samaritan?

A Distraught Woman

A Distraught Woman Omar Eby (bio) I woke in the pearly morning light of Mogadishu, Somalia, to a woman's wailing, distant but steady. The wail was not raised against her husband's beating; it had no physical urgency. Rather, her keen was of a heart in distress, a spirit broken and without words for grief. When the wail seemed to come nearer, I got up and looked out of my barred bedroom window. A Somali woman thrashed about on the flat roof of the Lind house, she having climbed the metal staircase against the outside rear wall. She cried and thrust out bare arms towards the pale east. Her hair hung loose, fallen from the tight kerchief all Somali women wear. Staggering to the north edge of the roof, she looked down, her body weaving against the knee-high parapet. I thought she might jump. But she turned away and wrapped her long head scarf about her face, blinding herself as she staggered to the west wall. Now I could see her fully, and suddenly she again opened her arms, sheathed in the scarf, and threw them up rigid above her head, as though beseeching the fading western star for mercy, for quick death, her life bitter and futile. And then she screeched—a noise prehistoric and inhuman. A grief-crazed Somali woman on the Lind house roof, her cries again turning to pitiless keening! What could I do? The Lind family was on holiday in Nairobi. I would have to do something. It was another hour before Ali would come to my house. In a fog of irresolution I pulled on shorts and stamped into sandals and went down to her. When I came up to the house I could no longer see her from below. I climbed part of the way up the steps until my head was level with the roof. She must have heard the metal stairs rasp against the wall, for she whirled and stared at me with eyes wide open, yet, flat, dead in a terrible sleep. My heart pounding with fear, I still managed to call greetings to her, quietly, and urged her to come down. Had she come, I had no idea what I would do with her. But she spared [End Page 31] me that dilemma, dashing to the farthest corner, all the while, wailing. I worried that any moment now someone early on the street below would hear us, look up, and gather a wrong idea. There came to my mind Mrs. Modricker's account of drunken brawls at night in a house of Italian bachelors across the street from the Sudan Interior Mission headquarters. "Lie down! Lie down!" the men yelled as they chased the Somali tarts they had brought home. There was nothing for me to do but to return to my house and await Ali's arrival. Later he came through the door, shouting with heartless delight. "She crazy! She crazy! Crazy woman on the roof!" No, he did not know her. But, yes, he had seen her sometimes crazy in the markets, until someone came to take her away. "We must get her down," I said. "This is awful!" When Ali refused to approach the woman, I suggested he go for the police. Within minutes he returned, the policeman smart in his khaki shorts and blue beret. At first the two men stood below the house and laughed. Something the deranged woman kept repeating—vulgar or incongruous—struck them as hilarious. Eventually the officer, a mere lad, climbed the stairs to the woman, calling and gesturing that she come to him. When she refused, he rushed her. She swirled toward the roof's edge, and again I thought she would jump. But the policeman snatched at her billowing dress and wound her against him. Then shouting and scuffling, the two came down the stairs. The policeman, his voice raised half in amazement, half in anger, called something to Ali. Again their laughter rang out. Suddenly the distraught woman was docile. But the policeman did not release his hold. In the severe intimacy of his grip, the woman, disheveled and now mute, walked quietly beside him...

How Many Psychiatrists Does It Take?

How Many Psychiatrists Does It Take?

Two Men Stand Beside

Two Men Stand Beside

Colored People and Affirmative Action: The Colored Man Standing by the Punch Bowl

Colored People and Affirmative Action: The Colored Man Standing by the Punch Bowl

Christian Johnson and Pagan Hume

Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 1, April 2001, pp. 149-159 A Symposium on Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume Christian Johnson and Pagan Hume WILLIAM R. CONNOLLY It is a pleasure to be able to pay tribute to Adam Potkay's interesting and impressive book on two of the most important figures in the eighteenth century.x It brings together the philosophical and the literary, the "anatomist" and the "painter" of the passions and the moral life, integrating worlds that, however isolated they may have become in the twentieth century, were not seen as all that distinct in the eighteenth. Having said this, the most remarkable feature of Potkay's book is that it unites two figures usually thought to be opposed—the irascible, domineering, and deeply Christian Johnson and the dispassionate, moderate, and pagan Hume. Potkay's study exhibits a clear appreciation for the unified structure and purpose of Hume's work, the program of the science of human nature, from the Treatise and the Enquiries to the moral, political, historical, and economic essays. For the philosophical community he has nicely highlighted the contributions of Johnson as a moralist, drawing our attention to the philosophical underpinnings of Johnson's literary work in Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes as well as the relevant essays from The Rambler, The Adventurer, and The Idler. Finally, he draws attention to the historical importance in this period of the influence of Cicero, whose philosophical works provided not only a stylistic model much admired by Hume, but also a substantive moral contribution in the form of Cicero's eclectic, somewhat skeptical and Romanized stoicism. One may view Potkay's work as an attempt to answer the following questions . Why have Johnson and Hume traditionally been seen as antagonists? William R. Connolly is Professor of Philosophy, University of Evansville, 1800 Lincoln Avenue, Evansville, IN 47722, USA. e-mail: dc25@evansville.edu 150 William R. Connolly How does this traditional account blind us to the substantial areas of underlying agreement between them? And, what are these areas of agreement? After examining these questions, I would like to conclude by suggesting that in some fundamental ways this project of reconciliation has important limitations , due in large part to religious differences to which both Johnson and Boswell draw attention. I suspect my experience of Johnson has been fairly typical for philosophers. What we know about Samuel Johnson is pretty much limited to knowing him as the author of the great dictionary and, more likely, as the witty, irascible, even arrogant conversationalist who emerges in Boswell's Life of Johnson. Indeed , it is probably rare for philosophers, even those interested in the eighteenth century, to read Johnson and certainly not for the purposes of mining philosophical gems. (I thank Professor Potkay for getting me at least to start some of this reading.) When one turns to Boswell for references to those occasions when Johnson speaks about Hume, in nearly every case we are confronted with hostility both to the ideas and the person of Hume. Consider this gem from Boswell's account of a conversation on July 20, 1763.2 Of a gentleman who was mentioned, he said, "I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure in his principles, and wants to puzzle other people." I [Boswell] said his principles had been poisoned by a noted infidel writer [Hume], but that he was, nevertheless, a benevolent good man. [Johnson:] We can have no dependence from that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded on principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incentive to transgress its principles, I can conceive of him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there is always temptation. [One might hazard...

The Men Stood Like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name.

The Men Stood Like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name.

The Men Stood like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name.

The Men Stood like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name.

Editor’s inaugural statement

At the time that Talcott Parsons was serving as the first editor of this journal, Peter Berger was publishing his influential Invitation to Sociology. These works, though not usually mentioned together, were arguably related, in the sense that Parsons's labors constituted an "invitation to a sociology of sociology." As I begin my official term, I want to extend a similar invitation in the spirit of the dialogue to which Don Levine has so eloquently summoned us in his Visions of the Sociological Tradition. We have before us always the option of community, and our decision to embrace or reject that bond will largely determine our fate, both in academia and in the larger world of practical affairs. I share the concern about sociology's situation and status that has been ex pressed by many caring colleagues during the past decade, including Stephen and Jonathan Turner, Joan Huber and Irving Louis Horowitz. I believe there is an urgent need for creative efforts to affirm sociology and to make its value visible in ways that will enhance our legitimacy. We need to address very basic questions: What would be lost if sociology disappeared tomorrow? Who, besides ourselves, has a stake in our success? How would education, public policy, business, social service, health care, criminal justice, science, philosophy, the arts, literature, philanthropy, religion, or international relations be different? What justifies our claims to scarce resources? Let us make this journal a forum for such issues, always looking beyond mere critique to creative alternatives. I also invite you, my peers, to contribute personal stories about your own engagement with the field and about others you have known as colleagues, mentors, or intellectual influences. While we often describe sociology as sci ence, profession, or discipline, it is also a personal journey. As Robert Maclver said in his autobiography, "We live our lives as a tale that is told." In this spirit, let me offer a brief account of my own passage. A tall, serious, mostly bald-headed man stood at the front of the auditorium, before a scant audience comprising the freshman orientation session. Someone asked, "Why do you do what you do?" He paused in his customary manner, looked away and gathered his thoughts. Then, with much intensity in the dark eyes and a rather raspy voice, he replied, "I am one of the few free men left. I can stand here and criticize the Pope, the president, and anyone in between." I was surprised by the fierceness of this declaration of intellectual and moral independence.

The Men Stood like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name

The Men Stood like Iron: How the Iron Brigade Won Its Name