Random House Research Articles

Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown Daniel James Brown. Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II. New York: Penguin Random House, 2021. 540 pp. Paperback $18.00. Jonathan van Harmelen Jonathan van Harmelen JONATHAN VAN HARMELEN is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has appeared in Southern California Quarterly, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Urban History, BC Studies, and Journal of Asian American Studies. He is a columnist for the Japanese American National Museum’s blog “Discover Nikkei” and contributes to a number of Japanese community newspapers. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (3): 83–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.83 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jonathan van Harmelen; Review: Facing the Mountain: An Inspiring Story of Japanese American Patriots in World War II, by Daniel James Brown. California History 1 August 2022; 99 (3): 83–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.3.83 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search Over the past fifty years, accounts of the World War II experiences of Japanese Americans have proliferated in popular literature. Authors like James and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Richard Reeves, Julie Otsuka, and George Takei, to name just a few, have presented mainstream accounts of the camp experience, drawing either from personal experience or from extensive research. Recently, a number of authors, both Japanese American and otherwise, have attempted to retell the story of the camp experience in new ways, with some receiving acclaim. Facing the Mountain, however, is an exception. This new work by Daniel James Brown, author of the best-selling The Boys in the Boat (2013), presents riveting accounts of four Japanese American men and their journeys from prewar tranquility in Japanese communities in Hawaii and on the West Coast to the chaos and uncertainty of the war years. Along the way, each of them confronts racial discrimination... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: A Fiery Peace during the Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan (New York: Random House, 2009)

Review: A Fiery Peace during the Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan (New York: Random House, 2009)

The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas David G. Dalin (bio) The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade. By Samantha Barbas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 424 pp. Morris Ernst was one of the best-known liberal lawyers and most celebrated civil libertarians in America, serving for many years as chief legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and achieving fame as an opponent of literary censorship and representative of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. He was born in Uniontown, Alabama, in 1888, and moved to Manhattan with his family two years later. After attending the Horace Mann School, he graduated from Williams College and three years later from New York Law School, which he attended as a night student. In 1915, together with one of his Williams classmates, Ernst co-founded the New York City law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, with which he remained associated until his death in 1976. During the 1920s, influenced by the landmark free speech jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who would become his friend, Ernst began to add free speech cases to his growing legal practice. In 1927 Ernst joined the ACLU board and would remain one of the best known and most successful ACLU attorneys for the next forty years. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst became the "preeminent law firm for the left," as the law firm's "tremendous commercial practice allowed it to represent liberal causes at reduced rate or pro bono" (79). It "was also gaining a reputation as a literary law firm," becoming counsel for several major magazines … including the New Yorker and the Nation, which shared many board members with the ACLU" (79). As a civil liberties lawyer, Ernst achieved national prominence and notoriety in 1934 when he successfully defended James Joyce's highly controversial novel Ulysses against charges of obscenity. As Barbas notes, "Joyce's novel had a long history of suppression in the United States," with the post office confiscating and burning copies, though that did not stop Ulysses from being widely read (152). Ernst, a brilliantly flamboyant attorney whom Barbas describes as "a civil liberties lawyer who adored controversy," declared that Ulysses was the "only volume of literary importance still under a ban" in the country (1). He persuaded the judge that Ulysses was not obscene – that it would not corrupt even those members of society "whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (1). Following his 1934 court victory, Ulysses became [End Page 305] a best seller, and the case, while a triumph in the battle against literary and artistic censorship, also was personally enriching for Ernst, who had made a deal with Random House that if he won he would earn a royalty on every copy sold. A liberal Democrat, throughout his legal career Ernst received major political appointments from Democratic Party leaders, which enhanced his prominence and influence in American politics and public life. In 1929, Ernst, who was considered one of the state's outstanding insurance experts, was appointed by New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the state insurance commission charged with regulating all insurance business in New York. Three years later, FDR appointed Ernst to the New York State Banking Board, a powerful board established in 1932 to set rules for the regulation of the state's financial institutions. By the late 1930s, Ernst was being mentioned by the columnist Drew Pearson as a candidate for mayor of New York. In 1946, Ernst was appointed by President Harry Truman to the newly established President's Commission on Civil Rights. Though Barbas claims that Ernst remained proud of his Jewish heritage, there is almost no discussion of it in this book. Ernst apparently followed in the footsteps of his parents who were mostly religiously nonobservant, and he became estranged from Judaism as a teenager, never again setting foot inside a synagogue and holding a lifelong conviction that religion was irrational. As Barbas discusses in the second part of this book, Ernst was a man of stark contradictions, waging an intensely personal battle against communism and publicly supporting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's...

“It's the news, stupid”

“It's the news, stupid”

The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India, by Vijay Gokhale. Gurugram, India: Penguin Random House Books, 2021. 200 pp. ₹699.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India, by Vijay Gokhale. Gurugram, India: Penguin Random House Books, 2021. 200 pp. ₹699.00 (cloth).Suyash DesaiSuyash DesaiNational Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 88July 2022 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720168 Views: 24Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Precursory Prevention: Togetherness for Better Health

Precursory Prevention: Togetherness for Better Health

The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll

Reviewed by: The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith by James Carroll Peter Steinfels The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul, A Memoir of Faith. By James Carroll. New York: Random House, 2021. 383 pp. $28.99. In August of 2018 something in James Carroll “snapped” (25). He stopped going to Mass. The cause, surprisingly, was Pope Francis. In Carroll’s view, the pope’s statements in visiting Ireland of shame and sorrow at priests’ molestation of minors was shockingly insufficient and Francis’s denial of previous knowledge about the harsh church-run Magdalene asylums for unwed mothers was preposterous. Carroll’s response was this exposé of what he considers the “essential pathology” at the root of all these abuses—the priesthood itself and its poisonous clericalism (57). His book weaves together church history, theology, and personal memoir of his own anguishing journey in and out of the priesthood. In fact, James Carroll’s anguishing over his Catholicism began, it seems, at age six or seven when he learned about heaven, hell, the need for Confession, and the doctrine of “no salvation outside the church.” He lived, by his account, in dread of eternal hellfire, in dread of the damnation of his Jewish best friend, and later in adolescent dread of a nuclear armageddon. Rescued from this “God of doom” by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, Carroll sought ordination to the priesthood (157). Then, as a campus chaplain in the late sixties, he took his anguish public, joining demonstrations against the Vietnam War, denouncing the American hierarchy’s acquiescence in the war, and challenging the [End Page 85] church’s refusal to ordain women with liturgical improvisations. After five years, he left the priesthood. He took his anguish, however, to a wider audience as a writer for the Boston Globe and New Yorker, and in a prize-winning 1996 memoir, An American Requiem. Carroll traces the church’s corruption, first, to the anti-Jewish turn of early Christianity in its struggle with emerging rabbinic Judaism and, second, to the assumption of imperial roles after Constantine. But the main sources are “the two most controlling works of Christian theology ever written”: (104) St. Anselm’s “inhumane theology” (103) of atonement and St. Augustine’s theology of original sin. “Augustine and Anselm together gave to us a doom-threatening monster God,” as well as “totalitarian sexual repressiveness” (118), misogyny, and mandatory celibacy. “Humans are fallen. God damns sinners. God damns sex, especially female sex” (104). “From this omnipotent, sadistic God, as Catholics are taught, only a Catholic priest can offer rescue—a deep-seated theology that undergirds clericalism and its worst abuses” (104). Carroll’s alternative to this hateful God and abusing church veers from the familiar to the radical. He can, finally, wax positively about Pope Francis, call for expanding the diaconate to women and the priesthood to the married, welcome the “popular” Catholicism of devotions and prayers, look forward to the continuing work of Catholic schools, universities, hospitals, and religious orders—while simultaneously advocating an “anti-clericalism from within,” a magisterium-free, lay-run, do-it-yourself church that reads very much like the self-styled underground church of the 1970s and 1980s. He also declares the need to radically reinterpret “key symbols of revelation,” including Jesus and the Godhead—eliminating some traditional beliefs while stoutly protecting but perhaps significantly recasting the language of others (274). His “explicitly Christian affirmation of a kind of secular faith” is frustratingly brief and ambiguous (275). Its bottom line is “In Jesus, we know we are not alone—not even at death,” but he offers no explanation of what that might actually mean (263). For Carroll, the personal is often the paradigmatic. Not every Catholic child lived in fear of damnation, even in benighted pre-Vatican II days. More than a few nuns were kind enough to explain that to get to hell you had to do something really bad, like rob a bank or murder your brother. If they mentioned “no salvation outside the church” at all, they were quick...

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Reviewed by: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed Catherine Clinton All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake. Tiya Miles. New York: Random House, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5499-5, 416 pp., cloth, $28.00 On Juneteenth. Annette Gordon-Reed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1, 152 pp., cloth, $15.95. A few years ago I began labeling my graduate course "Civil War and Emancipation," in recognition of the turn within the academy, with scholarship rippling outward into a more diverse audience and perhaps trickling down into textbooks and curriculum. A slow, deliberate change from the days of the Civil War centennial—as the 1960s was an era of racialized conflagrations, and a national commemoration fraught with competing, explosive agendas. By the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011–15, the destruction of slavery was acknowledged as a major war aim of the federal government. During the past half century, historians of nineteenthcentury America escalated the debates over war's cause and effect to include the significance of Emancipation and the struggles during and after Reconstruction by former slaves and Black Americans seeking rights and citizenship. This new era has yielded a bounty of important, prizewinning work. A large contingent of Civil War scholars are engaged in including Black perspectives and African American resources to reshape the era. During this same transformative turn, women have come to the forefront, both as scholars of the slave experience and as a dynamic topic within Black history: African American women in slavery and freedom. When I dipped my toe into the Civil War field during the 1980s after being immersed in African American history during the '60s and women's history during the '70s, little did I imagine the creative and interventionist ways these fields might meet to create an era of intersectionalism. However, there were clearly visionary scholars at work, paving the way. These two new books by Tiya Miles and Annette Gordon-Reed herald an era of metanarrative, whereby prizewinning authors challenge the fallacy of objectivism. Their bracing, interrogative [End Page 217] accounts allow readers to experience the full powers of their intellects and narrative gifts. Surely the bevy of prizes won in 2021 by Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Association for Women Historians, among others) signals the way Civil War studies is seeking important new terrain to bring this burgeoning field into alignment with the twenty-first century. Tiya Miles's new volume, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake, follows a productive parade of impressive books, including a novel (The Cherokee Rose). Miles's historical talents were evident from her first monograph, Ties That Bound (winning the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in 2006) to her 2017 Dawn of Detroit (awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize), receiving a MacArthur Fellowship (2011) along the way. Her scholarship has always been praised as meticulous, and she earns accolades for her prose style, which is characterized as both "luminous" and "accessible." In the story of Ashley's sack, we are given layered lessons about the historian's craft. How does one approach an object? What are the objectives for the story to be told? What is the value of speculation? How does the empowerment of context supply content when no particulars are evident, when no evidence is forthcoming? Miles patiently pieces together her story as brilliantly and creatively as the recovered sack deposited at Middleton plantation. It is not just an object for a repository, but the beginning of a journey for Miles—who takes the family history of the ancestor Rose, who lovingly prepared this cotton bag for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley's sale and departure. Ripped away from her home, from her family—with a tattered dress, three handfuls of nuts, a lock of her mother's hair, and the...

The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas Joseph M. Hassett (bio) THE RISE AND FALL OF MORRIS ERNST, FREE SPEECH RENEGADE, by Samantha Barbas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 424 pp. $35.00 cloth, ebook. Morris Ernst (1888-1976) was the lawyer who developed and presented arguments that won judicial determinations that James Joyce's novel Ulysses was not obscene. These victories fundamentally changed the law of obscenity in both the United States and England and established authors' right to present the world as they saw it. Ernst's life merits this wide-ranging and fascinating biography by an author with the impressive credentials of Samantha Barbas, who holds a doctorate in history from Berkeley, a law degree from Stanford, and a professorship at the University at Buffalo School of Law. As told in this biography, Ernst's life is a testament to what an individual can accomplish through talent, hard work, and a desire to make public and private institutions deliver a better and freer life for everyone. Barbas shows how Ernst used his considerable abilities to advocate for social reform and civil liberties in court, before legislative bodies, on committees, in the press, during dinners, and on many other occasions. He was a whirlwind. Barbas deftly situates Ernst's accomplishments in the context of the social and political history of his times. Reviewing the book foregrounds the problem faced by one of Ernst's contemporaries in trying to write about him: "There are too many facets, too many angles, and I keep floundering around simply trying to decide which one to grab at next" (292).1 This review deals with the problem by focusing primarily on a subject in which readers of this publication will be particularly interested: the book's account of the Ulysses litigation. The subject merits careful attention because the struggle for authorial freedom is never over, and the arguments that worked for Ulysses will be needed again. Those that failed should be avoided. In this context, Barbas's treatment of litigation forming the backdrop against which Ernst achieved his victories is troubling. The earlier case arose in 1920 out of the publication of episodes of Ulysses in The Little Review. The magazine's editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were prosecuted on obscenity charges in a New York City court for publishing part of episode XIII, in which Leopold Bloom ejaculates while looking at Gerty MacDowell's exposed "nainsook knickers."2 Barbas's authoritative voice tells readers that New York attorney John Quinn made a "persuasive argument" by urging that "Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it" (152). [End Page 726] In fact, Quinn's argument was not persuasive at all. The first judicial officer who heard it, Magistrate Joseph Corrigan, promptly ruled that the passage "where the man went off in his pants" was unmistakable in meaning and obscene within the meaning of the statute.3 More importantly, it was a disservice to Joyce and the cause of free expression for Quinn to ignore the beauty and truth of Ulysses in favor of the false assertion that the years Joyce devoted to creating a masterpiece resulted in an unintelligible text. Joyce himself did not find Quinn's argument persuasive. After reading reports of Quinn's performance, he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver that "the offence is less grotesque than the defence!"4 The important lesson of Quinn's loss and Ernst's win is that an articulate explication of the societal importance of literature was needed—not rhetorical tricks. This biography's use as a guide for protecting speech is also limited by its uncritical repetition of Random House founder Bennett Cerf's account of how Ernst found a way around judicial "resistance to hearing expert testimony in obscenity cases" (156). In this telling, the key to defeating obscenity charges was to paste favorable reviews onto the book that would be mailed into the United States. The theory was that the book itself "would be introduced as evidence" (156) in proceedings that followed its seizure by customs officials. Readers may scratch their...

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente

Reviewed by: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente Stacie Charbonneau Hess Jesse Wente. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance. Canada: Penguin Random House, 2021. 198 pp. Hardcover, $29.95 CAN / $22.95 US. Jesse Wente believes in a good story. He has built his career around story-telling: first, as a film student, then a radio columnist, a film critic, and now holding one of the most influential positions in Canada—Director of the Indigenous Screen Office—which was established in 2018. If Wente believes in a good story, he believes even more in "narrative sovereignty," defined by him as "the idea that people, communities, and nations should control their own stories and the tools used in that storytelling" (168). In the context of his memoir, Unreconciled, he is referring to the narrative sovereignty of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, those peoples whose presence preceded the invention of Canada by thousands of years. When Indigenous stories are told by another group—say, the powerful film industry moguls in Hollywood, or the white editor of a popular magazine—that's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the very topic for which Wente became a household name in Canada in 2017, after he cried on live television. Although there are many emotionally charged passages in Wente's memoir, two scenes might become painfully engraved in the readers' minds. The first is ten-year-old Jesse playing softball on his home turf in Toronto, when a crowd of neighborhood kids taunt him with a war whoop. Wente recognizes the sound—not as one he has ever made, or heard, in real life—but as one from Saturday morning cartoons. That war whoop is Wente's first experience with blatant racism, and shapes his ideas about Hollywood (mis)representation. In another blistering scene, Wente breaks down and sobs in emotional exhaustion on a live morning talk show—some three decades later. His exhaustion reaches its peak after a public battle over a now-legendary 2017 issue of Write magazine that featured all indigenous authors, authors whose names [End Page 260] would be obscured by the ensuing drama over cultural appropriation. Wente's exhaustion is with the white-centeredness of everything in Canada—even an issue that is supposed to celebrate indigenous writers. He is careful to name each of those writers in a chapter called "The Power to Tell Our Own Stories." Throughout the book, Wente's frustration is palpable, and Unreconciled reads as a manifesto to his educated, well-thought-out torment as a person still processing trauma as he presses on in the face of it. Wente is American and Anishinaabe, a member of the Serpent River First Nation. His grandmother Norma, to whom this book is dedicated, was a student in Spanish for ten years at a residential school. Despite living with Jesse for his entire adolescence, she spoke of it only once. Two generations separated from both the Reserve and the Ojibwe language, Wente laments that his upwardly mobile, English-speaking family is "the exact type of Indians residential schools were designed to produce" (17). In this way, Wente's story is a familiar one. He calls the "damage wrought by residential schools" his family's "unwanted inheritance" (75). Wente's parents are executives and he attended private high school. One chapter is even named: "Ojibwe Enough." Yet, the memoir does more than admit to the complication of straddling two identities; Wente's stories interweave personal tribulations in the context of the changing political landscape of Canada. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was issued in 2015, seven years and six thousand interviews after it began. Whether the country has lived up to its intention to recreate a more equitable Canada is, according to Wente, not even a matter for debate. Despite the fact that Canada is years ahead of the United States in terms of reckoning with its genocidal past, Wente insists the wound colonialism has caused is still wide open, and not even healing. Unreconciled can be at times jarring and uncomfortable—but maybe that is the point. A nation can't get to the Reconciliation part without wading in the...

Cristina Giorcelli, Botteghe Oscure e la letteratura statunitense, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2021, pp. 378.

Dear Ian, as a member of this Review’s Editorial Board and as a scholar of Williams, I want to inform you and our readers that I have just published a book on Botteghe Oscure and American literature (Botteghe Oscure e la letteratura statunitense, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2021, pp. 378), in which Williams plays a significant role. As the book is in Italian (except for all the documents in English cited in it), I am writing this letter to alert our readers of its publication.When six years ago I spent a month at the Ransom Center in Austin to read in its holdings concerning the literary journal Botteghe Oscure (1948–1960), I was astonished to find out that in the US everybody interested in literature—from the US or elsewhere—knew of the publication which is the topic of my volume. In my own country, when I mentioned the topic of my research I always had to explain that no, I had not changed my interests: I was not writing on the Italian Communist Party (which used to have its national head-quarters in Via delle Botteghe Oscure). “Nemo propheta in patria” [Nobody is a prophet in their own land] referred, this time, to the journal not to the Party!But, perhaps, my compatriots had some justification for being so oblivious: the journal—which Princess Marguerite Caetani (born Gibert Chapin, from Waterford, Connecticut) founded, sponsored, and edited—published more US writers than from any other nation and language: of slightly more than 600, there were 210 that came out in its 25 issues. In the Western world, this review was the first one to publish—basically without translations—its contributions in five (six, Williams would say) languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and . . . the American idiom, of course! Previously, while she was living with her family in France, Princess Caetani had founded and sponsored the review Commerce (1924–1932; edited by Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fabre, and Valery Larbaud), in which contributions from all over the world and from the past as well as from the present, were almost always translated into French. Botteghe Oscure, her second editorial enterprise, was thus decidedly more cosmopolitan. Even if her main aim was to present young, still unknown writers, Marguerite Caetani was proud to also propose works by such established artists as e. e. Cummings, Marianne. Moore, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, George Santayana, Robert P. Warren, Marguerite Young, and Williams. The correspondence that she entertained with these and younger writers (from James Wright, to Richard Wilbur, from Robert Lowell to Peter Viereck, from Cynthia Ozick to W.S. Merwin and Elizabeth Bishop)—held in the Marguerite Caetani Fund in Rome or in several US Archives—is of great interest both for the opinions expressed in these letters and for the idiosyncrasies as well as well for the acts of generosity and dignity that sometimes emerge.Through her half-sister, Katherine Garrison Chapin (a fellow in American letters at the Library of Congress and the spouse of the former Attorney General Francis Biddle), Marguerite Caetani had been put in touch with Williams. He appeared four times in the review with previously unpublished work, as this was one of its prerequisites: in 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1953. Since she was so lavish in her payments that authors would often (more or less gladly) meet her requests, Williams too, on one occasion, had to change a few words in The Desert Music as she found them too . . . daring. At times, she was “from another generation and New England,” as her editorial secretary, Eugene Walter, once described her. But this is not all: for a few months, their relationship suffered from some incomprehension as some letters show. Loyalty and understanding being at the basis of their personality, however, this coldness did not last long: when Marguerite Caetani heard of his second stroke, she immediately wrote to him and their friendship continued on definitely firmer ground. So much so that Williams wrote a very warm review of the book (published in the US) by the French poet whom she valued above all others: René Char. To please her he may have gone even further: he may also have written a Preface to this volume—a Preface that, not authored by any of the several critics whom she addressed to this purpose, was finally rejected by the director of Random House and that I have been able to transcribe in the present volume.These years of research on and about the journal made me more aware of something that, of course, is intrinsic to the life and the vicissitudes of a periodical: the encounter/exchange, debate/fight that is always entailed in an enterprise devised to promote culture must also bear with much human frailty.

Book review: Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, New Power: How Anyone Can Persuade, Mobilize, and Succeed in Our Chaotic, Connected Age

Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, New Power: How Anyone Can Persuade, Mobilize, and Succeed in Our Chaotic, Connected Age (Reprint edition published on 26 February 2019). New York: Anchor Books, Penguin Random House LLC, 2018, 325 pp., ₹1015.00. ISBN-978-1-101-97110-9 (Paperback).

“An Old Black Woman” and “Zora of Orange County” as Patriarchal Subjects

My essay unpacks what exactly is meant by the term “patriarchy,” and how this ideology impacts Black women’s lives. I take my definition of ideology from Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970), in which he defines “ideology” as a way of thinking, and discusses how these ways of thinking influence social interactions (1300). Reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1945 poem, “An Old Black Woman, Homeless and Indistinct,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, How it Feels to be Coloured Me through an Althussarian lens, we begin to understand how the patriarchy challenges Black women’s self-actualization. For example, in both Brooks’ and Hurston’s work, belittling diction emphasises how Black women are “always already” (Althusser 1304) infantilized by the patriarchy. Furthermore, both writers’ use of chremamorphism elucidates how patriarchal objectification disempowers Black women. Finally, Brooks’ and Hurston’s reliance on allusion suggests that Black women’s behaviour is conditioned by arts that reinforce patriarchal thought. While Brooks’ “Old Black Woman” is made to accept it, Hurston attempts to counter patriarchal oppression. Ultimately, I use Althusser to explore how Brooks’ “Old Black Woman” and Hurston are disempowered by patriarchal ideology as yet another means by which Black women’s behaviour is controlled. Insofar as they comment on the relationship between patriarchal and racist ideologies, Brooks and Hurston are early intersectional activists. We cannot continue our intersectional activism without first understanding what exactly we mean when we say the word “patriarchy,” and how this ideology impacts women—and in particular, Black women, like Brooks’ subject and Hurston herself. 
 Works Cited in Abstract: 
 Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Jeffrey J. Williams, Norton, 2018, pp. 1285-1311. 
 Brooks, Gwendolyn. “An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct.” African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young, Penguin Random House, 2000, p. 289-290. 
 Hurston, Zora Neale. “How it Feels to be Coloured Me.” The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Literary Non-Fiction. 2nd ed., edited by Lisa Chalkyoff, Neta Gordon and Paul Lumsden, Broadview Press, 2018, pp. 40-43.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

Book Reviews

Brown B. Random House; 2021. Hardcover; 336 pages.Finding the right words to describe a feeling should be easy enough. But is it? The COVID-19 pandemic has taught nurses many things, and one of the biggest lessons is the importance of using the right words to describe a state of mind to avoid being misunderstood. From the nurses who have worked tirelessly at the frontline, to the managers who have worked behind the scenes to support their staff, to the invaluable nursing assistants and technicians, as health care professionals nurses are utterly exhausted. What nurses have experienced is more than burnout; it is more than compassion fatigue. Nurses are traumatized. In addition, nurses feel invisible in many ways. Invisibility, in Brené Brown’s latest book Atlas of the Heart, is defined as No one shows up to work to feel invisible. Nurses show up to work to make a difference in the patients’ lives that are entrusted to them. Each person who shows up to fight another day is more than resilient. A person cannot show up to care for others, 3 years into a pandemic, and not be resilient. Although I left the hospital in April 2021 to lend my voice to nursing in a different way, I know the strength that it takes to put on those scrubs and show up to work day after day.In Atlas of the Heart I found many compelling words that describe the world so many nurses live in right now—words that define nurses’ experiences and how they feel disconnected from family, friends, hospital administration, and even themselves. I also found words that can help nurses share their experiences with people outside of health care.I do not mean to tell nurses to buck up, to find their inner peace with yoga, or to keep going to work for the pizza parties. I recommend reading this book because it might help nurses figure out how to best put into words their feelings. Reading this book will not fix staffing ratios, salaries, or lack of supplies, but it may give nurses a moment of peace and the knowledge that they are not alone. Our collective voice will be heard and we will fight to lead the next generations of nurses so they will not feel invisible. This atlas of language can help ensure we are both heard and understood.McConaughey M. Crown Publishing Group; 2020. Hardcover; 304 pages.In this memoir, Matthew McConaughey shares stories, insights, and philosophies. He reminds us that life is short and we should cherish the simple things. This book emphasizes that we are all human and mistakes can and will be made. What often feels like a roadblock could be a green light down the road. If you listen to the audiobook, you will be able to enjoy McConaughey’s inflections and laid-back story telling.Gawande A. Picador; 2010. Paperback; 240 pages.The Checklist Manifesto is an easy read about finding simplicity in how we organize our thoughts and actions in a high-stress environment, with consistency and safety always at the focus. Using a checklist keeps everyone on the same page, even when we are in the middle of hundreds of actionable items that we face in our acute and critical care settings every day. For brand-new nurses, especially as they gain their footing and transition into independent practice, this book provides the backstory as to why we encourage the use of a checklist to start the day.

Safeguarding planetary health for southeast Asia's future children

Safeguarding planetary health for southeast Asia's future children

A Letter from Eugene O'Neill to Patrick McCartan (June 11, 1934); or, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and Days Without End (April 16, 1934)

A Letter from Eugene O'Neill to Patrick McCartan (June 11, 1934); or, Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, and <i>Days Without End</i> (April 16, 1934)

Assessment of the Treatment Strategies of Random housing in Ramadi City from the perspective of Sustainable Transport by Using (AHP&amp;GIS)

The phenomenon of random housing in Ramadi city is one of the important planning challenges facing the city, especially after rapid growth rates of urban and population grow thing in the city, hence the importance of research is to prove that sustainable transport planning has a prominent role in addressing this problem and producing many social economic and environmental problems. This study aims to determine the role and importance of transport and sustainability planning criteria for the proposed strategies to address the informal housing spread in the city neighborhoods and sectors within and outside the boundaries of the master plan of the city.The use of Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which combines descriptive and quantitative analysis, will depend on the available data for city at the present time ; as well as, on the expertise of specialists and persons concerned in the subject through a questionnaire to reach the most important factors that affecting random housing from the point of sustainable transport on one hand and in addition to prioritizing treatment according to the proposed strategies presented to planners and local authorities in the city.The research encountered a number of difficulties and obstacles, the most important of which is the scarcity of data and information available in the subject, which led to personally analyze data and resort to the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for the purposes of quantitative and geometrical analysis. The main results for the basic criteria affecting the role of sustainable transport on Ramadi city by gradation from top to lowest ,( i.e. environmental criterion, followed by economic, social, and finally schematic). As for secondary standards, the highest value was the share of the standard of treatment of residential destroyed areas, within the environmental criterion, and the lowest value is the calibration of road efficiency within the planning criterion.

Book review: Shivshankar Menon, India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present

Shivshankar Menon, India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2021), vii + 406 pp.

Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne

Reviewed by: Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne Mason Whitehorn Powell (bio) SET AT RANDOM: THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T LIE DOWN, by Declan Dunne. CreateSpace: Self-Published, 2018. 287 pp. $12.00. I would like to know what Declan Dunne set out to say by writing Set at Random. His novel meanders a bit alongside its protagonist, Set Wright, beginning in Pendleton, Texas, during the "'29 cotton-picking season'" (1). This specific seasonal detail, like many others, does not color the novel so much as it hangs undeveloped. Intriguing subject matter and an engaging plot struggle to develop a clear path. What begins as a bildungsroman, where bankers take farmhouses from hapless families, develops into a battle against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice's attempt to censor James Joyce's Ulysses. Wright relocates to New York City, where he is taken under the wing of an Irish-American family, the Finnegans, and finds himself working for Bennett Cerf and Donald Knopfler of Random House and [End Page 376] their attorney Morris Ernst.1 Thus: Set (works) at Random (House), filing paperwork for the imminent court case—United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—and is eventually sent to Paris to meet with the Joyces and their coterie as the verdict is reached. Dunne's story searches for a sense of purpose and direction without clear realization, which mirrors the nature and execution of its protagonist's journey. Dunne makes it overtly clear that this is a novel of parallelism: if Wright, with his Texas mettle, did not envision the foreclosing banker and artistic censor as one and the same, then his evolution from admitted ignorance to the center of the Joycean controversy by happenstance would not have occurred. "Make sure they're heard—the people they're trying to silence," a mentor says to Wright early in the text in Texas (21). The repetition of circumstance and patterns is not simply a trick in the Ulysses playbook appropriated by Dunne but rather a surface-level theme of which Wright becomes consciously aware, and it consistently pops up in dialogue from beginning to end. Here are examples: "You remind me of Joyce." "Who's she?" [Wright asks, now in New York City]. "James Joyce. His book, Ulysses, takes a lot from Homer's Odyssey. So people read one and refer to the other trying to find connections or where Joyce has reflected the story in Ulysses. That's if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses. You have found, Set, at an early age that life repeats itself in strange ways. I think you might have the mind of an artist." "I don't know about that, Mr. Finnegan. What do you mean, if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses? Is it nearly sold out?" "No," Mr. Finnegan answered. "It's banned." "You mean they won't let him talk?" (42) A question worth asking is whether the novel is more about the battle for publication rights to Joyce's book or the agency of its protagonist's life. Wright seems to be at the mercy of greater cosmic forces that guide him, and whether this is coincidence or randomness, it really is up to the author. If Wright was removed from the world Dunne created, Joyce's novel would become unbanned anyway. His presence, however, highlights the reality of both small and large figures who advocated for Joyce and fought to defend Ulysses. Even if the novel is heavy-handed, it does provide a unique perspective on the ontological divide between reality and fiction: that words and ideas, like people, must be protected when threatened. How Dunne goes about this is not seamless and epic, as in Ulysses, yet the author's prose is clear and his ideas straightforward. The novel is an engaging read if approached with an expectation that it does not shed new light on Joycean scholarship but instead refracts it through the eyes of a boy from Texas on a white-knight mission. [End Page 377] Set at Random lacks the sensuousness, mental entanglement, and iconoclasm that...