Author: Peter Hart-Brinson File Type: epub The generational and social thinking changes that caused an unprecedented shift toward support for gay marriage How did gay marriagesomething unimaginable two decades agocome to feel inevitable to even its staunchest opponents? Drawing on over 95 interviews with two generations of Americans, as well as historical analysis and public opinion data, Peter Hart-Brinson argues that a fundamental shift in our understanding of homosexuality sparked the generational change that fueled gay marriages unprecedented rise. Hart-Brinson shows that the LGBTQ movements evolution and tactical responses to oppression caused Americans to reimagine what it means to be gay and what gay marriage would mean to society at large. While older generations grew up imagining gays and lesbians in terms of their behavior, younger generations came to understand them in terms of their identity. Over time, as the older generation and their ideas slowly passed away, they were replaced by a new generational culture that brought gay marriage to all fifty states. Through revealing interviews, Hart-Brinson explores how different age groups embrace, resist, and create societys changing ideas about gay marriage. Religion, race, contact with gay people, and the power of love are all topics that weave in and out of these fascinating accounts, sometimes influencing opinions in surprising ways. The book captures a wide range of voices from diverse social backgrounds at a critical moment in the culture wars, right before the turn of the tide. The story of gay marriages rapid ascent offers profound insights about how the continuous remaking of the population through birth and death, mixed with our personal, biographical experiences of our shared history and culture, produces a society that is continually in flux and constantly reinventing itself anew. An intimate portrait of social change with national implications, The Gay Marriage Generation is a significant contribution to our understanding of what causes generational change and how gay marriage became the reality in the United States. **

Author: James Cracraft File Type: pdf In his new book, Two Shining Souls, James Cracraft explores the decades-long encounter of Jane Addams, the famous American social reformer and peace activist, with Leo Tolstoy, the acclaimed Russian writer and sage. He documents Tolstoys influence in Progressive-era America and particularly on Addamss career, citing previously unknown or neglected sources. In addition to her study of Tolstoys writingshis now largely forgotten religious tracts more than his celebrated fictionAddams traveled to Russia to see him personally, a meeting that is recounted in detail. Late in her life, Addams described Tolstoy as a rare shining soul, a term, Cracraft suggests, that applies equally well to her. His book adds an enduring religious dimension to Addamss rich legacy while newly delimiting, by contrast, the legacy of Tolstoy. The story of Addams and Tolstoy brings into focus issues of continuing public concern, including the often conflicting demands on the individualparticularly womenof family and society the legitimacy of violence in pursuit of political aims the problem of poverty the role of government in social reform and the place of religion in both public and private life. The distinctive ways in which these emblematic figures dealt with such controversial issues offer insights that may be valuable even today. Yet the single most important link between Addams and Tolstoy was their preoccupation with the question of peace, which they understood as a value subsuming all other values or goods. So Two Shining Souls is also about the invention and spread of pacifism in 19th-century Europe and America and the great crisis in its history precipitated by World War I. **

Author: Gerald M. Edelman File Type: pdf We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the many current cognitive and behavioral approaches to the brain that leave biology out of the picture, and argues that the workings of the brain more closely resemble the living ecology of a jungle than they do the activities of a computer. Some startling conclusions emerge from these ideas individuality is necessarily at the very center of what it means to have a mind, no creature is born value-free, and no physical theory of the universe can claim to be a theory of everything without including an account of how the brain gives rise to the mind. There is no greater scientific challenge than understanding the brain. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a book that provides a window on that understanding.From Publishers WeeklyIn this challenging, exhilarating leap by a disciplined and original mind, Nobel Prize-winner Edelman (medicine, 1972) throws a neurobiological line between two ships--mind and matter--in the stormiest of scientific seas. In his defense of the biological component of mind, Edelman ( The Remembered Pres ent ) disposes of cognitive and behavioral theories of consciousness. To take up the slack, he extends current developments in brain neuroscience well into speculation. He is far too modest in stating that his goal is to dispel the notion that the mind can be understood in the absence of biology, for the book is a near-kinetic series of critiques and proposals to connect physics and psychology. The Harmonies section draws on other disciplines--philosophy, linguistics and psychiatry, among others--to entwine these tendrils of thought into a unified theory of mind. Illustrations not seen by PW . Natural Science Book Club selection. 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalEdelman, Nobel laureate and director of the Neurosciences Institute, is the author of three previous books on the biology of the brain. His latest book advances the theory that the mind has arisen through evolutionary morphology. According to Edelman, the mind is not a kind of computer but a product of the biological forms that have developed through natural selection. To support his theory, Edelman offers a mini-course in modern molecular biology and development. By the authors own admission, this is strenuous reading, complete with strange vocabulary. Nevertheless, Edelman presents his theory with enthusiasm and a genuine desire to discover the origins of the mind. Readers well-grounded in physics, biology, and philosophy will find his ideas extremely challenging. Primarily for academic libraries.- Laurie Bartolini, Lincoln Lib., Springfield, Ill. 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Alexander Klose File Type: pdf We live in a world organized around the container. Standardized twenty- and forty-foot shipping containers carry material goods across oceans and over land provide shelter, office space, and storage capacity inspire films, novels, metaphors, and paradigms. Today, TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit, the official measurement for shipping containers) has become something like a global currency. A container ship, sailing under the flag of one country but owned by a corporation headquartered in another, carrying auto parts from Japan, frozen fish from Vietnam, and rubber ducks from China, offers a vivid representation of the increasing, world-is-flat globalization of the international economy. In The Container Principle, Alexander Klose investigates the principle of the container and its effect on the way we live and think. Klose explores a series of container situations in their historical, political, and cultural contexts. He examines the container as a time capsule, sometimes breaking loose and washing up onshore to display an inventory of artifacts of our culture. He explains the Matryoshka principle, explores the history of land-water transport, and charts the three phases of container history. He examines the rise of logistics, the containerization of computing in the form of modularization and standardization, the architecture of container-like housing (citing both Le Corbusier and Malvina Reynoldss Little Boxes), and a range of artistic projects inspired by containers. Containerization, spreading from physical storage to organizational metaphors, Klose argues, signals a change in the fundamental order of thinking and things. It has become a principle. **Review Globalization has created a landscape of shipping containers. Against the methodological background of media theory, Alexander Kloses kaleidoscopic essay traces the containerization of the world. This book explains why the container became an icon of global trade and a powerful object of imaginations. (Monika Dommann, University of Zurich) Klose captures the rise of the infrastructural as a key dynamic in our global world. He explodes the conceptual boundaries of the term, and therewith makes that familiar term unrecognizable, an exciting window into material realities of todays world. (Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy) The Container Principle captures the fear and imagination inspired by our logistics-driven world. Klose describes the paradoxes of the container how it collapses time and space and how it has become the most dynamic, networked object on both land and sea. (Julia Christensen, Assistant Professor of Integrated Media Art, Oberlin College author of Big Box Reuse) About the Author Alexander Klose is a researcher and curator in the program department of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.