Author: Lester Friedman
File Type: pdf
A smug glance at the seventies-the so-called Me Decade-unveils a kaleidoscope of big hair, blaring music, and broken politics-all easy targets for satire, cynicism, and ultimately even nostalgia. American Cinema of the 1970s, however, looks beyond the strobe lights to reveal how profoundly the seventies have influenced American life and how the films of that decade represent a peak moment in cinema history. Far from a placid era, the seventies was a decade of social upheavals. Events such as the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities, the Watergate investigations, the legalization of abortion, and the end of the American involvement in Vietnam are only a few among the many landmark occurrences that challenged the foundations of American culture. The director-driven movies of this era reflect this turmoil, experimenting with narrative structures, offering a gallery of scruffy antiheroes, and revising traditional genre conventions. Bringing together ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Jaws, Rocky, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now. Lester D. Friedman is the Senior Scholar-in-Residence in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of numerous books on film.ReviewContributors acknowledge the difficulty of characterizing a decade that birthed both the young (mostly male) auteur and the commercial blockbuster. Discussions of blaxploitation and sexploitation films and the increase in films celebrating male power and authority are particularly strong. Recommended. --Choice About the AuthorLester D. Friedman is the Senior Scholar-in-Residence in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and the author of numerous books on film.
Author: Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
File Type: pdf
The artist Lee Lozano (1930--1999) began her career as a painter her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozanos Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave. And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozanos most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artists entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozanos act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artists practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.
Author: Jean Bignon
File Type: pdf
Biochemistry, Pathology and Genetics of Pulmonary Emphysema documents the proceedings of an international symposium held in Sassari, Italy, 27-30 April 1980. Research on the origins of emphysema has acquired more importance than functional diagnostic studies. There are various hypotheses concerning the development of emphysema. Some cases of emphysema are linked to defects in metabolic functions of the vessels while others are linked to a disturbance in repair processes. The papers in this volume are organized into four sections. Section 1 contains studies on the pathology and biochemistry of lung connective tissue. Section 2 deals with animal models. Section 3 on proteases and antiproteases includes studies on the characteristics and identification of biological specimens, and alpha1-proteinase inhibitor. Section 4 takes up the risk factors and therapeutic approaches for lung disease. Other papers in the volume were presented during two roundtable discussions on the biochemistry of connective tissue components in emphysema and therapeutic approaches.**
Author: Jim Storr
File Type: epub
King Arthurs Wars describes one of the biggest archaeological finds of our times yet there is nothing new to see. There are secrets hidden in plain sight. We speak English today, because the Anglo-Saxons took over most of post-Roman Britain. How did that happen? There is little evidence not much little archaeology, and even less written history. There is, however, a huge amount of speculation. King Arthurs Wars brings an entirely new approach to the subject. The answers are out there, in the countryside, waiting to be found. Months of field work and map study allow us to understand, for the first time, how the Anglo-Saxons conquered England county by county and decade by decade. King Arthurs Wars exposes what the landscape and the place names tell us. As a result, we can now know far more about this Dark Age. What is so special about Essex? Why is Buckinghamshire an odd shape? Why is the legend of King Arthur so special to us? Why dont Cumbrian farmers use English numbers, when they count sheep? Why dont we know where Camelot was? Why did the Romano-British stop eating oysters? King Arthurs Wars tells that story.
Author: Thomas J. Sargent
File Type: pdf
The Big Problem of Small Change offers the first credible and analytically sound explanation of how a problem that dogged monetary authorities for hundreds of years was finally solved. Two leading economists, Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde, examine the evolution of Western European economies through the lens of one of the classic problems of monetary history--the recurring scarcity and depreciation of small change. Through penetrating and clearly worded analysis, they tell the story of how monetary technologies, doctrines, and practices evolved from 1300 to 1850 of how the standard formula was devised to address an age-old dilemma without causing inflation. One big problem had long plagued commodity money (that is, money literally worth its weight in gold) governments were hard-pressed to provide a steady supply of small change because of its high costs of production. The ensuing shortages hampered trade and, paradoxically, resulted in inflation and depreciation of small change. After centuries of technological progress that limited counterfeiting, in the nineteenth century governments replaced the small change in use until then with fiat money (money not literally equal to the value claimed for it)--ensuring a secure flow of small change. But this was not all. By solving this problem, suggest Sargent and Velde, modern European states laid the intellectual and practical basis for the diverse forms of money that make the world go round today. This keenly argued, richly imaginative, and attractively illustrated study presents a comprehensive history and theory of small change. The authors skillfully convey the intuition that underlies their rigorous analysis. All those intrigued by monetary history will recognize this book for the standard that it is. **
Author: John Dixon Hunt
File Type: pdf
The great English writer and gardener John Evelyn (16201706) kept a diary all his life. Today, this diary is considered an invaluable source of information on more than fifty years of social, cultural, religious, and political life in seventeenth-century England. Evelyns work is often overshadowed by the literary contributions of his contemporary and friend, Samuel Pepys. This new biography changes that. John Dixon Hunt takes a fresh look at the life and work of one of Englands greatest diarists, focusing particularly on Evelyns domesticity. The book explores Evelyns life at home, and perhaps even more importantly, his domestication of foreign ideas and practices in England. During the English Civil Wars, Evelyn traveled extensively throughout Europe, taking in ideas on the management of estate design while abroad to apply them in England. Evelyns greatest accomplishment was the import of European garden art to the UK, a feat Hunt puts into context alongside a range of Evelyns social and ethical thinking. Illustrated with visual material from Evelyns time and from his own pen, the book is an ideal introduction to a hugely important figure in the shaping of early modern Britain. **
Author: Barbara Spackman
File Type: pdf
This book identifies a strand of what it calls Accidental Orientalism in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through historical accident and who wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Among them are young woman, Amalia Nizzoli, who learned Arabic, conversed the inhabitants of an Ottoman-Egpytian harem, and wrote a memoir in Italian a young man, Giovanni Finati, who converted to Islam, passed as Albanian in Muhammad Alis Egypt, and published his memoir in English a strongman turned antiquarian, Giovanni Belzoni, whose narrative account in English documents the looting of antiquities by Europeans in Egypt a princess and patriot, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, who lived in exile in Anatolia and wrote in French condemning the Ottoman harem and proposing social reforms in in the Ottoman empire and an early twentieth century anarchist and anti-colonialist, Leda Rafanelli, who converted to Islam, wrote prolifically, and posed before the camera in an Orient of her own fashioning. Crossing class, gender, dress, and religious boundaries as they move about the Mediterranean basin, their accounts variously reconfigure, reconsolidate, and often destabilize the imagined East-West divide. Ranging widely on an affective spectrum from Islamophobia to Islamophilia, their narratives are the occasion for the books reflection on the practices of cultural cross-dressing, conversion to Islam, and passing and posing as Muslim on the part of Italians who had themselves the object of an Orientalization on the part of Northern Europeans, and whose language had long been the lingua franca of the Mediterranean.
Author: Stephanie Urdang
File Type: epub
Stephanie Urdang was born in Cape Town, South Africa, into a white, Jewish family staunchly opposed to the apartheid regime. In 1967, at the age of twenty-three, no longer able to tolerate the grotesque iniquities and oppression of apartheid, she chose exile and emigrated to the United States. There she embraced feminism, met anti-apartheid and solidarity movement activists, and encountered a particularly American brand of racial injustice. Urdang also met African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral, who would influence her return to Africa and her subsequent journalism. In 1974, she trekked through the liberation zones of Guinea-Bissau during its war of independence in the 1980s, she returned repeatedly to Mozambique and saw how South Africa was fomenting a civil war aimed to destroy the newly independent country. From the vantage point of her activism in the United States, and from her travels in Africa, Urdang tracked and wrote about the slow, inexorable demise of apartheid that led to South Africas first democratic elections, when she could finally return home. Urdangs memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continued to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, she belongs. My South Africa! she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain? **About the Author Stephanie J. Urdang is the author of two books on Africa, including And Still They Dance Women, War and the Struggle for Change in Mozambique. She has worked as an anti-apartheid activist, journalist, academic writer, university lecturer, and freelance consultant, as well as gender specialist and senior advisor on HIVAIDS for the United Nations.