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Title: Emerson: the mind on fire: a biography
Author: Richardson, Robert D 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | Social and Political Thought | United States History
Publisher's Description: Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings - from Persian poets to George Sand - and to his many friendships and personal encounters - from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston - evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.   [brief]
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Title: Many Rāmāyaṇas: the diversity of a narrative tradition in South Asia 
Author: Richman, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Throughout Indian history, many authors and performers have produced, and many patrons have supported, diverse tellings of the story of the exiled prince Rama, who rescues his abducted wife by battling the demon king who has imprisoned her. The contributors to this volume focus on these "many" Ramayanas .While most scholars continue to rely on Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana as the authoritative version of the tale, the contributors to this volume do not. Their essays demonstrate the multivocal nature of the Ramayana by highlighting its variations according to historical period, political context, regional literary tradition, religious affiliation, intended audience, and genre. Socially marginal groups in Indian society - Telugu women, for example, or Untouchables from Madhya Pradesh - have recast the Rama story to reflect their own views of the world, while in other hands the epic has become the basis for teachings about spiritual liberation or the demand for political separatism. Historians of religion, scholars of South Asia, folklorists, cultural anthropologists - all will find here refreshing perspectives on this tale.   [brief]
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Title: Prayers in stone: Greek architectural sculpture ca. 600-100 B.C.E
Author: Ridgway, Brunilde Sismondo 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | Art | Art and Architecture | Art History
Publisher's Description: The meaning of architectural sculpture is essential to our understanding of ancient Greek culture. The embellishment of buildings was common for the ancient Greeks, and often provocative. Some ornamental sculpture was placed where, when the building was finished, no mortal eye could view it. And unlike much architectural ornamentation of other cultures, Greek sculpture was often integral to the building, not just as decoration, and could not be removed without affecting the integrity of the building structure. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the significance of Greek architectural sculpture. Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, a world-class authority on ancient Greek sculpture, provides a highly informative tour of many dimensions of Greek public buildings - especially temples, tombs, and treasuries - in a text that is at once lucid, accessible, and authoritative.Ridgway's pragmatism and common sense steer us tactfully and clearly through thickets of uncertainty and scholarly disagreement. She refers to a huge number of monuments, and documents her discussions with copious and up-to-date bibliographies. This book is sure to be acknowledged at once as the standard treatment of its important topic.   [brief]
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Title: The fractious nation?: unity and division in contemporary American life 
Author: Rieder, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Religion | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: What are we to make of the speed with which the new climate of national solidarity emerged after September 11? Does it not look strange against a backdrop of the much-touted divisiveness of American life? In truth, The Fractious Nation? makes clear, the contrast of the time of divisiveness before and the time of unity that followed is much too stark, indeed. Less than a year before two planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the 2000 presidential election produced not just the starkly blue and red electoral map but also the two tribal Americas those totemic colors emblazoned. And from the cultural wars to immigration restriction, from the Christian right to political correctness, recent decades have witnessed much hand-wringing on the left and the right about the fragmentation of American life. The Fractious Nation? enlists the critical intelligence of fourteen distinguished contributors who illuminate the schisms in American life and the often volatile debates they have inspired in the realms of culture, ethnic and racial pluralism, and political life. The collective wisdom of The Fractious Nation? suggests a counterview to all the overheated rhetoric. The authors warn against fixating on flamboyant incidents of racial conflict when black-and-white values overlap considerably. On a range of cultural issues, the gap between our citizens has closed as well. And even as the rivalry between liberalism and conservatism transmutes into new forms, the political center remains vital and democratic. We are tied together not just by shared values but by institutions - the Constitution, the culture of consumption, the etiquette of ethnic respect. In private life and public affairs, our nation has expanded the meaning of democratic citizenship. Still, there's no room for self-congratulations here. Tendencies toward preoccupation with private life encourage indifference to the suffering of the less privileged. This is also one of the main failings of the narrative of fragmentation: In its focus on matters of shared values, it too distracts from issues of poverty and inequality that also fragment the human spirit.   [brief]
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Title: Pious passion: the emergence of modern fundamentalism in the United States and Iran
Author: Riesebrodt, Martin
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Religion | Sociology | Social Theory | Middle Eastern Studies | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: Martin Riesebrodt's unconventional study provides an extraordinary look at religious fundamentalism. Comparing two seemingly disparate movements - in early twentieth-century United States and 1960s and 1970s Iran - he examines why these movements arose and developed. He sees them not simply as protests against "modernity" per se, but as a social and moral community's mobilization against its own marginalization and threats to its way of life. These movements protested against the hallmarks of industrialization and sought to transmit conservative cultural models to the next generation.Fundamentalists desired a return to an "authentic" social order governed by God's law, one bound by patriarchal structures of authority and morality. Both movements advocated a strict gender dualism and were preoccupied with controlling the female body, which was viewed as the major threat to public morality.   [brief]
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Title: Asylia: territorial inviolability in the Hellenistic world
Author: Rigsby, Kent J 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Ancient History | Politics | Classical History | Classical Religions | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: In the Hellenistic period certain Greek temples and cities came to be declared "sacred and inviolable." Asylia was the practice of declaring religious places precincts of asylum, meaning they were immune to violence and civil authority. The evidence for this phenomenon - mainly inscriptions and coins - is scattered in the published record. The material has never been collected and presented in one publication until now.Kent J. Rigsby lays out these documents and discusses their historical implications in a substantial introduction. He argues that while a hopeful intention of military neutrality lay behind the institution of asylum, the declarations did not in fact change military behavior. Instead, "declared inviolability" became a civic and religious honor for which cities across the Greek world competed during the third to first centuries B.C.   [brief]
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Title: A buccaneer's atlas: Basil Ringrose's South Sea waggoner: a sea atlas and sailing directions of the Pacific coast of the Americas, 1682 
Author: Ringrose, Basil d. 1686
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | European History | Geography
Publisher's Description: On July 29, 1681, a band of English buccaneers that had been terrorizing Spanish possessions on the west coast of the Americas captured a Spanish ship, from which they obtained a derrotero , or book of charts and sailing directions. When they arrived back in England, the Spanish ambassador demanded that the buccaneers be brought to trial. The derrotero was ordered to be brought to King Charles II, who apparently appreciated its great intelligence value. The buccaneers were acquitted, to the chagrin of the king of Spain, who had the English ambassador expelled from the court at Madrid on a seemingly trumped-up charge.The derrotero was subsequently translated, and one of the buccaneers, Basil Ringrose, added a text to the compilation and information to the Spanish charts. The resulting atlas, consisting of 106 pages of charts and 106 pages of text, is published in full for the first time in this volume. Covering the coast from California to Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, and Juan Fernandes, Basil Ringrose's south sea waggoner is a rich source of geographical information, with observations on navigational, physical, biological, and cultural features as well as on ethnography, customs, and folklore.After almost exactly three hundred years, this secret atlas is now made available to libraries and individuals. The editors have provided an extensive introduction on historical, geographical, and navigational aspects of the atlas, as well as annotations to the charts and text, and they have plotted the coverage of the charts on modern map bases.   [brief]
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Title: Six screenplays 
Author: Riskin, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Screenwriter Robert Riskin (1897-1955) was a towering figure even among the giants of Hollywood's Golden Age. Known for his unique blend of humor and romance, wisecracking and idealism, Riskin teamed with director Frank Capra to produce some of his most memorable films. Pat McGilligan has collected six of the best Riskin scripts: Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and Meet John Doe (1941). All of them were directed by Capra, and although Capra's work has been amply chronicled and celebrated, Riskin's share in the collaboration has been overlooked since his death. McGilligan provides the "backstory" for the forgotten half of the team, indispensable counterpoint to the director's self-mythologizing autobiography - and incidentally the missing link in any study of Capra's career.Riskin's own career, although interrupted by patriotic duty and cut short by personal tragedy, produced as consistent, entertaining, thoughtful, and enduring a body of work as any Hollywood writer's. Those who know and love these vintage films will treasure these scripts. McGilligan's introduction offers new information and insights for fans, scholars, and general readers.   [brief]
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Title: Dao de jing: the book of the way
Author: Roberts, Moss 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | China | Asian History | Asian Literature | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Dao De Jing is one of the richest, most suggestive, and most popular works of philosophy and literature. Composed in China between the late sixth and the late fourth centuries b.c., its enigmatic verses have inspired artists, philosophers, poets, religious thinkers, and general readers down to our own times. This new translation, both revelatory and authentic, captures much of the beauty and nuance of the original work. In an extensive and accessible commentary to his translation, Moss Roberts reveals new depths of Dao De Jing. This edition is distinguished by the literary quality of the translation, its new renderings for a number of the stanzas, and by Roberts's knowledgeable contextualizations. Utilizing recently discovered manuscripts and Chinese scholarship based on them, he is able to shed new light on the work's historical and philosophical contexts. This translation shows that Dao De Jing is far more than a work of personal inspiration; it is also a work of universal scope that makes penetrating comments on politics, statecraft, cosmology, aesthetics, and ethics. Roberts brings these themes to our attention, shows how they are integrated into the work as a whole, and demonstrates the relevance of these topics for our own times.   [brief]
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Title: Nothing but history: reconstruction and extremity after metaphysics 
Author: Roberts, David D 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Intellectual History | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: What is the role of history in our "postmetaphysical" age? Surveying two centuries of philosophical writing, David Roberts offers a thoughtful guide to the philosophy of history before the recent challenges associated with deconstructive postmodernism. He then argues for a moderate intellectual tradition in which historical knowledge, although freed from transcendent values, continues to play a crucial role in the conduct of human affairs.Roberts's careful account of historicism explores the ideas of its major nineteenth-century representatives and foils, including Hegel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche. His thorough consideration of such twentieth-century thinkers as Gadamer, Croce, Foucault, and Heidegger contributes vitally to the ongoing discussions about the use and abuse of history. Certain to engage historians and philosophers, this book will interest scholars across the humanities who are concerned with the present and future utility of historical thinking.   [brief]
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Title: Takarazuka: sexual politics and popular culture in modern Japan
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Cultural Anthropology | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | Theatre | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan.The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways. Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.   [brief]
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Title: Native and newcomer: making and remaking a Japanese city 
Author: Robertson, Jennifer Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Asian History | Urban Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: This expertly crafted ethnography examines the ways in which native and new citizens of Kodaira, a Tokyo suburb, have both remade the past and imagined the future of their city in a quest for an "authentic" Japanese community.
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: Freud and his critics 
Author: Robinson, Paul A 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Intellectual History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Psychology | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: Wars against Freud have been waged along virtually every front during the past decade. Now Paul Robinson takes on three of Freud's most formidable critics, mounting a thoughtful, witty, and ultimately devastating critique of the historian of science Frank Sulloway, the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, and the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum.Frank Sulloway contends that Freud took most of his ideas from Darwin and other contemporary thinkers - that he was something of a closet biologist. Jeffrey Masson charges that Freud caved in to peer pressure when he abandoned his early seduction theory (which Masson believes was correct) in favor of the theory of infantile sexuality. Adolf Grünbaum impugns Freud's claim to have grounded his ideas - especially the idea of the unconscious - on solid empirical foundations.Under Robinson's rigorous cross-examination, the evidence of these three accusers proves ambiguous and their arguments biased by underlying assumptions and ideological commitments. Robinson concludes that the anti-Freudian writings of Sulloway, Masson, and Grünbaum reveal more about their authors' prejudices - and about the Zeitgeist of the past decade - than they do about Freud.Beautifully crafted and full of surprises, Robinson's work is a compelling defense of one of history's most original and powerful minds. Freud and His Critics will earn an enduring place in the raging Freudian debate.   [brief]
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Title: Toil and toxics: workplace struggles and political strategies for occupational health 
Author: Robinson, James C. (James Claude) 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Labor Studies | Sociology | Public Policy | Economics and Business
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Title: Tragedy and enlightenment: Athenian political thought, and the dilemmas of modernity 
Author: Rocco, Christopher 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical History | Classical Literature and Language | Social and Political Thought | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Weaving together ancient Greek texts and postmodernist theory, Christopher Rocco addresses the debate between modernity and postmodernity that dominates contemporary theory. Interpreting Greek drama within a critical framework informed by contemporary theorists Foucault, Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno, Tragedy and Enlightenment makes a sophisticated argument for the continuing relevance of the classical past, focusing on the subject of democracy.The starting point for Rocco's analysis is the impasse in contemporary political and cultural theory over the possibility and desirability of democracy in a postmodern world. After explaining the competing positions in the current debate, Rocco argues that ancient Greek tragedy and dialogue - specifically Sophocles' Oedipus , Plato's Republic and Gorgias , and Aeschylus' Oresteia - suggest alternate constructions for this and other postmodern problems.Rocco gives a detailed analysis of the contemporary divide over the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault and provides a provocative reading of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. This original contribution to political and cultural discourse brings us to a new understanding of familiar texts and will alter the grounds of debate for students and scholars of the classical and the contemporary worlds.   [brief]
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Title: Latin America in the 1940's: war and postwar transitions 
Author: Rock, David 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Latin America in the 1940s addresses the significant impact that World War II and the onset of the Cold War had on the political development of Latin America. During the middle of this crucial decade many Latin American countries turned from authoritarian regimes toward democracy and the rapid growth of labor unions. By the end of the decade, however, the fledgling democracies had collapsed, the unions were in shambles, and authoritarianism asserted itself once more. This collection of essays by an international group of historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists confronts a central debate in Latin American studies: Were these events the immediate result of external forces - that is, of the war - or the culmination of internal movements that originated in the 1930s?This book is among the first in its field to evaluate the early Cold War period through the lens of the immediate post-Cold War era. While powerfully reinterpreting the brief resurgence of democracy in Latin America in the 1940s, it offers a comparative foundation from which to judge the renewed trend toward democracy that began in the 1980s and continues during the early 1990s.   [brief]
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Title: Authoritarian Argentina: the Nationalist movement, its history, and its impact
Author: Rock, David 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: David Rock has written the first comprehensive study of nationalism in Argentina, a fundamentalist movement pledged to violence and a dictatorship that came to a head with the notorious "disappearances" of the 1970s. This radical, right wing movement has had a profound impact on twentieth-century Ar . . . [more]
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Title: The quiet revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the science of organic chemistry 
Author: Rocke, Alan J 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science | Physical Sciences | European History
Publisher's Description: Organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) is the subject of this vigorously contextualized biography, which combines the approaches of cognitive and social history of science. Kolbe was one of the most outstanding chemists during the remarkable period in which German science, like the wider manifestations of German industrial and political power, rose to a position of world dominance.Rocke portrays Kolbe as a leading actor in the transformation of the institutional and pedagological dimensions of the physical sciences, as well as in the rapid growth of technologically powerful pure sciences. In all these areas there was a sharp inflection point around 1860 when, as Rocke persuasively argues, the primary discipline in the drama was organic chemistry.   [brief]
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Title: Cognition: an introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit 
Author: Rockmore, Tom 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Philosophy | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , the philosopher's first and perhaps greatest work, is the most important philosophical treatise of the nineteenth century. In this companion volume to his general introduction to Hegel, Tom Rockmore offers a passage-by-passage guide to the Phenomenology for first-time readers of the book and others who are not Hegel specialists.Rockmore demonstrates that Hegel's concepts of spirit, consciousness, and reason can be treated as elements of a single, coherent theory of knowledge, one that remains strikingly relevant for the contemporary discussion. He shows how the various conceptions of cognition developed in the text culminate in absolute knowing, which Rockmore reads, in opposition to the frequent religious readings of Hegel, in a wholly secular manner. Unlike commentators who isolate Hegel's text from its philosophical origins, Rockmore analyzes the book in the philosophical context from which it emerged, lucidly discussing notoriously difficult passages in relation to the ideas of Aristotle and Descartes, and above all to those of Kant and other German idealists.   [brief]
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