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No one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages\, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport\, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong\, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable\, comic\, humane\, ironic\, charming\, poignant\, and completely\, unpretentiously full of love for literature.
Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker\, Harper’s Magazine\, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation\, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford\, Switzerland\, and St. Petersburg\; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus\; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying\; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
Love and the novel\, the individual in history\, the existential plight of the graduate student\: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors\, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience\, combining fresh readings of the great Russians\, from Pushkin to Platonov\, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100414T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100414T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/vivian-gussin-paley-boy-beach-building-community-through-play URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/vivian-gussin-paley-boy-beach-building-community-through-play SUMMARY:Vivian Gussin Paley - The Boy on the Beach\: Building Community through Play DESCRIPTION:Four-year-old Eli plays alone at the shore\, inventing dramas out of sand and water. He is Builder\, Fireman\, Protector\, and Scout\, overcoming waves and conquering monsters. Enter Marianne and doll\, Mother and Baby\, eager to redefine Eli as a good father and homesteader. Their separate visions intertwine in a search for a common ground on which howling wolves and butterfly sisters can learn to understand and need one another.
What can the richly imagined\, impressively adaptable fantasy world of these children tell us about childhood\, development\, education\, and even life itself? For fifty years\, teacher and writer Vivian Gussin Paley has been exploring the imagery\, language\, and lore of young children\, asking the questions they ask of themselves.
In The Boy on the Beach she continues to do so\, going deeper into the mystery of play as she follows Eli and Marianne through the kindergarten year\, finding more answers and more questions. How does their teacher\, Mrs. Olson\, manage to honor and utilize the genius of play to create an all-inclusive community in which boys and girls like each other and listen to each other’s stories? Why is Paley’s fellow teacher Yu-ching in Taiwan certain that her children pretend to be kittens in order to become necessary to the group? And why do teachers in London see their childrens’ role-playing as the natural end to loneliness in the school community?
Rich with the words of children and teachers themselves\, The Boy on the Beach is vintage Paley\, a wise and provocative appreciation of the importance of play and enduring curiosity about the nature of childhood and the imagination.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100416T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100416T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jacqueline-winspear-mapping-love-and-death URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jacqueline-winspear-mapping-love-and-death SUMMARY:Jacqueline Winspear - The Mapping of Love and Death DESCRIPTION:In the latest mystery in the New York Times bestselling series\, Maisie Dobbs must unravel a case of wartime love and death—an investigation that leads her to a long-hidden affair between a young cartographer and a mysterious nurse.
August 1914. Michael Clifton is mapping the land he has just purchased in California's beautiful Santa Ynez Valley\, certain that oil lies beneath its surface. But as the young cartographer prepares to return home to Boston\, war is declared in Europe. Michael—the youngest son of an expatriate Englishman—puts duty first and sails for his father's native country to serve in the British army. Three years later\, he is listed among those missing in action.
April 1932. London psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs is retained by Michael's parents\, who have recently learned that their son's remains have been unearthed in France. They want Maisie to find the unnamed nurse whose love letters were among Michael's belongings—a quest that takes Maisie back to her own bittersweet wartime love. Her inquiries\, and the stunning discovery that Michael Clifton was murdered in his trench\, unleash a web of intrigue and violence that threatens to engulf the soldier's family and even Maisie herself. Over the course of her investigation\, Maisie must cope with the approaching loss of her mentor\, Maurice Blanche\, and her growing awareness that she is once again falling in love.
Following the critically acclaimed bestseller Among the Mad\, The Mapping of Love and Death delivers the most gripping and satisfying chapter yet in the life of Maisie Dobbs.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100417T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100417T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/alison-lacroix-ideological-origins-american-federalism URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/alison-lacroix-ideological-origins-american-federalism SUMMARY:Alison LaCroix - The Ideological Origins of American Federalism DESCRIPTION:Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution\, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia.
In this groundbreaking book\, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority\, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity\, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work\; it was the system.
Connecting the colonial\, revolutionary\, founding\, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period\, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100421T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100421T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jonathan-metzl-protest-psychosis-how-schizophrenia-became-black-disease-0 URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/jonathan-metzl-protest-psychosis-how-schizophrenia-became-black-disease-0 SUMMARY:Jonathan Metzl - The Protest Psychosis\: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease DESCRIPTION:Revolution was in the air in the 1960s. Civil rights protests demanded attention on the airwaves and in the streets. Anger gave way to revolt\, and revolt provided the elusive promise of actual change. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia\, Michigan. Here\, far from the national glare of sit-ins\, boycotts\, or riots\, African American men suddenly appeared in the asylum’s previously white\, locked wards. Some of these men came to the attention of the state after participating in civil rights demonstrations\, while others were sent by the military\, the penal system\, or the police. Though many of the men hailed from Detroit\, ambulances and paddy wagons brought men from other urban centers as well. Once at Ionia\, psychiatrists classified these men under a single diagnosis\: schizophrenia.
In The Protest Psychosis\, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American men at the Ionia State Hospital\, and how events at Ionia mirrored national conversations that increasingly linked blackness\, madness\, and civil rights. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents—from scientific literature\, to music lyrics\, to riveting\, tragic hospital charts—Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in ways that directly reflected national political events. As he demonstrates\, far from resulting from the racist intentions of individual doctors or the symptoms of specific patients\, racialized schizophrenia grew from a much wider set of cultural shifts that defined the thoughts\, actions\, and even the politics of black men as being inherently insane.
Ultimately\, The Protest Psychosis provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions\, even during our current\, seemingly post-race era of genetics\, pharmacokinetics\, and brain scans.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100423T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100423T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/writers-record-peter-carey URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/writers-record-peter-carey SUMMARY:Writers on the Record\: Peter Carey DESCRIPTION:From the two-time Booker Prize–winning author comes an irrepressibly funny new novel set in early nineteenth-century America.
Olivier—an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history\, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.
When Olivier sets sail for the nascent United States—ostensibly to make a study of the penal system\, but more precisely to save his neck from one more revolution—Parrot will be there\, too\: as spy for the marquis\, and as protector\, foe\, and foil for Olivier.
As the narrative shifts between the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier\, between their picaresque adventures apart and together—in love and politics\, prisons and finance\, homelands and brave new lands—a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold. And with their story\, Peter Carey explores the experiment of American democracy with dazzling inventiveness and with all the richness and surprise of characterization\, imagery\, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100424T190000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100424T190000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/craig-robinson-game-character-family-journey-chicagos-south-side-ivy-league-beyond URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/craig-robinson-game-character-family-journey-chicagos-south-side-ivy-league-beyond SUMMARY:Craig Robinson - A Game of Character\: A Family Journey from Chicago's South Side to the Ivy League & Beyond DESCRIPTION:In A Game of Character\: A Family Journey from Chicago’s Southside to the Ivy League and Beyond\, Craig Robinson takes readers behind the scenes to meet his family and the other important influences in his life who have contributed to his success both on and off the basketball court. The result is a stunning tribute to his parents\, coaches\, and other mentors who have contributed to his ongoing search for what it truly means to have character.
Craig shares rich\, heartwarming stories of what life was like growing up with Fraser and Marian Robinson and his sister\, Michelle - from days playing street basketball while excelling academically\; to dodging third-grade girls chasing him home thanks to Michelle’s sisterly protection\; to family outings to the drive-in and grandparents’ homes\; to summers at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort\; to admission to Princeton University\, where he was twice named Ivy League Player of the Year. The fundamentals Craig learned from his family are evidenced today in his coaching style and family life.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120523T155335Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100430T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20100430T000000Z UID:http://www.semcoop.com/event/sam-munson-november-criminals URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.semcoop.com/event/sam-munson-november-criminals SUMMARY:Sam Munson - The November Criminals DESCRIPTION:A darkly funny\, pot-infused novel of teenage maladjustment in the tradition of Beautiful Children from a compelling new voice in American fiction.
For a high school senior\, Addison Schacht has a lot of preoccupations. Like getting into college. Selling drugs to his classmates. His complicated relationship with his best friend (NOT his girlfriend) Digger. And he's just added another to the list\: the murder of his classmate Kevin Broadus\, and his own absurd\, obsessive plan to investigate the death. When presented with an essay question on his application to the University of Chicago—What are your best and worst qualities?—Addison finds himself provoked into giving his final\, unapologetic say about all of the above and more.
Addison Schacht finds good company among American literature's cadre of unsettled\, restless youth\, from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield. The November Criminals takes on the terrain of the classic adolescent truth-telling novel and—with nerve and erudition—carves out its own unique territory.
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