Editor’s Note: The following books have been published by the U-M Press .
Remembered Lives: The Work of Ritual, Storytelling, and Growing Older
by Barbara Myerhoff. Edited and with an introduction by Marc Kaminsky, founding co-director of the Myerhoff Center, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Long before the current interest in gerontology came about, Myerhoff challenged us to listen to what the elderly had to say. Before her death at a tragically young age, the anthropologist created a bounty of work; her studies, her writings, and her Academy Award-winning documentary Number Our Days have definitely left a mark on this world. In Remembered Lives, Myerhoff’s longtime friend and colleague Kaminsky assembles her most important essays on the subject of aging and the aged in American society.
The Press and the Ford Presidency
by Mark J. Rozell, assistant professor of political science, Mary Washington College.
Journalists offer a daily dose of commentary sizing up the president’s successes and failures, profoundly influencing the public’s perceptions of presidential performance. In The Press and the Ford Presidency, Rozell investigates the national press coverage of the Ford administration: how leading journalists developed their perceptions of Gerald Ford, the criteria they employed in evaluating his presidency, and the nature and impact of their assessments of his leadership.
The Pleasures of Exile and Natives of My Person
by George Lamming.
Lamming, a leading Caribbean writer, is a towering figure in 20th-century literature. He is one of the fathers of modern Caribbean writing and, as a voice for the colonial and post-colonial experience, has been hailed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and a host of other world figures.
Through a series of interrelated essays, The Pleasures of Exile explores the cultural politics and relationships created in the crucible of colonization. Natives of My Person creatively reconstructs the symbolic “middle passage” of the Europeans who sailed the slave ships on the triangular route to Africa, Europe and the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries. Through this novel, Lamming asserts that the colonial experience is not only that of the colonized, but also the intense psychological experiences of the colonizers themselves.
Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism
by Ellen E. Berry, assistant professor of English, Bowling Green State University.
Berry’s work is a wide-ranging and provocative study tracing Stein’s production of avant garde texts, radically disrupting traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued and read. As the first sustained reading of Stein’s novels to combine feminist and postmodern perspectives, the book reveals new facets of Stein’s work by placing her within an expanded definition of the postmodern.
