New Books by Former Fellows
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The Imperial Trace By Nancy Condee ISBN13: 978-0-19-536696-9 The collapse of the USSR seemed to spell the end of the empire, yet it by no means foreclosed on Russia's enduring imperial preoccupations, which had extended from the reign of Ivan IV over four and a half centuries. Examining a host of films from contemporary Russian cinema, Nancy Condee argues that we cannot make sense of current Russian culture without accounting for the region's habits of imperial identification. But is this something made legible through narrative alone-Chechen wars at the periphery, costume dramas set in the capital-or could an imperial trace be sought in other, more embedded qualities, such as the structure of representation, the conditions of production, or the preoccupations of its filmmakers? This expansive study takes up this complex question through a commanding analysis of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period auteurists, Kira Muratova, Vadim Abdrashitov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksei German, Aleksandr Sokurov and Aleksei Balabanov. (see: News From ICWA – Society for Cinema and Media book award) |
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Kinetic Contraptions By Curt Gabrielson ISBN: 978-1-55652-957-3 The two dozen contraptions found in this handy resource can move across the land, over the sea, and through the air and can be assembled primarily from low-cost or free recycled materials, batteries, and a single motor. Some of the projects include constructing a hovercraft out of a Styrofoam plate, two corks, and binder clips; building a double-paddlewheeler out of paint stirrers, plastic bottles, and a pair of disposable knives; and turning bamboo skewers, checkers, and a drinking straw into a three-wheeled motorcycle. Each project is clearly explained through materials and tools lists, step-by-step instructions with photographs, and scientific background on the concepts being explored. Budding engineers will get experience working with tools, testing simple circuits, modifying and improving their designs, and building unique contraptions of their own. |
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Heart of Dryness By James G. Workman “We don’t govern water. Water governs us,” writes James G. Workman. In Heart of Dryness, he chronicles the memorable saga of the famed Bushmen of the Kalahari—remnants of one of the world’s most successful civilizations, today at the exact epicenter of Africa’s drought—in their widely publicized recent battle with the government of Botswana, in the process of exploring the larger story of what many feel has become the primary resource battleground of the twenty-first century: the supply of water. The Bushmen’s story could well prefigure our own. In the United States, even the most upbeat optimists concede we now face an unprecedented water crisis. Reservoirs behind large dams on the Colorado River, which serve thirty million in many states, will be dry in thirteen years. Southeastern drought recently cut Tennessee Valley Authority hydropower in half, exposed Lake Okeechobee’s floor, dried up thousands of acres of Georgia’s crops, and left Atlanta with sixty days of water. Cities east and west are drying up. As reservoirs and aquifers fail, officials ration water, neighbors snitch on one another, corporations move in, and states fight states to control shared rivers. Each year, around the world, inadequate water kills more humans than AIDS, malaria, and all wars combined. Global leaders pray for rain. Bushmen tap more pragmatic solutions. James G . Workman illuminates the present and coming tensions we will all face over water and shows how, from the remoteness of the Kalahari, an ancient and resilient people is showing the world a viable path through the encroaching Dry Age. Walker & Company, NY. To Order Click here to watch a brief interview on the book Read an excerpt from the book or view a 20 min. documentary on the Bushmen situation. |
The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for the twenty-first century. In The Great Gamble, Gregory Feifer examines the conflict from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. During the last years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent some of its most elite troops to unfamiliar lands in Central Asia to fight a vaguely defined enemy, which eventually defeated their superior numbers with unconventional tactics. Although the Soviet leadership initially saw the invasion as a victory, many Russian soldiers came to view the war as a demoralizing and devastating defeat, the consequences of which had a substantial impact on the Soviet Union and its collapse.
Feifer’s extensive research includes eye-opening interviews with participants from both sides of the conflict. In gripping detail, he vividly depicts the invasion of a volatile country that no power has ever successfully conquered. Parallels between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are impossible to ignore—both conflicts were waged amid vague ideological rhetoric about freedom. Both were roundly condemned by the outside world for trying to impose their favored forms of government on countries with very different ways of life. And both seem destined to end on uncertain terms.
A groundbreaking account seen through the eyes of the men who fought it, The Great Gamble tells an unforgettable story full of drama, action, and political intrigue whose relevance in our own time is greater than ever.
Available January 6, 2009 HarperCollinsPublishers Hardcover: $27.99 ISBN: 9870061143182
browseinside.harpercollins.com
A Fistful of Diamonds: Gemstone Thrillers
By John B. Robinson
A suite of priceless diamonds surfaces in Central Africa. Fast-talking gem expert Lonny Cushman wants them. As cover, he chaperones a young seminarian to Rwanda in search of her missing father. Once there, Lonny chases the diamonds through the killing fields of the Congo. Survival depends on negotiating the bloody machinery that benefits from the conflict diamond trade—Islamic jihadis, corrupt army officers, Israeli diamantaires, and Ukrainian arms dealers. Can he save himself, the diamonds, and the seminarian from a terrible end?
McBooks Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 9781590131503
Yugoslavia—Oblique Insights and Observations
By Dennison Rusinow, Edited by Gale Stokes
As a long-time resident of Yugoslavia during the Cold War years, journalist/historian Dennison Rusinow had a bird's eye seat to view Marshal Josip Broz Tito trying to fit his square hybrid socialist peg into the Soviet Union's round hole.
Essays on a variety of topics explore "the first American-style supermarket and its challenge to traditional outdoor markets; the lessons of a Serbian holiday feast (Slava); the resignation of Vice President Aleksandar Rankovic; the Croation political purge of 1971; ethnic divides and the rise of nationalism throughout the country; the tension between conservative and liberal forces in Yugoslav politics; and the student revolt at Belgrade University in 1968.
Rusinow was a research professor at the University Center for International Studies and emeritus professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and has authored five books. Editor Stokes is Professor of History Emeritus at Rice University.
Available from Amazon
The Upside-Down Tree: India’s Changing Future
By Richard Connerney
The Upside-Down Tree presents the 'other' India, beyond the call centers of Bangalore and Delhi and Westernized cities like Mumbai—a huge slice of humanity that remains invisible and impenetrable to most Americans. Exploring the realities of agriculture, business, the environment, politics, the economy, marriage, language and the arts, the author introduces the real people of India. At the heart of each chapter lies an epiphany about Indian culture—Copernican intellectual shifts, radical reverses in the way the author made sense of the environment when the evidence seemed to support one conclusion but further experience pointed to a different answer.
Algora Publishing, March 2009
ISBN-13: 9780875866482
www.algora.com/274/book/details.html
search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?r=1&z=y&EAN=0875866484
To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan
By Nicholas Schmidle
In To Live or to Perish Forever, Nicholas Schmidle takes readers to Pakistan’s rioting streets, to Taliban camps in the North-West Frontier Province, and on many surprising adventures as he provides a contemporary history of this country long riven by internal conflict. With the intimacy and good humor available only to the most fearless and open-eyed reporters, Schmidle narrates what was arguably the most turbulent period of Pakistan’s recent history, a time when President Pervez Musharraf lost his power and the Taliban found theirs, and when Americans began to realize that Pakistan’s fate is inextricably linked with our own.
In February 2006 Schmidle had traveled to Pakistan hoping to learn about the place dubbed “the most dangerous country in the world.” It was while there that he befriended a radical cleric (who became an enemy of the state and was killed), came to crave the smell of tear gas (because it assured him that he was sufficiently close to the action), and in the end, was deported by the Pakistani authorities, managed to get back into the country, and was chased out a second time.
Henry Holt and Co., On Sale: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8938-7, ISBN-10: 0-8050-8938-1
www.nicholasschmidle.com/index.html
us.macmillan.com/toliveortoperishforever
Interview with Nicholas Schmidle, C-Span, May 10, 2009
The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget (Hardcover)
By Andrew Rice
From Rwanda to Sierra Leone, African countries recovering from tyranny and war are facing an impossible dilemma: to overlook past atrocities for the sake of peace or to seek catharsis through tribunals and truth commissions. Uganda chose the path of forgetting: after Idi Amin’s reign was overthrown, the new government opted for amnesty for his henchmen rather than prolonged conflict.
Ugandans tried to bury their history, but reminders of the truth were never far from view. A stray clue to the 1972 disappearance of Eliphaz Laki led his son to a shallow grave—and then to three executioners, among them Amin’s chief of staff. Laki’s discovery resulted in a trial that gave voice to a nation’s past: as lawyers argued, tribes clashed, and Laki pressed for justice, the trial offered Ugandans a promise of the reckoning they had been so long denied.
For four years, Andrew Rice followed the trial, crossing Uganda to investigate Amin’s legacy and the limits of reconciliation. At once a mystery, a historical accounting, and a portrait of modern Africa, The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget is above all an exploration of how—and whether—the past can be laid to rest.
Metropolitan Books, On Sale: May 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7965-4, ISBN-10: 0-8050-7965-3
us.macmillan.com/theteethmaysmilebuttheheartdoesnotforget
Georgia Diary
A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos
in the Post-Soviet Caucasus
Expanded Edition
By Thomas Goltz
Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia fell prey to a series of power struggles, rampant crime and corruption, secessionist wars, and the spillover of the war in Chechnya. Thomas Goltz traces these developments with the same vivid, personal narrative style that made his previous books Azerbaijan Diary and Chechnya Diary so compelling. Featuring memorable portraits of individuals in high places and low, Georgia Diary is the ‘unknown’ story of the key-to-the-Caucasus country from 1992 through the resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze, the ‘Rose Revolution,’ and the rise of Mikheil Saakashvili…
Now UPDATED as a Paperback with a New Epilogue on the ‘Olympics War’ with Russia of August 2008!
M.E. Sharpe, January 2009; 300 pages, maps, photographs; ISBN 0-7656-1710-2
Traditional Themes in Japanese Art
By Charles R. Temple
An indispensable reference work for students, historians, gallery owners, art dealers, and the general reader, Traditional Themes in Japanese Art draws from pioneer works in the field to provide easy-to-read entries that introduce colorful figures and fascinating events from Japanese history, mythology, legend, and folklore. Malicious ghosts appear in human or in animal guise, often tormenting those who see them. Benevolent and malevolent wizards comfort or abuse human beings. Demons abound; dragons let water flow or withhold it from parched landscapes; shape shifters, like the tea-kettle badger, bring evil into the world. Torments are delivered by supernatural beings along with destructive and bloody wars between family clans for political power. The author is a writer and book publisher who lived for many years in Japan as an editor/book designer with John Weatherhill, Inc, publisher of elegant books on Japanese and Chinese art. He now resides in San Francisco, California.
Available: amazon.com; regentpress.net; B&N.com
Dist. to the Trade by INGRAM and Baker & Taylor
Published by REGENT PRESS
2747 Regent Street
Berkeley, CA 94705
www.regentpress.net
Retrieving Times
By Red Austin
www.granvilleaustin.com
Published by: WHITE RIVER PRESS (Oct 2008) ISBN-13: 978-1-93505-204-3
Granville Austin, widely known by his life-long nickname, Red, was an ICWA fellow from 1960-1966, working on India. After publishing two political histories of the Indian Constitution he has relaxed with a memoir of Norwich, Vermont. Published this October (2008), it draws portraits of the people, recounts their ways and livelihoods, their characters and wisdom, and their primary school, which he attended for eight years starting in 1932. The culture critic of the Washington Post called Retrieving Times “the biography of a beloved place...something astonishing...a town remembered in its detail”; Institute alumnus David Hapgood says “it’s a wonderful book”, full of “delicious detail”. Retrieving Times is available at your local bookstore, on the shelf or by order, and from www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, or Red directly. If you wish to know more about Red Austin, you may “google” him under Granville Austin.
An American Witness to India’s Partition
By Philips Talbot
Published by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd. (Sept. 2007) ISBN: 9780761936183 www.sagepub.com/booksProdDesc. nav?prodId=Book232382
“In 1938 the New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs awarded 23-year-old Phillips Talbot a fellowship with a mandate: visit South Asia and learn about the intricacies of life in India. Till 1950, Talbot graphically recounted the buildup to Indian and Pakistani independence, and the early experiences of the new states in the form of several letters to the institute. Talbot’s reports from the field, presented here in the original, offer a kaleidoscope of first-hand observations: on student life at the Aligarh Muslim University, local life in a small Muslim community in Kashmir, a Vedic ashram in Lahore, Tagore’s Shantiniketan, Gandhi’s Sevagram, crucial sessions of the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League, the Kodaikanal Ashram Fellowship, Hindu and Muslim urban communities in Lahore and Bombay, Afghanistan, a walk with Gandhi in Noakhali, the parties’ negotiations with Mountbatten that led to independence and more.Written with flair and insight, An American Witness to India’s Partition, provides a perceptive view of South Asian society in its decisive decade.”
Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks
By Ann Mishe
Published by PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (Oct.2007) ISBN-13 9780691124940 press.princeton.edu/titles/8543.html
Former Brazil Fellow and Rutgers University sociology Professor Ann Mische has published a book about youth activists in Brazil. It is based partly on her fellowship work (1987-90).
News from the Institute and Former Fellows
