Confused but Brave is a collection of twelve short stories and seven essays from the life of a man from Chicago, living now in New Orleans and Prague. They tell of his friends and his lovers, his children, his several families, his familiar passions — baseball, music, visual arts, architecture, camping, literature — presented not as memoir but as the intimate, gradual unfolding of a life’s spiral. All the stories are to some extent autobiographical; two are fantasies for little children like those I told my daughter nearly forty years ago. My tone varies from the hopeful energy of “A Family Story” to the despair of “Henry’s Child.” Loss of love is the story in “Ed in Love”; Ed bears it with greater grace than I ever might. Ed is my hero in more ways than one. The essays explore problems in contemporary American life. “Remarkable People” is pure memoir.
This book presents a model of organization transformation success. The model framework comprises a series of S-Curves (maturity curves) of planning and execution activities phased over time. The model is illustrated through description and analysis of an actual, two-decade, highly successful, global enterprise transformation Six Sigma program at a Fortune 200 company -- Cummins, Inc. Lessons learned from the model and company case study are completely transferrable to other organizational culture, improvement, and innovation transformation settings. This insightful book: Documents a first-hand account of a successful transformation. The authors completely explain what was accomplished and the lessons learned from a sixteen-year deployment of Six Sigma at Cummins. Acts as a benchmark for those organizations interested in pursuing primarily a continuous improvement transformation, and more generally, for other types of transformation efforts. Includes substantive interviews with 10 key leaders and others who made the transformation possible. Helps organizations shorten the overall transformation timelines. The documentation of a transformation provides you a model for how to think about organization transformation maturity over time and plan for it. Recognizes the work of thousands of people involved in transforming a global company. The interviews provide extraordinary perspectives, not only by executives who initiated and sustained the transformation program, but program participants who themselves grew as managers and leaders in their careers through the program. Essentially, this book helps early-career managers and executives see the broader picture of enterprise transformation, especially over time. This helps them be better managers and executives, and importantly, helps them better plan for and hasten their upward career trajectories. Lastly, the book describes a view of possibilities. It describes a clear, sustained success, the steps taken to get there, and the measurement of progress. The result provides you with confidence that successful transformation is possible and worth the effort"--
In 2010, the composer Gustav Mahler celebrates his one hundred fiftieth birthday. In Mahler Re-Composed, linguist George Cummins shares a collection of six interrelated essays that provide a fresh perspective on difficult questions familiar to Mahler lovers. Cummins, a teacher of Russian and Czech at Tulane University, brings a uniquely Czech perspective to the study of Mahlers personality and work. In his careful examination of the composers life and work, Cummins begins with an introduction that provides a glimpse into Mahler the Czech and continues with an account of Mahlers conversion from Judaism to Catholicism while making his way to the Vienna Hofoper directorship. Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahlertwo of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.
In the last decade of his life, starting when he was a sixty-two-year old curmudgeon in a backwater Slavic country, Czech composer Leo Jancek produced operas and chamber music that would stun the music world, one masterpiece on top of another. In Janceks Eternal Love, author George M. Cummins III presents a biography focusing on the life of Jancek (1854-1928) based on original Czech sources, with special attention to detailed analysis of the last four operas and biographical focus on the composers relationship with his muse, Kamila Stsslov. In 1916, Jancek was known only as a local ethnographer specializing in folk music, but he acquired international fame with the operas and chamber pieces he composed after the age of sixty-two until his death at seventy-four. Cumminswith both a personal and scholarly knowledge of Czech language, history, and culturenarrates a personal biography that includes detailed, insightful descriptions of Janceks compositions.
In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought-and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see very different sets of values reflected across the board. They would, in short, find themselves in an unrecognizable America, one both reflected in and shaped by television, a medium that has been shown to have an unprecedented influence on our lives both for better and for worse. By focusing on the development of television within the cultural context that surrounds it, and drawing on such phenomena as quiz shows, comedy hours, the Kennedy assassination, the Olympics, sitcoms, presidential ads, political debates, MTV, embedded journalism, and reality TV, the authors reveal television's impact on essential characteristics of American life. They cover topics as diverse as politics, crime, medicine, sports, our perceptions, our values, our assumptions about privacy, and our unquenchable need for more things. In addition, they consider the future of the medium in the light of the proliferation of programming options, the prevalence of cameras and receivers in our lives, the growing links between TV and computers, and the crossed boundaries of television throughout the world.
George M. Cummins, III, is a retired associate professor of Slavic languages and cultures at Tulane University, where he taught from 1972-2010 and served as Department Chair of Germanic and Slavic from1998-2007. His specialties were Russian and Czech language and literatures and undergraduate teaching. In recent years he has been working on Czech and Austrian music and cultural history. He is the author of Mahler Re-Composed (2011) and is now writing about the Czech composer Leo Jana ek. He lives and works in New Orleans and has three children, a son Kit, who is professor of inorganic chemistry at M.I.T., a daughter Liv, a singer-songwriter in New York, and a son George IV, who is a student in New Orleans. He runs along the Mississippi river levee in New Orleans, follows his home-town Chicago Cubs, and travels to his favorite destinations in the Czech Republic - Brno, Prague, and recently Hukvaldy. In my last year of undergraduate teaching (2009-2010) I wrote a blog for my students in Introductory Russian and in the second year language course. It turned out to be a valedictory to a work I have loved for many years, touching a range of subjects and ideas, most of them circling around strategies for acquiring a second language in the university environment and the fascinations of human speech in general. Professors learn along with their students; they learn the craft of teaching as well as their own subject, which is endlessly an object of scrutiny and discovery. Teaching has taught me humility and respect for my students, although this may not be as readily apparent in my blog as I imagine it to be. I put these essays to print as an affectionate retrospective.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
In the preparation of this descriptive manual of the rust fungi of the grasses of the world the principal goal was to produce a system by which these important pathogens might be recognized on the basis of their morophology, without dependence on the identity of the host plant. This is an Utopian goal and, being Utopian, has doubtless not been attained. But it is better to have tried and partially failed than not to have tried at all. The first attempt to revise the classification on a new basis utilized the rust fungi of the tribe Andropogoneae. A "Group System" was initiated (Uredineana 4:5-89. 1953) based on the uredinial stage. The attempt was satisfactory at the time, but was not adaptable when all grass rust fungi were considered. Consequently, an expanded system was employed when I attempted a summarization of all grass rust fungi. The expanded scheme (Plant Disease Reporter Supplement 237:1-52. 1956) of 9 Groups proved to be a most helpful organizational system and is used here (see explanations, p. Xi) in Puccinia, Uromyces, and Uredo. The system is useful and does aggregate generally similar species, rather than segregating them as in a host-based arrangement. The characters used, i.e. presence or absence of paraphyses, arrangement of germ pores, and echinulate or verrucose spore surface, are subject to minimal intergradations.
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.
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