Old People Are Cranky, But Not My Friends is an interesting, although unusual book of biographies of people who have lived their life in previous generations and mainly in their prime, in decades 1970s to 1990s. The stories describe each person who had such an effect on me. The chapters are based on my experience with them and I decided to write my memories for my readers to know how colourful my life has been, due to the influence they have had on it. These people are my inspiration to be strong enough to face every challenge and to enjoy what life can offer. You only live once so you must be prepared to make the most out of it. Meeting such special characters, indeed a dying breed and a type not to be met again, only increased the quality of my life. I hope you enjoy my book and can feel their charisma coming through clearly in my writing. I feel that the pictures and documents have enriched the text and should help the younger generation to understand more about the written description of each person mentioned.
Old People Are Cranky, But Not My Friends is an interesting, although unusual book of biographies of people who have lived their life in previous generations and mainly in their prime, in decades 1970s to 1990s. The stories describe each person who had such an effect on me. The chapters are based on my experience with them and I decided to write my memories for my readers to know how colourful my life has been, due to the influence they have had on it. These people are my inspiration to be strong enough to face every challenge and to enjoy what life can offer. You only live once so you must be prepared to make the most out of it. Meeting such special characters, indeed a dying breed and a type not to be met again, only increased the quality of my life. I hope you enjoy my book and can feel their charisma coming through clearly in my writing. I feel that the pictures and documents have enriched the text and should help the younger generation to understand more about the written description of each person mentioned.
We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity to the present it has been a dynamic meeting place of cultures and religions. Marie-Janine Calic invites us to reconsider the history of this intriguing, diverse region as essential to the story of global Europe.
Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.
A masterful new survey of sixteenth-century France which examines the vicissitudes of the French monarchy during the Italian Wars and the Wars of Religion. It explores how the advances made under a succession of strong kings from Charles VIII to Henri II created tensions in traditional society which combined with economic problems and emerging religious divisions to bring the kingdom close to disintegration under a series of weak kings from Francois II to Henri III. The political crisis culminated in France's first succession conflict for centuries, but was resolved through Henri IV's timely reconnection of dynastic legitimism with religious orthodoxy.
Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.
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