History of the nude in the art of Egypt, India, China/Japan, Greece/Rome, Middle-East, American Indians, Africa¿plus every period of Western art from medieval to present. The first comprehensive full-color book on the topic¿also the first one written from a naturist perspective. The interdisciplinary approach pays some attention to related literature and music. 700+ illustrations. Compiled from 20 years of columns in Naturally magazine. Signed and numbered limited edition of 500. Contents and sample pages can be viewed at www.paullevalley.com.
In the set of title stories, a quiet teacher gets romantically involved with two Mexican-American former students-mother and daughter. (Oh my!) The final selection finds the author delivering the keynote address at a nudist convention. (Oh my, oh my!) Actually, it's all quite tastefully done. Sandwiched between are provocative poems, Jehovah's Christmas monologue, Boy Scouts around the campfire, royal genealogy, and America's social classes skewered. With wise and witty commentary, the mature author looks back on "the very best of my juvenilia." The writing is concise, thoughtful, powerful.
Why would I spend a good portion of my time over the last 35 years gathering information on the Gymnosophists? The story begins even earlier. As an undergraduate student in the Flint College of the University of Michigan, I pursued an English major with a strong history minor-always looking for something between the two, and rarely finding it. Then in my practice teaching, I happened into one of the early experimental high school courses in Interdisciplinary Humanities. With the exciting interrelationships between art, literature, music, philosophy and history, I said YES-this was what I had been looking for. So I pioneered in teaching high school Humanities for the next few years. Interdisciplinary Humanities was a bottom-up movement. Gradually, colleges began offering Masters programs to give teachers the rich background they needed. I decided I was not tied to Michigan where it was cold; I would find the best Masters program in Humanities anywhere in the world, and go there. Well, it turned out that the best Masters program in the world was at Wayne State University in Detroit, of all places. Unlike other programs that were really just double majors, Wayne offered truly interdisciplinary classes. Moreover, they offered an Eastern track and a Western track. Knowing that I would never find that Eastern track anywhere else, I studied interdisciplinary courses in the cultures of India, China, Japan, and Egypt. (The middle-eastern professor was on sabbatical when I was there.) I especially liked India-perhaps because I had already travelled around the world, and India impressed me the most.
Driving west from Lincoln to Grand Island, Nebraska, Paul A. Johnsgard remarks, is like driving backward in time. "I suspect," he says, "that the migrating cranes of a preice age period some ten million years ago would fully understand every nuance of the crane conversation going on today along the Platte.
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