It is Becker's undefendedness that makes this collection so strong and appealing. Whether acknowledging childhood privilege . . . or admitting her part in creating her own destiny . . . Becker's direct, fluidly accessible lyric narratives move assuredly through even the most complex emotional terrain, living with the questions, letting us know that we are with a speaker we can trust."—Women's Review of Books
In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard, or museum; New York or New Mexico. "The Mosaic injunction against / the graven image" inspires meditations on drawings by DŸrer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness—"Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk"—suffused with self-knowledge: "Worry wraps her long legs / around me, promises to be mine forever." In "The New Egypt," the narrator mines her family's legacy: "From my father I learned the dignity / of exile and the fire of acquisition, / not to live in places lightly, but to plant / the self like an orange tree in the desert." Becker's shapely stanzas—couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoum, sonnet, syllabics—subvert her colloquial diction, creating a seamless merging of subject and form. Luminous, sensual, these poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.
Becker celebrates the interconnectedness of creatures and places—never losing sight that much will turn out precarious, illusory, provisional. These poems speak, in ardent voices, about our affinities: an articulate, black bear mourns habitat loss; a frail man and failing dog become one; a scientist and her African grey parrot research language acquisition for thirty years. Ecologies interlace, as when a troubled family “sacrifices one member,/ as plants surrender leaves in times of drought.” Becker responds with rage and wit to corporate excess and intractable geo-politics. Love and friendship empower in wry narratives, though time “mows” down our days, though we may never escape “original cruelties.” Tragedies permeating our enmeshed, global identities haunt the book: the massacre of gay youth in Orlando; the terrors facing Cambodian teenagers working fishing boats. Wise, capacious, by turns unsettling and joyous, The Black Bear Inside Me incorporates histories and losses into a luminous present.
Appearance and disguise—in a Costa Rican rainforest, a West Village repair shop, or an intimate relationship—reveal the turbulence that undergirds daily life, as families and places undergo change. In "Elegy for the Norther Flying Squirrel" and "Divers," Becker takes up the science of climate change and habitat loss. "Language that is by turns virtuosic and quiet, astonishing and accurate," writes a reviewer of Becker's 2006 collection, Domain of Perfect Affection for Jewish Book World Magazine. The challenge of "aligning loss with love" exerts a potent tension in Tiger Heron, as age comprises mortal bodies and intimacies end. A self-mocking wit propels characters "to find and lose and find each other again"—in the imagination and in the stories these poems tell. The final line of "The Sounds of Yiddish"—"Spare us what we can learn to endure"—closes a playful send-up, dramatizing language, culture, and power. Writing in The Washington Post, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky praises Becker's "comic timing." Longtime readers of Becker's work will delight in poems cast in a variety of stanzas and experimental forms. Their occasions are diverse—an animal shelter, a failed trip to Venice, a hospice bedside—but Becker ultimately yokes a language of praise to our stumbling, humble, human efforts.
Robin Becker reminds me that to be a Jew or a feminist is to live with duality of culture language and dream The several warring parts of a complex identity imposed inherited chosen don t make easy sense Events are funny painful awkward unassimilable With passionate intelligence Becker conjures them for me and I identify Joan Larkin Robin Becker s Backtalk makes us think back The dialogues are exciting and there is a lot to look at You may meet yourself in her book with Becker standing over your shoulder holding both her magnifying glass and mirror before you Off Our Backs Robin Becker s poems tell truths of a special kind Most of us know them already in our gut and groin Becker talks from the back of love about those undervalued repressed feelings that lovers often have difficulty being upfront about These poems are like one half of a dialogue social communication rather than solitary contemplations People almost always occasion them they are written to or about someone Valley Advocate
In The Horse Fair, Robin Becker asks questions about citizenship and participation in the marketplaces—of bodies, of ideas, of objects—in which we function. She investigates how individuals marginalized by gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits, each within a framework of social history and a poetics of partiality—she speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, child of assimilate, German-Jewish parents and grandparents and killed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-six; she appropriates passages from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services; and juxtaposes them against stanzas that mourn her sister's death and those that celebrate non-traditional families. Organized around the long meditations, other poems show Becker's dexterity with formal verse (sestina, sonnet, tercets) and her imaginative engagements with free verse. The Horse Fair takes its name from Bonheur's monumental painting and serves as the vehicle through which Becker explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. In Becker's hands, The Horse Fair transports us to the communal plaza where we come to barter and to buy, to study one another, to touch the foundation upon which we build our temporary habitations.
Celebratory or eligiac, these poems record the author’s “two-headed journey” to root herself - geographically and emotionally - in the world. Becker’s poems are from remote and familiar outposts: the watery evanescence of Venice contrasts with the desert of the American Southwest; we lean with her over the rim of a canyon or stand back to study a Giacometti sculpture. From such settings arise poems on the death of a sibling, the consoling power of painting and sculpture; others celebrate the erotic and the capacity of the female body for pleasure and pain.
“A witty and unexpected take on the zombie genre; I had a great time.” —Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels Subtitled “A Zombie Memoir,” Brains looks at America’s favorite walking-dead flesh-eaters from an audaciously original and deliciously gruesome new perspective. Debut author Robin Becker blazes new ground with this story of former college professor-cum-sentient zombie Jack Barnes, who recounts the tale of the resistance he organized in the wake of the recent zombie apocalypse. World War Z; Shaun of the Dead;Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies… Becker tops them all with Brains—a witty, tasty treat for anyone who every spent a midnight glued to a classic George A. Romero zombie epic!
Over the past decade, mainstream feminist theory has repeatedly and urgently cautioned against arguments which assert the existence of fundamental—or essential—differences between men and women. Any biological or natural differences between the sexes are often flatly denied, on the grounds that such an acknowledgment will impede women's claims to equal treatment. In Caring for Justice, Robin West turns her sensitive, measured eye to the consequences of this widespread refusal to consider how women's lived experiences and perspectives may differ from those of men. Her work calls attention to two critical areas in which an inadequate recognition of women's distinctive experiences has failed jurisprudence. We are in desperate need, she contends, both of a theory of justice which incorporates women's distinctive moral voice on the meaning of justice into our discourse, and of a theory of harm which better acknowledges, compensates, and seeks to prevent the various harms which women, disproportionately and distinctively, suffer. Providing a fresh feminist perspective on traditional jurisprudence, West examines such issues as the nature of justice, the concept of harm, economic theories of value, and the utility of constitutional discourse. She illuminates the adverse repercussions of the anti-essentialist position for jurisprudence, and offers strategies for correcting them. Far from espousing a return to essentialism, West argues an anti- anti-essentialism, which greatly refines our understanding of the similarities and differences between women and men.
Bringing together leading authorities, this much-needed volume synthesizes current knowledge about the nature, impact, and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the crucial developmental period of adolescence. Contributors explore the distinct challenges facing teens with ADHD as they navigate intensifying academic demands; new risks in the areas of driving, substance use, and romantic relationships; and co-occurring mental health problems. Best practices in clinical assessment are presented. Chapters on treatment--several of which include illustrative case examples--review interventions targeting motivation, executive functioning, and homework problems, as well as applications of cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness. The book also examines medication issues specific to this age group.
This title was first published in 2001. Friedrich Nietzsche has always been recognized as an original thinker, one who stands apart from and outside the philosophical schools and tendencies of his time. This is the way he continually presented himself. Many readers have accepted this self-interpretation at face value. Yet there is another side to Nietzsche's thinking which shows not only an awareness of contemporary writers, but an engagement with their ideas which is often both intense and sustained. The intention of this study is to explore this side in detail, by surveying various themes in his philosophical thinking with such links in mind. It is important to avoid one misunderstanding though: this book is not designed to show that Nietzsche derived his ideas from various other thinkers. In that sense, it is not necessarily about "sources" or even about "influences". Rather, it shows that his independence and originality developed in dialogue with other thinkers.
Written by senior examiners and experienced teachers, this student revision workbook for Edexcel AS History Unit 2: The Changing Position of Women closely combines course content with revision activities and advice on exam technique. This allows students the opportunity to improve the skills needed to perform well in exam conditions through interacting with the content they need to revise. In addition each section has a model answer with exam tips for students to analyse and better understand what is required in the exam.
Criminoloogist Robin Odell has compiled this gruesome gallery of cases from all over the world, revealing the growth in serial slayings, contract killings and middle-class murders and investigating what motivates people to commit the ultimate crime. As well as gangsters and ordinary felons, the book includes doctors, millionaries, housewives, children, lawyers, accountants, officers and gentlemen who have succumbed to the killing instinct. Behind the sensational names concocted by the tabloid press - 'Boston Strangler', 'Dracula Killer', 'Night Stalker', 'Granny Killer' - lurk real murderers committing acts of violence in circumstances often more bizarre than fiction. Arranged in an easy-to-use A-Z format, the book contains over 500 cases from serial killers such as Dennis Nilsen and Ted Bundy, to those such as Jeremy Bamber and Steven Benson who dispatched their parents for money; from murderous New Zealand teenagers whose story made a successful film, to the many doctors and nurses who took life instead of saving it; from unsolved murders such as the murder of Little Gregory in France to the paid assignments of John Waynes Hearn, a Vietnam veteran who killed to order. The result is a classic of true crime, a definitive work on murder as a worldwide phenomenon.
A riveting exploration of terrorism’s relationship to sex, with a new preface by the author Terrorism is the international crime that has captured the attention of the entire world, forcing governments to make radical changes in security and civil liberties. Meanwhile, everyone tries to comprehend the real reasons that inspire such violence. This is where political philosopher Robin Morgan begins The Demon Lover, a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and a bestseller in the print edition. Through her globe-spanning examination of terrorism, Morgan unearths the roots of the phenomenon. With wide-ranging research across historical eras and a three-hundred-sixty-degree approach, she examines how violence has become eroticized—and conflated with masculinity—to the lethal detriment of both women and men. Recent scientific studies referenced in the preface to this edition prove just how ahead of her time Morgan has been with her analysis. Her account of her own personal experience with militant tactics adopted by US radicals in the 1960s and 1970s is extraordinary, and her reports on and interviews with Palestinian women in the refugee camps of the Middle East—women confiding for the first time, as women, details of their lives under terrorism every day—are deeply moving. Morgan also offers a compelling vision of hope for change, and an afterword includes her famous “Letters from Ground Zero,” written after 9/11. The Demon Lover is Robin Morgan at her most intelligent and unforgettable.
In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington’s wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters’ world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power. The author of such classic Cold War treatises as “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Albert Wohlstetter is remembered for advocating an aggressive brinksmanship that stood in stark contrast with what he saw as weak and indecisive policies of Soviet containment. Yet Albert’s ideas built crucially on insights gleaned from his wife. Robin makes a strong case for the Wohlstetters as a team of intellectual equals, showing how Roberta’s scholarship was foundational to what became known as the Wohlstetter Doctrine. Together at RAND Corporation, Albert and Roberta crafted a mesmerizing vision of the Soviet threat, theorizing ways for the United States to emerge victorious in a thermonuclear exchange. Far from dwindling into irrelevance after the Cold War, the torch of the Wohlstetters’ intellectual legacy was kept alive by well-placed disciples in George W. Bush’s administration. Through their ideological heirs, the Wohlstetters’ signature combination of brilliance and hubris continues to shape American policies.
In times past, everyday business might mean making a trip to the pawnbroker, giving a loan to a trusted friend of selling off a coat, all to make ends meet. Both women and men engaged in this daily budgeting, but women's roles were especially important in achieving some level of comfort and avoiding penury. In some communities, the daily practices in place in the seventeenth century persisted into the twentieth, whilst other groups adopted new ways, such as using numbers to chart domestic affairs and turning to the savings banks that appeared in the nineteenth century. These strategies promised respectability and greater access to new consumer goods: better clothes and finer furnishings accompanied a newly disciplined behaviour. Therefore, in the material world of the past and in the changing habits of earlier generations lie crucial turning points. This book explores these previously under-researched patterns and practices that gave shape to modern consumer society.
In 1991 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) published "Postgraduate Taining Guidelines". Throughout the document emphasis is placed on the need for universities to make postgraduate research students aware of the methodological issues that affect their work.; This text explores the relationship between knowledge, methodology and research practice across the broad spectrum of the social sciences in langage that is accessible to researchers at all levels of their research careers. It follows the themes that there is no single practice or correct methodology, and that the diversity and variety in terms of methodology and disciplinary focus are a sign of the sophistication and complexity of the proceses of social research. The text examines socio-cultural contexts of social research and relates them to contemporary shifts in focus such as feminism, critical theory and postmodernism. The importance of selecting the research methodology most appropriate to the subject discipline concerned is emphasized.
From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. This book offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Black horror from the 1890s to present day. In this second edition, Robin R. Means Coleman expands upon the history of notable characterizations of Blackness in horror cinema, with new chapters spanning the 1960s, 2000s, and 2010s to the present, and examines key levels of Black participation on screen and behind the camera. The book addresses a full range of Black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, art-house films, Blaxploitation films, and U.S. hip-hop culture-inspired Nollywood films. This new edition also explores the resurgence of the Black horror genre in the last decade, examining the success of Jordan Peele’s films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), smaller independent films such as The House Invictus (2018), and Nia DaCosta’s sequel to Candyman (2021). Means Coleman argues that horror offers a unique representational space for Black people to challenge negative or racist portrayals, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of Blackness itself. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.
Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender examines contemporary debates about the meaning and value of marriage. The book analyzes arguments for traditional marriage, including those of neonaturalists, utilitarians, and communitarians or virtue theorists. The volume also considers a range of feminist, welfarist, and liberationist arguments for ending the institution altogether. It evaluates two major reform movements: one focused on expanding marriage to include same-sex couples and the other focused on the use of law to render marriage more internally just. The book concludes with a plea to activists to redirect "marriage equality" movements toward the creation of an entirely secular "civil union law" that would respect a broader range of private life-long commitments, including but not limited to same- and opposite-sex couples, without threatening the role of religious marriage in the lives of those who embrace it and without penalizing nonparticipants.
We live in a digital age, buy and sell in a digital economy, and consume—oh do we consume—digital media. The digital lies at the heart of our contemporary, information-heavy, media-saturated lives, and although we may talk about the digital as a cultural phenomenon, the thing itself—digitality—is often hidden to us, a technology that someone else has invented and that lives buried inside our computers, tablets, and smartphones. In this book, Robin Boast follows the video streams and social media posts to their headwaters in order to ask: What, exactly, is the digital? Boast tackles this fundamental question by exploring the origins of the digital and showing how digital technology works. He goes back to 1874, when a French telegraph engineer, Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot, invented the first means of digital communication, the Baudot code. From this simple 5-bit code, Boast takes us to the first electronic computers, to the earliest uses of graphics and information systems in the 1950s, our interactions with computers through punch cards and programming languages, and the rise of digital media in the 1970s.Via various and sometimes unanticipated historical routes, he reveals the foundations of digitality and how it has flourished in today’s explosion of technologies and the forms of communication and media they enable, making real the often intangible force that guides so much of our lives.
The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science. They explain that progress is being held back and debate on how to overcome these limitations.
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