Praise for Sam Pickering: "The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble." ---The New York Times Book Review "Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend." ---Smithsonian "What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering!" ---The Chattanooga Times "Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived." ---Kirkus Reviews The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning. Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under. On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough. Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.

Presents an analysis of the "nomadic" consciousness of our ancestors, and the forces --religious and political --that overwhelmed it during the Neolithic era, and considers its revival in the twentieth century. 'The most famous among the Chinese commentators on the Laozi—a man appreciated even by his opponents for the sheer brilliance of his analysis—is Wang Bi (226–249). Born into a short period of intellectual ferment and freedom after the collapse of the Han dynasty, this self-assured genius, in the short twenty-three years of his life, dashed off two of the most enduring works of Chinese philosophy, a commentary on the Laozi and another on the Book of Changes.

Religious travelers were a common sight in the Mediterranean world during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In fact, as Maribel Dietz finds in Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims, this formative period in the history of Christianity witnessed an explosion of travel, as both men and women took to the roads, seeking spiritual meaning in a life of itinerancy. Much of this early Christian religious travel was not focused on a particular holy place, as in the pilgrimage of later centuries to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. Rather, the inspiration was more practical. Travel was a way of escaping hostility or social pressures or of visiting living and dead holy people. It was also a means of religious expression of homelessness and temporary exile. The wandering lifestyle mirrored an interior journey, an imitation of Christ and a commitment to the Christian ideal that an individual is only temporarily on this earth. Women were especially attracted to religious travel. In the centuries before the widespread cloistering of women, a life of itinerancy offered an alternative to marriage and a religious vocation in a society that excluded women from positions of spiritual leadership. Eventually, ascetic travel gave way to full-fledged pilgrimage. Dietz explores how and why religious travel and monasticism diverged and altered so greatly. She examines the importance of the Cluniac reform movement and the creation of the pilgrimage center of Santiago de Compostela in the emergence of a new model of religious travel: goal-centered, long-distance pilgrimage aimed not at monks but at the laity. Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims is essential reading for those who study the history of monasticism, for it was in a monastic context that religious travel first claimed an essential place within Christianity. It will also be important for anyone interested in pilgrimage and the role of women in the history of Christianity.

In ###Wandering Souls#, Rohrer examines the migration patterns of eight religious groups and finds that Protestant migrations consisted of two basic types. The most common type involved migrations motivated by religion, economics, and family, in which Puritans, Methodists, Moravians, and others headed to the frontier as individuals in search of religious and social fulfillment. The other type involved groups wanting to escape persecution (such as the Mormons) or to establish communities where they could practice their faith in peace (such as the Inspirationists). Rohrer concludes that the two migration types shared certain traits, despite the great variety of religious beliefs and experiences, and that secular values infused the behavior of nearly all Protestant migrants.

From the FDA review of RU-486 to the recent growth of fertility clinics to the rights of lesbian parents, women's reproductive lives are aggressively regulated by law and medicine. While a great deal has been written on such issues as abortion and postpartum depression, no single volume has offered a broad discussion of the interface between the legal, medical, and political aspects of women's reproduction in a manner accessible and informative to non-specialists.The Wandering Uterus fills that gap. Taking her title from an ancient Greek belief that women's health problems were caused by a wandering uterus that needed to be confined and controlled, Meyer exposes the way in which myths and prejudice about female sexuality continue to influence the practice of law and medicine today.

This book offers new insights and provides a wealth of up-to- date information on a subject that changes every day. The text is divided into three main parts: political issues of pre- conception, the politics of pregnancy, and the politics of motherhood. Throughout, Meyer argues passionately that while technology and medicine must progress, they should not be allowed to do so at women's expense.

In this moving ethnographic portrait of Hindu renouncers -- sadhus or ascetics -- in northern India and Nepal, Sondra L. Hausner considers a paradox that shapes their lives: while ostensibly defined by their solitary spiritual practice, the stripping away of social commitments, and their break with family and community, renouncers in fact regularly interact with "householder" society. They form a distinctive, alternative community with its own internal structure, but one that is not located in any single place. Highly mobile and dispersed across the subcontinent, its members are regularly brought together through pilgrimage circuits on festival cycles. Drawing on many years of fieldwork, Hausner presents intimate portraits of individual sadhus as she examines the shared views of space, time, and the body that create the ground for everyday experience. Written with an extraordinary blend of empathy, compassion, and anthropological insight, this study will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.

This book of interviews with Professor Wang Gungwu, published to felicitate him on his 80th birthday in 2010, seeks to convey to a general audience something of the life, times and thoughts of a leading historian, Southeast Asianist, Sinologist and public intellectual. The interviews flesh out Professor Wang’s views on being Chinese in Malaya; his experience of living and working in Malaysia, Singapore and Australia; the Vietnam War; Hong Kong and its return to China; the rise of China; Taiwan’s, Japan’s and India’s place in the emerging scheme of things; and on the United States in an age of terrorism and war. The book includes an interview with his wife, Mrs Margaret Wang, on their life together for half a century. Two interviews by scholars on Professor Wang’s work are also included, as are his curriculum vitae and a select bibliography of his works.What comes across in this book is how Professor Wang was buffeted by feral times and hostile worlds but responded to them as a left-liberal humanist who refused to cut ideological corners. This book records his response to tumultuous times on hindsight, but with a keen sense of having lived through the times of which he speaks.

Acclaimed as one of the most important writers of twentieth-century China, the late Wang Xiaobo (1952–1997) is known for his frank, often antic treatment of sex and his gift for reveling in human absurdity and provoking laughter from horror. Comprised of three novellas, “The Golden Age,” “East Palace, West Palace,” and “2015,” this book is the first English translation of his work. “East Palace, West Palace,” one of the first contemporary Chinese fictional works dealing with male homosexuality, is an S/M-oriented love story between a masochistic gay writer and a handsome policeman unaware of his sadistic tendencies. In “The Golden Age,” for which Wang Xiaobo is perhaps best known, the protagonist, Wang Er (literally, Wang number two) is a city student sent to the countryside for rustification during the Cultural Revolution. There he meets a lovely young doctor whom he encourages to live up to her undeserved reputation as “damaged goods.” In “2015,” another Wang Er, after being put into a labor camp for practicing painting without a license, becomes the love object of a sadistic policewoman. Although the sexual and social roles of Wang Xiaobo’s characters intertwine, sexuality functions not as protest but as an absurd metaphor for state power and the voluntary, even enthusiastic, collaboration of those subject to it. Full of deadpan humor and oddball sex, Wang Xiaobo’s novellas allow us to see, through a subtly shifting kaleidoscope, scenes from the elaborate dance the individual must do with the state in twentieth-century China.

In the first decade of the twentieth century while other intellectuals were concerned with translating works of political and scientific import into Chinese, Wang Kuo-wei (1877-1927) looked to Western philosophy to find answers to the fundamental questions of human life.

Explores the role of public memory and images of the past in the Jewish communities of Germany, France, and Hungary as they faced changing political and social conditions.