Bucknell University Books

Blind Singer Joe's Blues is a novel set in the birthplace and time of modern American music. The complex and all-too human characters whose live play out against this backdrop are the musicians who create what we now call blues, rag-time and country music.

The author's deep knowledge of the music of that era is obvious throughout. It complements his ability to draw strong portraits of the characters and an engrossing story line.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Highly recommended.

I couldn't put this beautifully-crafted book down once I started it. Robert Love Taylor's masterful handling of perspective and dialogue, his insightful and sympathetic development of characters, and the precise perfection of the language throughout make this a rare gem. You won't find its match in evoking the feel of music. I loved it.

More truth in reviewing: I know the author too, and I knew he could make a fiddle sing like God's choir of spring-morning birds -- but I had no idea he could do the same thing with mere words of clay. Blind Singer Joe's Blues sings through hard-bitten characters and hard times; through soul-searching, generosity, orneriness and forgiveness; and through the greenbrier thicket of family ties.

Taylor eases the reader through viewpoint, time and place, just as a tune effortlessly weaves from chorus to verse and back again. The plot unfolds so sparely that you wonder at how he creates such a complex tapestry in such a small space.

His characters -- Hannah Ruth, Pink Miracle, Dudley Crider and his mama Pearlie, Mama Bayless, Emmett and Amelia Holt -- reveal themselves, their stations, their hopes and beliefs through their language, all of it sounding as true as a tuning fork, as when Dudley gives a piece of his mind to the toddler, Singer Joe: "We are Criders and don't have no fear, he told the boy, and he imagined some of O.T., some of Uncle Crockett and Uncle U.S., some of Daddy, some of himself, yes, and then all the Criders before them, grandaddies and grandmamas by the score, crowded up in Singer Joe's veins."

Religious passion and personal passion meet sorrow and self-denial and all of it makes up the blues that are the fabric of Singer Joe's life.

Start this book on Friday night; you'll want the weekend to finish it.

Truth in reviewing: I am acquainted with the author, but haven't seen him in ages. Years ago he promised another novel with the old-time fiddler character Pink Miracle from his earlier book, THE LOST SISTER, and he has finally delivered. It is well worth the wait: it is highly readable and atmospheric, filled with memorable people. It's about souls who may seem kind of marginal in global and universal schemes but who find a way to be heard, to matter in the middle of it all.

Taylor has drawn on family history and legend out of his ancestral territory of Oklahoma and the mountains of eastern Tennessee for his past books. In this new work, in which he is at the top of his powers as a storyteller and fiction stylist, he looks at the early 20th century country folks who poured their lives into the songs that became the modern bluegrass, jazz and folk traditions. The jazz musician of the title and his blues are the legacy of the stories that flow together in this narrative, swirling around a restless songbird teenage mother who deserts him as well as everyone else in her life.

I confess to having been haphazardly acquainted with bluegrass music through occasional street festivals and local arts events. Coincidentally, as I was reading BLIND SINGER JOE'S BLUES, an Alison Krauss concert video was brought into the house. Listening and reading at the same time, I realized just how much Taylor's novel is alive with the music and explains how it got that way; and Krauss, well, she and bluegrass have a new fan.

I just loved this book. It was perfect for some light reading.

In clear prose, with a distinctive, piercing style, the author addresses the subject and exposes its surfaces and depths. Anyone interested in these poets should be sure to purchase a copy

Sentiment and emotion ride the waves with scholarly precision as Flinn pens the book Dean Koontz wishes he could write but knows he can't. Masterfully ignoring the conventions of the techno-thriller, this book steps boldly where Tom Clancy fears to tread. If you liked "The Bridges of Madison County" or "Trade and Tariff Policy in the Weimar Republic," this is the book for you.

Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths And Nationhood In The Land Of The Future is an in-depth discussion of Brazillian science fiction and what it has to tell us about Brazilian culture and society by Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literature M. Elizabeth Ginway. Chapters examine the cross-narrative icons of the robot, the alien, the spaceship, and the wasteland; dystopian science fiction; reflections on the changing roles of women; and influences of the post-dictatorship Brazilian generation and its delvings into "hard" SF, cyberpunk, alien encounters, alternate histories and parallel universes, and more. Black-and-white photographs of science fiction book covers illustrate this thoughtful and thorough examination which is especially recommended for academic library literary studies collections.

Ginway has been in Brazil several times since 2000 in preparation for this book, and she has read more Brazilian SF than most Brazilian readers.

Ginway is a "Brazilianist," a scholar of Brazilian history and culture, and in her remarkable book she employs techniques of cultural criticism to explore what some 50 years of local science fiction has to say about Brazil's cultural myths in relation to technology and modernization in that country, most of it ocurred during and troubled by a military dictatorship (1964-1985). Ecofeminist theory is among her approaches, along with Gary K. Wolfe's technique of symbol reading present in his book "The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction." A certain comparative stance arises when she contrasts Brazilian myths embedded in Brazilian SF, with American myths present in American SF.

Ginway refrains from making literary criticism--judgements on literary values and accomplishments regarding the works she analises.

The book was called "fascinating" by Charles N. Brown, the editor of "Locus--The Newspaper of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field," which has included Ginways study in its recommended list for 2005 (making it elegible for the Locus Award for best non-fiction book).

Let me say that *Brazilian Science Fiction* transcends its subject in the way that its attentive reading may reveal a device that would allow one to understand how other Third World of even Eastern Europe science fictions are much closer to their cultures than it was once supposed. One would need, of course, to have a strong familiarity and understanding of that culture in order to see how even the most comomplace SF icons--such as the robot, the starship, the alien--can be revealing of the heart and soul of that culture, even when its science fiction seems to be superficially imitative of Anglo-American SF.

A book that can work as a telescope to makes us see global SF in quite a different way.

This is a book to keep and read every once in a while, just to make sure that there are people in Brazil who produce good literary SF.

From the early works of the XIX Century to the Cyberpunk and Alternate History of the new millenium, Ginway built a very clever and well researched book about the few writers who dare to write about the future and the space in a country where the past is still present.

How to tame a land, how to built its destiny if the high technology is for a few? How to imagine and elaborate the growth of a Nation if our people is still chained by analphabetism? How to be a Portuguese spoken country and, at the same time, wish for the stars?

Yes, there is a Brazilian Science Fiction. And is plural, original, strong and juicy. Sometimes it's even very good. Most of the times.

You definetly must try it.

Philosophy and humanities teacher Richard Fleming presents First Word Philosophy: Writings On Ordinary Language Philosophy, a re-examination of the value of ordinary language philosophy, or "first word" philosophy. Fleming argues persuasively that resistance to taking ordinary language philosophy seriously is harmful and limiting to philosophy as a whole; by considering ordinary language an imperfect vessel to cloud meaning, one ignores the power of ordinary language to convey philosophic messages in more widely accessible terms. Recommending that ordinary language should be treated "in order as it is", First Word Philosophy offers sample dialogues, a discussion of the history of language philosophy, an abstract of language philosophy, and so much more. A thoughtfully reasoned and presented discussion of pragmatic principles.

Philosophy and humanities teacher Richard Fleming presents First Word Philosophy: Writings On Ordinary Language Philosophy, a re-examination of the value of ordinary language philosophy, or "first word" philosophy. Fleming argues persuasively that resistance to taking ordinary language philosophy seriously is harmful and limiting to philosophy as a whole; by considering ordinary language an imperfect vessel to cloud meaning, one ignores the power of ordinary language to convey philosophic messages in more widely accessible terms. Recommending that ordinary language should be treated "in order as it is", First Word Philosophy offers sample dialogues, a discussion of the history of language philosophy, an abstract of language philosophy, and so much more. A thoughtfully reasoned and presented discussion of pragmatic principles.

Butler Shaffer's scholarly interpretation of the political attitudes and actions most prevalent among America's business leaders in the two critical decades following World War I is uniquely satisfying. The author, a professor of law, reveals himself to be well grounded also in economics, history, and philosophy, as well as possessed of an insider's feel for the political agnosticism of large corporations and industry associations. Given his talents and his apt approach to the subject, Shaffer has made an important contribution to the literature.

[Shaffer] clearly demonstrates that the postwar period was not, as commonly depicted, the final hurrah of laissez-faire. On the contrary, "with the war concluded, leaders from a number of industries undertook a campaign on behalf of a system of 'cooperation' and 'self-regulation' for American industry" (p. 28). In a virtual summation of his book, he writes, "World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but it did give encouragement to some business leaders that a system of 'business cooperation,' subject to legal enforcement by the government, could become a functional reality in order to make competition safe for business" (p. 28).

The 1920s were marked by a political tug-of-war over business policy. On one side were corporate leadersand career politicians, such as Herbert Hooverwho saw in the War Industries Board the precise mechanism they craved to control competition and to force "order" on the economy. On the other side were advocates not of laissez-faire, but of so-called self-regulation. Trade association "codes of ethics," developed by most industries during or after the war, were intended to achieve identical goals through voluntary restraints on competition. The Harding and Coolidge administrations tended to be very receptive to the latter approach. The now-predictable result, of course, was that without enforcement authority, industry leaders spent their energy excoriating the "ten-percenters," who refused to cooperate, or trying to outlaw one example after another of "unfair competition." Almost every imaginable method of competition was attacked during the 1920s.

The election of Herbert Hoover (derisively called "Wonder Boy" by Calvin Coolidge) and the subsequent crash of the stock market provided both a rationale and the support for business to regain the wartime mechanisms for controlling competition. One Hoover administration initiative after another garnered strong support from the business community, but as economic conditions worsened, the demands for intervention grew more radical. Then, with the worsening of the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the support and the rationale both soared to new heights. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, far from a program passed over the objections of business, was actually the culmination of fifteen years of special pleading by business leaders. Shaffer's book dispels any remaining doubts about its genesis as a plan endorsed and lobbied for by business. The facts and the quotations are numerous; their impact is overwhelming.

This book is an excellent study of how business collaborated with government during the New Deal era. The origins of the NRA and how it stifled trade and raised prices for consumers is a key part of this book.

Skillfully translated from Russian and edited with notes and an introduction by expert scholars Michael A. Green and Stanislav A. Shvabrin, Mikhail Kuzmin: Selected Writings presents one of Russia's least known, non-conformist authors, Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936). Kuzmin's earlier "decadent" aesthetic works praising worldly delights have received some accord, but Mikhail Kuzmin: Selected Writings particularly focuses upon Kuzmin's later works, which reflected his endurance and struggle to survive during the early Soviet years. These works, long censored in the Soviet Union due to their absolute loathing of how the state denied individual liberties, to the extent of drawing an allegory between Nero's Rome and Stalin's Russia. Kuzmin as a literary theoretician was a key figure in the reaction against Symbolism for the new generation, and ultimately influential in Russian art, despite a totalitarian state's severe attempts to subdue and utilize art for its own propaganda. Prose, poetry, and plays including "The Trout Breaks the Ice", "Thrall", and "Alexandrian Songs" fill this strongly recommended addition to classic literature shelves.

Mikhail Kuzmin Selected Writings by Mikhail Kuzmin, Translated, Edited, Annotated, and with an Introduction by Michael Arthur Green, Stanislav Shvabrin (Bucknell University Press) The least known of the Russian writers in Harold Bloom's Western Canon, Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936) is the last to emerge from the oblivion imposed by Soviet prudery on the country's non-conformist art. Green and Shvabrin's Mikhail Kuzmin: Selected Writings takes the English-speaking reader well beyond the reference-book cliché of Kuzmin as Russia's first openly gay writer, made notorious by his "coming-out" novel Wings of 1906. One of the supreme Russian poets of the twentieth century the equal of Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva. Kuzmin was also an outstanding prose writer, dramatist, and literary theoretician. Finally he is beginning to receive the attention that is his due.
Kuzmin began his career as a "decadent" aesthete, singer of the worldly delights that had been looked down upon by the mystically inclined Symbolists. In his "Alexandrian Songs" of 1906, Kuzmin had introduced the image of this exotic city as a personal metaphor for an unconstrained harmony at once sensuous and spiritual. Such was the starting point of an evolution that led to the emergence of an unanticipated Kuzmin: a poet of endurance and survival amid the deprivation and oppression of the early Soviet years. It is this new, as yet undiscovered Kuzmin who provides the staple of this collection. For the first time in English, the reader, will find here a substan¬tial body of verse long forbidden in the Soviet Union because of its unambiguous loathing of a new order that denied liberty to the individual (see the cycle "Thrall" of1919 and the uncollected poems). Kuzmin's last published verse narrative "The Trout Breaks the Ice" of 1929 left no doubt of his place among leading Modernists, while the uniquely ambitious drama The Death of Nero (completed in 1929, published for the first time in 1977, in West Germany) will surely be hailed as a revelation. Drawing on Nero's Rome and Stalin's Russia, Kuzmin creates a metatheatrical riddle that delves into the essence of creativity and absolutism. The religious and mystical element germane to both is subjected to cruel authorial irony as The Death of Nero's protagonists compete for the reader's-or spectator's-attention. A single short story from each of the pre- and post-Revolutionary periods is made to represent Kuzmin the prose writer. The malice in the atmosphere of the St. Petersburg vie de bohème is vividly suggested in the 1910 story "High Art." It stands in striking contrast to "Underground Streams," a snapshot of the brave new world of the immediate post-Revolutionary years.
Kuzmin the literary theoretician was a singularly influential figure in the reaction against Symbolism among a new generation, one that helped shape our notion of twentieth-century Russian art. His "Concerning Beautiful Clarity" of 1910 gave impetus to a definition of the principles of post-Symbolism; Kuzmin's other manifesto, "Declaration of Emotionalism," published in 1924, was a courageous if quixotic attempt to thwart the approaching dominance of artistic modes sanctioned by a totalitarian state.

Captivating study in English of Anna de Noailles' poetry. Perry allows us to discover this powerful woman who had such an impact in France at the turn of the century and up to her early death in 1933. An incredibly thorough study with numerous and qualitative translations of Noailles' verse and poetic prose. Anna de Noailles has been well served!

A celebrated poet in France during her lifetime, Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) gradually lost critical attention after her death, This book, the first on the poet to appear in English, reexamines her extensive poetry and prose, alongside manuscripts and private documents' in relation to the works of French and European artists and thinkers from among her predecessors as well as her contemporaries The author shows how this woman of foreign origins envisioned and constructed an original poetic world by actively engaging with her literary and intellectual heritage-as represented by Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallamre, Proust, Schopenhauer, and Rilke, among others--while discovering vital sources of inspiration in her Greek ancestry and in Nietzsche's groundbreaking Philosophy. Not only did Noailles create a distinctive voice in the world of French letters but her influence reached writers of both genders in France, in other European countries, and across the Atlantic. Best understood in terms of a Dionysian aesthetics, her work is sensual, erotic, and playful, but also reflective, violent on occasion, and always marked by a tragic undercurrent that becomes magnified with time. Beyond the prominent place she held in the world of French letters, Noailles' lifelong commitment to artistic creation invites a reconsideration of her work.
Through the focusing lens of Anna de Noailles, Persephone Unbound revives multiple facets of the culture in which she wrote. More crucially still, it reevaluates a writer whose historical stature and whose incorporation by the French establishment as a representative of "feminine" poetry have tended to overshadow her literary merits. With respect to her poetry in particular, critics have often failed to recognize the modernity of its lyric voice on account of its traditional verse patterns. Reflecting a dual attitude of competition and cooperation with her cultural world, Noailles held a similarly doublevoiced discourse toward conventional interpretations of woman. Her classification in literary history as a belated French Romantic further obfuscates the significance of her work While recognizing her predecessors, Noailles was frequently unable to find adequate models in their works for a distinct poetic identity. In seeking new versions of the feminine self she acknowledged women who were unable to write and, more broadly, she attempted to provide a formerly silent Muse with voice and presence. Noailles' Greek inheritance also enabled her to reclaim mythical figures such as those of Persephone and Antigone, and thus to invigorate the link that French poetry had established with antiquity. The book finther evaluates Noailles' unique positions on social-sexual politics as they find expression in her little-known relationship with the nationalist writer Maurice Barres. First made available to readers in 1991, their correspondence discloses how Barres found in Noailles a long-sought muse even while he rejected her progressive politics. The author analyzes both Noailles' renditions of this relationship and the oscillation in Barrbs's works between the symbolic significance he attached to Noailles as a quasi-miraculous incarnation of his fascination with Dionysian values and his equally forceful denial of a poet whose inspiration clashed with his philosophy of nationalist action.

"Ruben Dario" is the pseudonym of Felix Ruben Garcia Sarmiento. He was born in Metapa, Nicaragua (today known as Ciudad Dario) in January 18, 1867.

From the inside cover of the book: "One of the greatest poets of all time in any language... [Dario] changed Spanish-language literature forever in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the seminal figure in the international movement known as "modernismo". Perhaps not since the prodigies of Spain's Golden Age has one poet managed to influence the course of Spanish-language literature so profoundly and permanently, virtually defining poetry both for his generation and for those to follow."

Whether Dario's name is new or already familiar to you, this book will be a joy to read. Amazon.com made this book available for purchase several months before it was actually published. Considering the price of the book, for me it was a purchase purely based on the faith that it would be good. Well, I'm far from disappointed, it's worth every cent!

As a native Nicaraguan who's read much of Dario's work in Spanish, I can honestly say that the authors' translations demonstrate tremendous understanding, sensibility and affection for Dario's work. His poems are presented in Spanish on even-numbered pages and English translations are presented on odd-numbered pages.

The themes of Dario's poems run the gamut: life, love, death, despair, politics, etc. Here's a couple of excerpts:

"VERSOS DE OTONIO"/"AUTUMN VERSES"

When my thought strays to you, it becomes perfumed;
your glance is so sweet, it turns profound.
Under your naked feet there is still the whiteness of foam,
and in your lips you epitomize the joy of the world.

Short-lived love has a brief charm
and offers the same end to delight and sorrow.
And hour ago I engraved a name in the snow;
a minute ago I expressed my love on the sand.

Yellow leaves fall on the boulevard
where so many loving couples stroll.
And in Autumn's cup there is a vague wine
into which your roses, Springtime, will drop their petals.

"LO FATAL"/"WHAT GETS YOU"

How fortunate the tree that is scarcely aware,
and more so the hard stone because it no longer feels,
since there is no greater pain than the pain of living,
nor deeper sorrow than conscious life.

Being, and knowing nothing, and being without a true course,
and the fear of having been, and a future terror...
And the certain dread of being dead tomorrow,
and suffering because of life, and because of shadow, and because of

what we don't know and scarcely suspect,
and the flesh that tempts with its fresh-picked bunches,
and the tomb that awaits with its funeral bouquets,
and not knowing where we are going,
nor from where we have come....!

The monumental greatness and expressive power of this giant of the Modernism, still permeates in new generations. Nicaragua was his nest, though his presence is universal. His poetry is plenty of deep significance: "Youth: Divine treasure" exemplifies a simple proof of his genius; three words that hurt and express much more than thousand swords and hundred of front pages.
Dario visited the hospitals of the hell that's why his poetry is so vigorous and strong, having born in a Romantic age, he overthrew this category becoming in a classic.
His tragic mood finds shelter even in the most imperceptible motives; from the morning dew to the brightest star: he writes as Rilke in mythic terms: he doesn't employ any masked subterfuges, or recondite places, he seems to have the astonishing capacity of crossing the limits of the real and emulating to Orpheus, goes and returns without effort to the last boundaries of the word.
Despite the fact all translation is a treason according to a Chinese statement, go for Dario and explore his universe. But if you domain the Spanish idiom the 'pleasure will be exponentially major and gratifying. .
If you require me about the two greatest names of the Castellan Poetry : Pío Baroja and Rubén Darío.

"Spanish Traditional..." really opened up mis ojos to the passing of language from person to person. Spanish Academics should take note of this informative book.

This book is perfect for anyone who feels that langauge and the history behind it is important. Highly recommended!

Intense study of Origen's thought, with probing chapters on how he viewed the beginning and the end, education, spiritual growth, the devil, the Fall, all of which is documented from primary sources. The first book in English to consider the whole range of Origen's thought through the concept of spiritual transformation. Though well documented and indexed, the scholarly depth does not affect the style, which is quite smooth and can be read by someone without knowledge of the field. Would be useful to those interested in ancient Christian thought, the Bible, Christian philosophy and, especially, spiritual transformation.