What We Are Reading Today: Empire of Ice and Stone

What We Are Reading Today: Empire of Ice and Stone
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Updated 26 January 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Empire of Ice and Stone

What We Are Reading Today: Empire of Ice and Stone

Author: Buddy Levy

In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world’s greatest living ice navigator. 

The expedition’s visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame.

Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy’s “Empire of Ice and Stone” tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership: one selfless, one self-serving, and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history.


What We Are Reading Today: White: The History of a Color

What We Are Reading Today: White: The History of a Color
Updated 19 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: White: The History of a Color

What We Are Reading Today: White: The History of a Color

Translated by Jody Gladding

As a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of color, but it is without doubt an important color in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow—and, like them, white has its own intriguing history.

In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of the color white in European societies, from antiquity to today.


What We Are Reading Today: Before Modernism

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Updated 19 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Before Modernism

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Author: VIRGINIA JACKSON

“Before Modernism” examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry.
Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries.

 


What We Are Reading Today: The Politics of Ritual

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Updated 18 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: The Politics of Ritual

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Author: Molley Farneth

“The Politics of Ritual” is a major new account of the political power of rituals. In this incisive and wide-ranging book, Molly Farneth argues that rituals are social practices in which people create, maintain, and transform themselves and their societies. Far from mere scripts or mechanical routines, rituals are dynamic activities bound up in processes of continuity and change.

Emphasizing the significance of rituals in democratic engagement, Farneth shows how people adapt their rituals to redraw the boundaries of their communities, reallocate goods and power within them, and cultivate the habits of citizenship.

Transforming our understanding of rituals and their vital role in the political conflicts and social movements of our time, “The Politics of Ritual” examines a broad range of rituals enacted to just and democratic ends, including border Eucharists, candlelight vigils, and rituals of mourning.

This timely book makes a persuasive case for an innovative democratic ritual life that can enable people to create and sustain communities that are more just, inclusive, and participatory than those in which they find themselves.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Africatown

What We Are Reading Today: Africatown
Updated 16 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Africatown

What We Are Reading Today: Africatown

Author: Nick Tabor

Nick Tabor’s “Africatown” charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the US from West Africa. 

Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders.


What We Are Reading Today: Delicious

What We Are Reading Today: Delicious
Updated 15 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Delicious

What We Are Reading Today: Delicious

Authors: Rob Dunn & Monica Sanchez

Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? “Delicious” is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions.

With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history.