What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation
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Updated 28 January 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

Edited by Paula Marantz Cohen

“Talking Cure” is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Marantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can and explains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to what ails our troubled society. 

Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and her decades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse in our families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverse opinions and sensibilities.


What We Are Reading Today: The First Fossil Hunters

What We Are Reading Today: The First Fossil Hunters
Updated 21 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: The First Fossil Hunters

What We Are Reading Today: The First Fossil Hunters

Author: Adrienne Mayor

What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in “The First Fossil Hunters.”

Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.


What We Are Reading Today: Settling for Less

What We Are Reading Today: Settling for Less
Updated 20 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Settling for Less

What We Are Reading Today: Settling for Less

Author: Lachlan McNamee

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs?
Settling for Less traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers.


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.