Edgar

Edgar Snow (1905--1972) was one of the most notable Western journalists to report on China in both the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. He first became famous in the mid-1930s when he broke through a Nationalist blockade and reached the Communists in northwest China. For nearly a decade, no foreign reporter had seen the Communists, who were widely regarded as a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous book Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading it. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement. In this award-winning biography, journalist John Maxwell Hamilton follows Snow from his birth in Kansas City to his rise as a celebrated foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, his ostracism during the cold war, and his role as a singular journalistic bridge between Communist China and the United States. With a new preface by the author, this revealing portrait of the widely misunderstood Snow firmly establishes him as a model for the kind of committed reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.

Places the work of Edgar Cayce in historical context and assesses the validity of his “readings.”

Controversies abound in studies of Edgar Allan Poe. From the time of his death well into the twentieth century, partisans debated the issue of his character: was he an alcoholic? drug addict? pathological liar? necrophile? In the 1920s and 30s, psychoanalytic critics sought to divorce the study of Poe from Victorian moral concerns but in the process made scandalous claims by linking Poe's dream-like stories to his personality. The status of Poe's literary productions was similarly disputed; dismissed by the New Critics but championed by poets such as William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate. Recent scholars have debated the meaning and significance of Poe's representations of race, class, and gender, often returning to the character issue: how racist and misogynist was he, and how important are those questions to understanding his work? Finally, how have the seemingly countless plays, films, novels, comic books, and pop music experiments based on his image and works intertwined with academic study of Poe? This book examines these and other controversies, shedding light on broader issues of canon formation, the role of biography in literary study, and the importance of integrating various, even conflicting interpretations into one's own reading of a literary work. This book will be of great interest to Poe scholars, both those who have been a part of the literary battles described above and newcomers to the field who can use the book as a guide to the field of Poe studies, and to all those interested in Poe and his work. Scott Peeples is associate professor of English at the College of Charleston.

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.

Being able to think and reason is part of what makes us human. However clever we may or may not be, our minds matter. The Bible helps us to understand our minds matter more fully. It shows us that when people become Christians, their minds are made new. This mini-guide to the Christian explores the far-reaching implications of having a renewed mind. Book jacket.

This volume contains the best of David Edgar's work from the seventies The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs is an adaptation of the famous South African writer's diaries and deals with solitary confinement and loneliness - "a remarkable, persuasive picture." (Observer); Mary Barnes is based in a commune in the sixties and focuses on schizophrenia "promulgating the theory that schizophrenia can be effectively treated through behaviourist methods alone"; Saigon Rose tackles venereal disease and is "intriguing and entertaining...Edgar handles his themes - loss of innocence and a sense of betrayal - in a bitty, playful style laced with black comedy" (Independent); Oh Fair Jerusalem deals with the black death and Destiny deals with the loss of Empire and the rise of fascism in contemporary Britain "A play which astonished me with its intelligence, density, sympathy and finely controlled anger." Dennis Potter (Sunday Times).