Still Hanging

Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racism provides a variety of performance texts of different lengths, powerful imagery, recognizable situations, discussion questions and a “Racism and AntiRacism Bibliography” for students, faculty and others interested in deconstructing racism and constructing an anti-racist perspective.

A lighthearted manual for getting through each day with humor and giddiness. It is a delightful look at some of our minor, daily irritants that includes marriage, motherhood, football reruns of highlights of last year’s game and the men we love who watch them… again and again. The book is filled with astounding anti-diet/anti-exercise advice in the chapter “How I turned flab into dollars.” While Jan was jogging she thought she heard applause. Regretfully it was simply her thighs hitting together. She was paid extremely well to leave the neighborhood. Franchise anyone? There are time management tips “If you do not polish silver for six years it begins to look like pewter. Pewter is nice!” This joyful philosopher notices most human absurdities, ponders, reflects and then answers such questions as “Can we really leave nagging to strangers? Why is it that for every light on Broadway there is a runny nose? She agrees with Hemingway that though the sun also rises, it also fades the drapes. This witty book will have you shaking with glee (67 calories expended) as you realize the stuff that really annoys you can be thought about in a more amusing, tolerable and weight losing manner.

A story of love and loyalty, betrothal and betrayal, triumph and tragedy; charting one gay man's attempts to rise above the legacy of a traumatic childhood. Based on the author's own life, it will strike a chord with many who have been through similar things. It's a varied, exciting, demanding, sometimes terrifying life story. It contains some explicit sexual narrative, including sexual violence. http://www.thecloudsstillhang.com

Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital punishment, inspired by its author’s own time in the shadow of a firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of the book, which was first published in England in 1956, and followed in 1957 by this American edition. As Koestler ranges across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police, jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the justness and effectiveness of the death penalty. In Britain, Reflections on Hanging was part of a concerted, ultimately successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the 1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament. Reflections on Hanging is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for some of society’s most defenseless members, a critique of capital punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime, the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a citizenry.

In the 1860s a turbulent and battered Mexico fought for its survival against a French invasion. For a moment in time, the world order as we know it today was in question. The nascent United States, an independent Mexico, Europe the worlds balance of power hung in the balance in a chaotic swirl of plots and intrigues.Yet from this struggle was born a deep national pride and sense of confidence as Mexico, too long a nation taken for granted, rose to the challenge and united in heroic resistance. Follow the action as the interests of Mexicans, Confederates, Unionists, French, and English collide. Emperors scheme and flail, soldiers fight and die, nations clash and in the vortex, one young boy follows his heart to defend his country and become a man.

Anna Royer and her daughter Elizabeth are haunted by the raw Wyoming landscape they left behind years before. Their memories of the immensity of sky, the breadth of distance, the demons of weather and spirits of the "Old Ones" conspire to draw them back to see what remains of their life there. What they find confronts them with confusion and death and changes their lives forever.