"The Midwest has been characterized as an excellent seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. This collection reveals that representation to be false. More than just a springboard for the careers of future expatriates, the region has cultivated extraordinary intellectuals and allowed for the cross-pollination of a diversity of ideas. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations-to some a frontier,...

A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life--and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds. What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization....

"The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place—Pittsburgh, PA—from the 1920s through the 1950s. Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most...

"A revelatory history of the transformational decade after World War II when Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul, and the horrors of the Holocaust"-- Provided by publisher.

"For its twentieth anniversary, a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition of Mary Karr's pathbreaking, award-winning, mega-bestselling memoir, with a new foreword by Lena Dunham When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious...

Being a Scot is a vivid and highly personal portrait of Scotland and its achievements. With Murray Grigor, co-writer, film-maker, friend and fellow Scot, Sean's personal quest has been to seek answers to some perplexing questions. How did Scots come to devise so many new sports and games? What gave fire to the Gothic tendency in Scottish literature? Why have so many creatively inventive and influential architects been Scots? Sean Connery offers a...

This is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, the author found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The...

"Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written, now illustrated by Maira Kalman"-- Provided by publisher.

"Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans--the poetry of Langston Hughes, the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, the sculptures of Augusta Savage, and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it....