Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During the great flood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath the main structure near Baton Rouge and enlarged a pre-existing football-field-size crater. That night the Mississippi River nearly changed its course for a shorter and steeper path to the sea. Such a map-changing reconfiguration of the country's largest river would bear national significance as well as disastrous consequences for New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of this phenomenon, beginning with a major channel shift around 3,000 years ago. By the time European colonists began to explore the Lower Mississippi Valley, a unique confluence of waterways had formed where the Red River joined the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya River flowed out into the Atchafalaya Basin. A series of human alterations to this potentially volatile web of rivers, starting with a bend cutoff in 1831 by Captain Henry Miller Shreve, set the forces in motion for the Mississippi's move into the Atchafalaya Basin. Told against the backdrop of the Lower Mississippi River's impending diversion, the book's chapters chronicle historic floods, rising flood crests, a changing strategy for flood protection, and competing interests in the management of the Old River outlet. Beyond Control is both a history and a close look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the twenty-first century.
Over three decades of interviews with the innovative Nigerian author and first Black African winner of the Booker Prize
A timely group of essays that wrestles with what children's literature is and who it is made for
The first book-length scholarly study of one of the most influential creators of comics' Bronze Age
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of "River Rats" living in a vestigial colony of twelve "camps" on New Orleans's river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.
A dynamic collection acknowledging a powerful diversity of superheroes outside of expected boundaries
A dynamic collection acknowledging a powerful diversity of superheroes outside of expected boundaries
Enlightening essays on the enduring and compelling functions of violence in comics
Enlightening essays on the enduring and compelling functions of violence in comics
Fourteen profiles of and conversations with the well-known American actor, director, and screenwriter
Fourteen profiles of and conversations with the well-known American actor, director, and screenwriter
A behind-the-scenes account from Muddy Waters's road manager and right-hand man during the bluesman's last great years
In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. During her stay she heard the singing of the slaves in their churches, as they rowed their boats from island to island, and as they worked and played. Already a skilled musician, she determined to preserve as much of the music as she could, quickly writing down words and melodies, some of them only fleeting improvisations. Upon her return to Philadelphia, she began composing musical settings for the songs and in the fall of 1862 published the first serious musical arrangements of slave songs. She also wrote about the musical characteristics of slave songs, and published, in a leading musical journal of the time, the first article to discuss what she had witnessed.In Songs of Sorrow renowned music scholar Samuel Charters tells McKim's personal story. Letters reveal the story of young women's lives during the harsh years of the war. At the same time that her arrangements of the songs were being published, a man with whom she had an unofficial "e;attachment"e; was killed in battle, and the war forced her to temporarily abandon her work.In 1865 she married Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and in the early months of their marriage she proposed that they turn to the collection of slave songs that had long been her dream. She and her husband--a founder and literary editor of the recently launched journal The Nation--enlisted the help of two associates who had also collected songs in the Sea Islands. Their book, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. After a long illness, ultimately ending in paralysis, she died at the age of thirty-four in 1877. This book reclaims the story of a pioneer in ethnomusicology, one whose influential work affected the Fisk Jubilee Singers and many others.
Before cable television and mega-contracts, professional jocks' lives were little different from those of the fans in the stands. Back then, the game they played was much simpler but far rougher than anything seen today. Ever cheering from the sidelines, Perian Conerly, wife of the New York Giants' star quarterback Charlie Conerly, and the first female sportswriter in the National Sportswriters' Association, wrote this lighthearted account of pro football during its heyday (1948-1961). Her husband led the Giants for fourteen seasons. As she describes the glory games, the players, and life on the road, she delivers from the inside the kind of personal reportage that fans adore. Her story begins with the hilarious misadventures of her wedding day in Clarksdale, Mississippi, "the Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt." It ends thirteen years later with Charlie's retirement at the age of forty. In between, there are vignettes of the closely knit cadre of Giants' wives, most of whom resided in the same Bronx hotel near Yankee Stadium. She also reports locker-room gossip and recounts amusing pro-ball anecdotes of a time before TV made athletes' images familiar in all households. Although their deeds on the gridiron were notable, their faces were not. Back then, players were so anonymous in public that many times they fell prey to imitators who stole their identities to mooch drinks and dinners from unsuspecting fans only for the thrill of passing as "somebody." Along with her scoop reports on winning games, Mrs. Conerly paints an endearing portrait of her famous husband, an Ole Miss legend who, after retirement, was hired as the first Marlboro Man. Though her style is casual, she moves the reader painlessly through some of the finer points of the game. The Washington Evening Star touted her for "having written the best book on pro football in a long time." The New York Times, for which Mrs. Conerly wrote occasional sports columns, said "Backseat Quarterback is exactly the kind of book that one would expect Perian Conerly to write. Its pages shine with her charm, gaiety, wit, intelligence, and sparkle." Newsweek praised its "comic insight." This reissue of a favorite book of 1963 has a foreword by the Conerlys' friend and teammate Frank Gifford.
How a boisterous fruit importer aided a revolution that triggered a war
The first definitive volume in more than fifty years on the extraordinary star of Pickup on South Street, Three Coins in the Fountain, and Niagara
Thirty years of interviews spanning the career of the novelist, screenwriter, and gay activist whose works include After Delores and Maggie Terry
Thirty years of interviews spanning the career of the novelist, screenwriter, and gay activist whose works include After Delores and Maggie Terry
Krzysztof Kiesślowski's untimely death came at the height of his career, after his Three Colors trilogy of films garnered international acclaim (and an Oscar nomination), and he had been proclaimed Europe's most important filmmaker by many critics. Born in 1941, he was only fifty-four years old when he died. Kiesślowski himself tried to tell the story of his life and career in the 1993 book Kiesślowski on Kiesślowski. This collection, by contrast, reveals the shifting voice of a filmmaker who was initially optimistic about his social and cultural role, then felt himself buffeted by the turbulent politics and events of the People's Republic of Poland. As described in the chronology in this book, he found himself subject to the "economic censorship" of post-Communist filmmaking. How Kiesślowski responded at each moment of his life, what he tried to achieve with each of his films, is finely detailed in thirty-five selections. These pieces bring together his thesis from the famous ?o?dz? film school, a manifesto written just before the dark days of martial law in Poland, diary entries from the first time he was working outside Poland, and numerous rare interviews from Polish-, French-, and English-language sources. Renata Bernard, Sydney, Australia, is the coeditor of Diasporas of Australian Cinema and has published in Kinokultura and Senses of Cinema. Steven Woodward, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is professor at Bishop's University in Quebec, where he teaches courses on film, media, and popular culture. He is the editor of After Kiesślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kiesślowski.
This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that employ temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time-play in contemporary programming, but also the implications of its sometimes disorienting presence. Drawing upon the fields of cultural studies, television scholarship, and literary studies, as well as overarching theories concerning postmodernity and narratology, Time in Television Narrative offers some critical suggestions. The increasing number of television programs concerned with time may stem from any and all of the following: recent scientific approaches to quantum physics and temporality; new conceptions of history and posthistory; or trends in late-capitalistic production and consumption, in the new culture of instantaneity, or in the recent trauma culture amplified after the September 11 attacks. In short, these televisual time experiments may very well be an aesthetic response to the climate from which they derive. These essays analyze both ends of this continuum and also attend to another crucial variable: the television viewer watching this new temporal play.
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