During the Great Depression, photographer Allen Eugene Cole posted a sign in front of his studio in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood: Somebody, Somewhere, Wants Your Photograph. An entrepreneurial businessman with a keen ability to market his images of Cleveland’s black experience, Cole was deeply immersed in civic life.
Ohio can be a land of weather extremes. There are droughts followed by flood, arctic cold and soaring heat in one year, a Christmas warmed to 70 degrees and a Christmas white with thirty inches of snow. Ice jams on the Sandusky River and tornadoes across its southern counties, wind storms in Cleveland and floods in the Ohio River Valley inspire Ohioans to “remember when.” Thomas and Jeanne Schmidlin, native Ohioans, have brought together data from government records, scientific studies, memoirs, diaries, and newspapers in the first comprehensive book on Ohio weather. They highlight 200 weather events from 1790 to the present—extremes of rain, snow, storms, and temperature. Anecdotal, often first person, accounts are enhanced by statistics, photographs, and maps. They describe the place of weather in popular history and folklore and how forces of nature compelled the construction of extensive flood control and weather warning systems in Ohio. Thunder in the Heartland will be of interest to climatologist, cultural historians, and all who live the weather of the Oho Country.
These letters to “Michal,” Williams endearing name for his wife, from “Serge,” a moniker by which his most intimate friends addressed him, are more than just a collection of love letters—they are significant for what they tell us about the man, for the light they throw on his work, and for the way they show Williams in the context of his literary contemporaries (C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, Christopher Fry, and Edith Sitwell). In fact, Williams felt that T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis were the only two people other than his wife to whom he could talk seriously about important matters.
The antislavery movement entered an important new phase when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator in 1831—a phase marked by massive petition campaigns, the extraordinary mobilization of female activists, and the creation of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society. While the period from 1831 to 1865 is known as the heyday of radical abolitionism, the work of Garrison’s predecessors in Massachusetts was critical in laying the foundation for antebellum abolitionism. To Plead Our Own Cause explores the significant contributions of African Americans in the Bay State to both local and nationwide antislavery activity before 1831 and demonstrates that their efforts represent nothing less than the beginning of organized abolitionist activity in America.
Focusing on the themes of enchantment and loss in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, this unique study incorporates elements of developmental psychology to explore both Tolkien’s life and art, deepening our understanding of the interrelationship between his biography and writing.
An in-depth examination of the role of divine beings in Tolkien’s work, Tolkien’s Cosmology: Divine Beings and Middle-earth brings together Tolkien’s many references to such beings and analyzes their involvement within his created world. Unlike many other commentators, Sam McBride asserts that a careful reading of the whole of the author’s corpus shows a coherent, if sometimes contradictory, divine presence in the world.
“Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’” —Alicia Ostriker
“In Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent, Stephen Frech takes a time-honored, traditional subject, the life of Christ, and brings it to life again. At the same time he deftly explores the divided nature of human beings—what it means to be spirit living in flesh, what it means to be incarnate. These fine, subtle, thoughtful poems again and again find the myth inside the real and the real inside the myth.”—Andrew Hudgins
As a true crime book, Tracks to Murder is witty and informative and enriches these classic American murder cases by placing them within their original settings. Goodman also plays them against their locations as they are today, resulting in a series of character sketches both contemporary and historical. As a travel book, it presents the seasoned reflections of a cultivated English writer on American manners and morals observed during his serendipitous transcontinental journey.
“Over the years Zimmer’s poems have consistently been full of good sense and buoyant humor. Now he has kicked it up some notches and, using his poetic skills, made this sad, funny, quite serious book of prose about trains, childhood, war, education, drinking, jazz, wooden sheds, grass, elephants, the moon, blues, horses, sickness, and so many other things that come together as a satisfying whole. It is a great pleasure to turn these lyrical, finely-written pages.”—Annie Dillard
