Visar resultat för..."University Press of Florida"

The origin story of a groundbreaking albumThe 1971 Allman Brothers Band album At Fillmore East was a musical manifesto years in the making. In Play All Night!, Bob Beatty dives deep into the motivations and musical background of band founder Duane Allman to tell the story of what made this album not just a smash hit, but one of the most important live rock albums in history. Featuring insights from bootleg tapes, radio ads, early reviews, never-before-published photos, and the memories of band members, fans, and friends, Beatty chronicles how Allman rejected the traditional route of music business success—hit singles and record sales—and built a band that was at its best jamming live on stage, feeding off the crowd’s energy, and pushing each other to new heights of virtuosic improvisation. Every challenge, from recruiting a group of relatively unknown but established musicians like Jaimoe and Dickey Betts, touring the American South as an interracial band, and the failure of their first two studio albums, sharpened Allman’s determination to pursue the band’s truly unique sound. He made a bold choice—to record their next album live at Bill Graham’s famous concert hall in New York’s Lower East Side, a gamble that launched a new strand of American music to the top of the charts. Four days after the album went gold, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 24. This book explores how At Fillmore East cemented Allman’s legacy as a strong-willed, self-taught visionary, giving fans of Southern rock and all readers interested in the role of rock music in American popular culture a new appreciation for this pathbreaking album.

Using textiles to understand gender and economy in Norse societiesIn The Valkyries’ Loom, Michèle Hayeur Smith examines Viking textiles as evidence of the little-known work of women in the Norse colonies that expanded from Scandinavia across the North Atlantic in the ninth century AD. While previous researchers have overlooked textiles as insignificant artifacts, Hayeur Smith is the first to use them to understand gender and economy in Norse societies of the North Atlantic. This groundbreaking study is based on the author’s systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unknown even to archaeologists and span 1,000 years. Through these garments and fragments, Hayeur Smith provides new insights into how the women of these island nations influenced international trade by producing cloth (vaðmál); how they shaped the development of national identities by creating clothing; and how they helped their communities survive climate change by reengineering clothes during the Little Ice Age. She supplements her analysis by revealing societal attitudes about weaving through the poem “Darraðarljoð” from Njál’s Saga, in which the Valkyries—Óðin’s female warrior spirits—produce the cloth of history and decide the fates of men and nations.Bringing Norse women and their labor to the forefront of research, Hayeur Smith establishes the foundation for a gendered archaeology of the North Atlantic that has never been attempted before. This monumental and innovative work contributes to global discussions about the hidden roles of women in past societies in preserving tradition and guiding change.

Most of the research on the South ties the region to the North, emphasising racial binaries and outdated geographical boundaries, but The American South and the Atlantic World seeks a larger context. Helping to define “New” Southern studies, this book - the first of its kind - explores how the cultures, contacts, and economies of the Atlantic World shaped the South. Ranging chronologically from colonial times to the modern era, the essays challenge current narratives about the South through an interdisciplinary spectrum of topics, including migration, religion, slavery, gender, literature, and ethnography.This book features some of the best work available on the topic, designed to explore not just southern themes but the historiographical and methodological issues that are now known as New Southern studies.

An introduction to embodied movement through the work of a dance education pioneerIn this introduction to the work of somatic dance education pioneer Nancy Topf (1942–1998), readers are ushered on a journey to explore the movement of the body through a close awareness of anatomical form and function. Making available the full text of Topf’s The Anatomy of Center for the first time in print, this guide helps professionals, teachers, and students of all levels integrate embodied, somatic practices within contexts of dance, physical education and therapy, health, and mental well-being.Hetty King, a movement educator certified in the Topf Technique®, explains how the ideas in this work grew out of Topf’s involvement in developing Anatomical Release Technique—an important concept in contemporary dance—and the influence of earlier innovators Barbara Clark and Mabel Elsworth Todd, founder of the approach to movement known as “ideokinesis.” Featuring lessons written as a dialogue between teacher, student, and elements of the body, Topf’s material is accompanied by twenty-one activities that allow readers to use the book as a self-guided manual. A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice is a widely applicable entry point into the tradition of experiential anatomy and its mindful centering of the living, breathing body.

William Morgan (1930–2016) was a bold, innovative, and highly imaginative architect known internationally for fusing ancient and modern styles and for his early championing of green design principles. This extensively illustrated book traces Morgan’s life story and the development of his singular design vision. Exploring Morgan’s early influences, Richard Shieldhouse reveals the architect’s childhood familiarity with pre-Columbian village sites and introduces college mentors who encouraged his interest in both architecture and archaeology. During navy service in the Pacific, Morgan studied ancient structures in Guam as well as Frank Lloyd Wright’s design work in Japan. Later, his drive and discipline brought him into contact with leading architects such as Paul Rudolph at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, a hotbed of modernism at the time. From there, Morgan struck out on his own in Jacksonville, Florida, to shape the course of architectural history. This book tracks the evolution of Morgan’s guiding ideas?economy, efficiency, visual delight, imaginative use of everyday materials, and environmental sensitivity. His most famous designs are featured with photographs, drawings, and the architect’s own commentary. Structures such as the Dunehouses, a duplex built into the side of an oceanfront dune, represent Morgan’s commitment to earth architecture. His plans for police headquarters and other public buildings incorporate green roofs, stepped terraces, pyramid forms, and other elements inspired by aspects of prehistoric design. Morgan was unique among architects for his interest in ancient North America and for blending a modern style characterized by its rejection of history with the design language of prehistory. Highlighting how his work has impacted many areas of architecture such as urban design, this book celebrates Morgan’s continuing legacy.

Told in personal interviews, this is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown.The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Terry Johnson, Ryan “Rymodee” Modee, Gloria Diaz, Skott Cowgill, and others tell of playing in bands including This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, operating local businesses such as End of the Line Cafe, forming feminist support groups, and creating zines and art. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of living, acceptance for the marginalized in a rapidly changing world, and building a sense of family from the ground up.Including photos by Cynthia Connolly and Mike Brodie, A Punkhouse in the Deep South illuminates many individual lives and creative endeavors that found a home and thrived in one of the oldest continuously inhabited punkhouses in the United States.

Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts, Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters deriving pleasure from pain in encounters and emotions such as flirtations, courtships, betrothals, lesbian desires, religious zeal, marital relationships, and affairs.Mitchell begins by examining the archetypal tale of Samson and Delilah together with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, from which masochism gets its name. Through close readings, Mitchell then argues that Charlotte Brontë's Villette, George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, and Jean Rhys's Quartet all experiment with masochistic relationships that are more complex than they seem. Mitchell shows that, far from being victimized, the characters in these works achieve self-definition and empowerment by pursuing and performing pain and that masochism is a generative response rather than a destructive force beyond their control. Including readings of Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden and Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, Mitchell traces shifts in public consciousness regarding sex and gender and discusses why masochism continues to be categorized as a perversion today. The literary world, she asserts, has repeatedly questioned this notion as well as masochism's associations with passivity and femininity, using the behavior to defy heteronormative and heteropatriarchal gender dynamics.

Did Richard the Lionheart really die from just a crossbow wound, or was there foul play? Who are the two infant children buried in Tutankhamen’s tomb? Could a skull found in a tax collector’s attic be the long-lost head of Henri IV? In When Science Sheds Light on History, Philippe Charlier, the “Indiana Jones of the graveyards,” travels the globe with his forensics team to unravel these and other historic mysteries. To get answers, Charlier looks for clues in medical records, death masks, fingerprints, and bloodstains. He even enlists the help of perfume experts to smell and identify embalming materials. He reconstructs the face of Robespierre and analyzes charred bones attributed to Joan of Arc. He identifies toxic levels of gold in the hair of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II, and mercury poisoning in the body of Agnès Sorel, the “most beautiful woman” in fifteenth-century France.Charlier also pieces together the stories of people whose names and lives have long been forgotten. He investigates Stone Age graves, medieval necropolises, and museum collections. Playing the role of both crime scene investigator and forensic anthropologist, Charlier diagnoses a mummy with malaria, an ancient Greek child with Down syndrome, and a stately Roman with encephalitis. He studies accounts of divine cures from antiquity. He determines the origins of preserved heads of the Jivaro and Maori people to help museums return them to their clans.Exploring how our ancestors lived and how they died, the forty cases in this book tackle some of history’s most enduring questions and illustrate the power of science to reveal the secrets of the past.

When her family moved from Puerto Rico to Atlanta, Von Diaz traded plantains, roast pork, and Malta for grits, fried chicken, and sweet tea. Brimming with humor and nostalgia, Coconuts and Collards is a recipe-packed memoir of growing up Latina in the Deep South. The stories center on the women in Diaz's family who have used food to nourish and care for one another.Inspired by her grandmother's 1962 copy of Cocina Criolla-the Puerto Rican equivalent of the Joy of Cooking-Diaz celebrates traditional recipes while fusing them with her own family history and a contemporary southern flair. Diaz's funche recipe is grits kicked up with coconut milk. White beans make the catfish corn chowder creamy and give it a Spanish feel. The pinchos de pollo-chicken skewers-feature guava BBQ sauce, which doubles as the sauce for adobo-coated ribs.Diaz innovates for modern palates, updating and lightening recipes and offering vegetarian alternatives. For the chayotes rellenos (stuffed squash), she suggests replacing the picadillo (sauteed ground beef) with seitan or tofu. She offers alternatives for difficult-to-find ingredients, like substituting potatoes for yucca and yautia-root vegetables typically paired with a meat to make sancocho. Diaz's version of this hearty stew features chicken and lean pork.And because every good Puerto Rican meal ends with drinks, desserts, and dancing, Diaz includes recipes for besitos de coco (coconut kisses), rum cake, sofrito bloody marys, and anticuado, an old-fashioned made with rum.With stunning photographs that showcase the geographic diversity of the island and the vibrant ingredients that make up Puerto Rican cuisine, this cookbook is a moving story about discovering our roots through the foods that comfort us. It is about the foods that remind us of family and help us bridge childhood and adulthood, island and mainland, birthplace and adopted home.

This book addresses James Joyce’s borderlessness and the ways his work crosses or unsettles boundaries of all kinds. The essays in this volume position borderlessness as a major key to understanding Joycean poiesis, opening new doors and new engagements with his work. Contributors begin by exploring the circulation of Joyce’s writing in Latin America via a transcontinental network of writers and translators, including José Lezama Lima, José Salas Subirat, Leopoldo Marechal, Eduardo Desnoës, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Augusto Monterroso. Essays then consider Joyce through the lens of the sciences, presenting theoretical interventions on posthumanist parasitology in Ulysses; on Giordano Bruno’s coincidence of opposites in Finnegans Wake; and on algorithmic agency in the Wake. Cutting-edge cognitive narratology is applied to the “Penelope” episode. Next, the volume features innovative essays on Joyce in relation to early animated film and comics, engaging with animated film in the “Circe” episode, Joyce’s points of contact with George Herriman’s cartoon strip Krazy Kat, and structural affinities between open-world gaming and Finnegans Wake. The final essays focus on abiding human concerns, offering new research on Joyce’s creative use of “spicy books”; a Lacanian consideration of “The Dead” alongside Katherine Mansfield’s “The Stranger” and Haruki Murakami’s “Kino”; and a meditation on Joyce’s uncertainties about the boundary between life and death. For Joyce, borders are problems—but ones that provided precious fodder for his art. And as this volume demonstrates, they encourage brilliant reflections on his work, from new scholars to leading luminaries in the field.

An essential resource for exploring the early literary genre of Icelandic saga narrativesCombining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.   Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact.   Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form.   A volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh

Amy Levy was a talented Anglo-Jewish writer who committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 28. During her brief career she published essays, short stories, three novels and three collections of poetry, but none of them is in print today. To correct this situation and set the stage for a generous selection of her work, Melvyn New introduces Amy Levy as an unmarried Victorian woman and an urban intellectual, disillusioned by the mores of her culture, yet unable to abandon her identification with the English Jews who embodied so much of what she scorned. He reconstructs her world in 1880s England - a time when the president of the British Medical Association warned his colleagues that educated women would become ""more or less sexless"" - raising questions that lead to the tortured heart and mind of this ""found"" writer. Of the novels, ""Reuben Sachs"", which generated strong negative feelings in London's Jewish community, is considered one of the first realistic examinations of assimilated Jewry in 19th century England. ""The Romance of a Shop"" looks at working women in late Victorian society and offers a glimpse of the bohemian world of artists. The shorter fiction ranges from a story about an Anglo-Jewish Cambridge student (who commits suicide) to the portrait of a women turned bitter and cynical by the courtship rituals of the age. The selection of nearly 50 poems includes a dramatic monologue in which Socrates' ""shrewish"" wife explains the world from her own perspective. The essays include sketches on Jewish life in London and a blistering attack on the pomposities of Henry James and his circle.

Based on her analysis of archaeological evidence from the excavations of Maya churches at Tipu and Lamanai, Elizabeth Graham seeks to understand why the Maya sometimes actively embraced Catholicism during the period of European conquest and continued to worship in this way even after the end of Spanish occupation.The Maya in Belize appear to have continued to bury their dead in Christian churchyards long after the churches themselves had fallen into disuse. They also seem to have hidden pre-Hispanic objects of worship in Christian sacred spaces during times of persecution, and excavations reveal the style of the early churches to be unmistakably Franciscan. The evidence suggests that the Maya remained Christian after 1700, when Spaniards were no longer in control, which challenges the widespread assumption that because Christianity was imposed by force it was never properly assimilated by indigenous peoples.Combining historical and archaeological data with her experience of having been raised as a Roman Catholic, Graham proposes a way of assessing the concept of religious experience and processes of conversion that takes into account the material, visual, sensual, and even olfactory manifestations of the sacred.

Exploring how Caribbean Black Power ideas and movements circulated across islands and continentsThis volume brings together established and emerging scholars to highlight the circuits of solidarity that linked Black Power activism in the Caribbean to various struggles in the diaspora and beyond. Contributors trace how people and ideas moved across islands and continents, establishing the Caribbean and its activists as central to the story of global Black Power.Chapters in this collection discuss topics including the 1968 Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, the Walter Rodney demonstrations in Jamaica, and the activism of Roosevelt Douglas. They cover Caribbean and Black British radical presses, the international campaign in support of Desmond Trotter in Dominica, anti-monarchy movements in Barbados and St. Vincent, the development of tax havens in the Caymans as a response to Black Power, and Puerto Rican radical traditions. Throughout, the volume underlines how Black Power was suppressed at the global level, and the ways activists resisted.These essays show the importance of diasporic spaces as places of encounter, connection, and mobilization of radical Black activism beyond national and imperial borders. Circuits of Black Power challenges assumptions about the scope and reach of late twentieth‑century global Black liberation movements, showing their continued legacies and relevance in the present day.Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This text covers Joyce's writing in terms of music and evaluates the music - its form, kind and technique - in each work. Using Joyce's own rhetoric of theme and variation, the author moves from one character to another, through the poems, fiction and drama, noting improvizations and finding intricate musical patterns throughout the canon. As Joyce's work grows in philosophical complexity, he says, its music becomes more recognizable. In ""Chamber Music"" and part of ""Dubliners"", Joyce at first merely mentions musical title, instruments and forms. In other stories in ""Dubliners"" he alludes to them. His writing in ""A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"" begins to approximate musical techniques, and music reflects and dominates its story and characters. By the time of ""Finnegan's Wake"", it replaces both. Within the works, Weaver cites examples of musical augmentation, diminution, harmony, counterpoint and key signatures, showing how the works become more experimental and increasingly dissonant in the manner of avant-garde composers. The author argues that Joyce's characters and works operate between the extremes of order and disorder, harmony and chaos, music and noise, and that these polarities both signal and contribute to the rhetoric within the texts. Finally, he says, Joyce's rhetoric itself becomes music.

This innovative analysis shows how James Joyce uses the language of prayer to grapple with profoundly human ideas in Finnegans Wake—the dreamlike masterpiece that critics have called his "book of the night." Colleen Jaurretche moves beyond what scholars know about how Joyce composed this work to suggest why he wrote and arranged it as he did.Jaurretche provides a sequential reading of the four chapters and corresponding themes of the Wake from the perspective of prayer. She examines image, manifested by the letters of the alphabet and the Book of Kells; magic, which Joyce equates with the workings of language; dreams, which he relates to poetry; and speech, glorified in the Wake for its potential to express emotions and ecstasy. Jaurretche also delves into writings about prayer by important thinkers from antiquity to the present, including Origen of Alexandria, Giambattista Vico, and Giordano Bruno. She demonstrates how these philosophers influenced Joyce's view that prayer can imbue language with power.This book is an illuminating and much-needed interpretation of a work that abounds with echoes and cadences of sacred language. Jaurretche's insights will guide readers' understanding of the style and structure of Finnegans Wake. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.

An introduction to the fascinating world of Joyce’s manuscriptsThis book shows how the creative process of modernist writer James Joyce can be reconstructed from his manuscripts. Daniel Ferrer offers a practical demonstration of the theory of genetic criticism, the study of the manuscript and textual development of a literary text. Using a concrete approach focused on the materiality of Joyce’s writing process, Ferrer demonstrates how to recover the process of invention and its internal dynamics.Using specific, detailed examples, Ferrer analyzes the part played by chance in Joyce’s creative process, the spatial dimension of writing, the genesis of the “Sirens” episode, and the transition from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. The book includes a study of Joyce’s mysterious Finnegans Wake notebooks, examining their strange form of intertextuality in light of Joyce’s earlier forms of note-taking. Moving beyond the single author perspective, Ferrer contrasts Joyce’s notes alluding to Virginia Woolf’s criticism of Ulysses with Woolf’s own notes on the novel’s first episodes.Throughout this book, Ferrer describes the logic of the creative process as seen in the record left by Joyce in notebooks, drafts, typescripts, proofs, correspondence, early printed versions, and other available documents. Each change detected reveals a movement from one state to another, a new direction, challenging readers to understand the reasons for each movement and to appreciate the wealth of information to be found in Joyce’s manuscripts.

In this collection of fiction and essays, Crews focuses on the people and places of Florida—full of natural wonders and other, grimier delights that make perfect grist for his forceful style, Southern Gothic sensibilities, and rowdy sense of humor. From poaching gators, to the Gatornationals, to cockfighting—a must-have collection for Harry Crews fans new and old.

Ethnographies and Archaeologies explores the many different ways that the archaeological past is used to create meaning in the present. Under the guidance of editors Lena Mortensen and Julie Hollowell, the contributors seek to de-center or reposition the role of archaeologists and archaeological practice in constructing the past. A major focus of the volume is to examine how the past is mediated by social engagements in the present and the consequences of those encounters. It is positioned at the forefront of a growing trend to explore the intersection of archaeology and cultural anthropology. Broadly arguing for the application of ethnography to the dialogue on archaeological heritage, the book considers how concepts of nationalism, identity politics, and cultural production affect how the past is shaped by archaeology.

An insightful ethnographic account of the lives of Santería practitioners in CubaHow do Santería practitioners in Cuba create and maintain religious communities amidst tensions, disagreements, and competition among them, and in the absence of centralized institutional authority? What serves as the "glue" that holds practitioners of different backgrounds together in the creation of a moral community? Examining the religious lives of santeros in Santiago de Cuba, Wirtz argues that these communities hold together not because members agree on their interpretations of rituals but because they often disagree.Religious life is marked by a series of "telling moments"—not only the moments themselves but their narrated representations as they are retold and mined for religious meanings. Long after they occur, spiritually elevated experiences circulate in narratives that may express skepticism or awe and hold the promise of more such experiences. The author finds that these episodes resonate in gossip and other forms of public commentary about the experiences of their fellow Santería practitioners.Drawing on ethnographic research about Santería beliefs and practices, Wirtz observes that practitioners are constantly engaged in reflection about what they and other practitioners are doing, how the orichas (deities) have responded, and what the consequences of their actions were or will be. By focusing their reflective attention on particular events, santeros re-create, moment to moment, what their religion is. Wirtz also argues that Santeria cannot be considered in isolation from the complex religious landscape of contemporary Cuba, in which African-based traditions are viewed with a mix of fascination, folkloric pride, and suspicion. Interactions among the conflicting discourses about these religions—as sacred practices, folklore, or dangerous superstitions, for example—have played a central role in constituting them as social entities. This book will interest scholars of religion, the African diaspora, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as linguistic and cultural anthropologists.

A celebration of the transformative effects of James Joyce's time in TriesteJoyce in Trieste is a record of the transformation in text, meaning, and language that Trieste worked upon Joyce. This volume begins with three path-breaking essays: Michael Groden's unveiling of the manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002, Margot Norris's introduction of the particularly effective paradigm of "risky reading" to describe the provocative re-contextualizations in history, theory, and culture that reveal something new about Joyce's work, and Zack Bowen's celebration of the Platonic and erotic qualities of Joyce's language. Each essay opens up to a section that follows the opening lead: essays on manuscript genetics following Groden, a political set of essays following Norris, and a set of essays on language following Bowen. Included are some final thoughts from the late Hugh Kenner, work from Joyceans such as Vike Martina Plock and Dirk Van Hulle, and political studies of Israel and Palestine. This volume provides a lively and useful summary of recent and future directions of Joyce scholarship and will be of particular interest to Joyce and Irish studies scholars as well as those interested in provocative readings of twentieth-century literature.

A look inside a dancer's worldInspiring, revealing, and deeply relatable, Being a Ballerina is a firsthand look at the realities of life as a professional ballet dancer. Through episodes from her own career, Gavin Larsen describes the forces that drive a person to study dance; the daily balance that dancers navigate between hardship and joy; and the dancer's continual quest to discover who they are as a person and as an artist.Starting with her arrival as a young beginner at a class too advanced for her, Larsen tells how the embarrassing mistake ended up helping her learn quickly and advance rapidly. In other stories of her early teachers, training, and auditions, she explains how she gradually came to understand and achieve what she and her body were capable of.Larsen then re-creates scenes from her experiences in dance companies, from unglamorous roles to exhilarating performances. Working as a ballerina was shocking and scary at first, she says, recalling unexpected injuries, leaps of faith, and her constant struggle to operate at the level she wanted—but full of enormously rewarding moments. Larsen also reflects candidly on her difficult decision to retire at age 35.An ideal read for aspiring dancers, Larsen's memoir will also delight experienced dance professionals and fascinate anyone who wonders what it takes to live a life dedicated to the perfection of the art form.

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is narrated by the title character in a series of digressions and interruptions that purportedly show the "life and opinions" — part of the novel's full title — of Tristram. Composed of nine "Books" originally published between 1759-1767, the novel has more to do with Shandy family members and their foibles and history than it seemingly does with Tristram himself. However, it is through Tristram's relating the actions, beliefs, and opinions of his family members — primarily his father, Walter Shandy, and his paternal Uncle Toby — that the reader gets a clearer picture of Tristram's character.

Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson condemned it. James Boswell and Goethe proclaimed it a masterpiece. And from the beginning Sterne realized he had written a book that would not suit everyone's taste. For more than two centuries. Tristram Shandy (1759-67) has astounded - and by turns confounded, captivated, angered, and amused but ever entertained - readers worldwide. While on the surface a comic, disjointed account of the title character's life and times, the work is in fact a brilliant commentary on life's inherent chaos, the pointed challenge of British clergy-man-turned-author Laurence Sterne to the twin concepts of rationalism and sentimentalism. Delineating his views through skillfully drawn representations - among them Tristram, Yorick, and Uncle Toby - Sterne pinpointed issues central to not only his era but our own. Filled with thought-provoking ideas and marked by an open, conversational writing style, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits is an adroit guide to understanding the aims and achievements of Sterne's masterpiece and to fully appreciating its lessons for contemporary times.