Books & Reading
George Washington: A Life in Books
$17.48
$34.95
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When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America. George Washington, instead, is toasted with accolades regarding his solid common sense and strength in battle. Indeed, John Adams once snobbishly dismissed him as "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation." Yet Adams, as well as the majority of the men who knew Washington in his life, were unaware of his singular devotion to self-improvement. Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin J. Hayes corrects this misconception and reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this sparkling literary biography, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes studies Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War. The final section of the book covers the voluminous reading that occurred during Washington's presidency and his retirement at Mount Vernon. Throughout, Hayes examines Washington's writing as well as his reading, from The Journal of Major George Washington through his Farewell Address. The sheer breadth of titles under review here allow readers to glimpse Washington's views on foreign policy, economics, the law, art, slavery, marriage, and religion-and how those views shaped the young nation.. Ultimately, this sharply written biography offers a fresh perspective on America's Father, uncovering the ideas that shaped his intellectual journey and, subsequently, the development of America.
ISBN/SKU:
9780190456672
Publication Date:
May 1, 2017
Publisher:
How to Read a Poem
$18.99
by Edward Hirsch
ON CAMPUS: October 1, 2025
"Read a poem to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone sleeps next to you. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of culture-the constant buzzing noise that surrounds you-has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find you."
So begins this astonishing book by one of our leading poets and critics. In an unprecedented exploration of the genre, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message-which is of vital importance in day-to-day life-can reach us and make a difference.
For Hirsch, poetry is not just a part of life, it is life, and expresses like no other art our most sublime emotions. In a marvelous reading of world poetry, including verse by such poets as Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and many more, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts.
A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives but don't know how to read it.
ISBN/SKU:
9780156005661
Publication Date:
April 1, 2000
Publisher:
Invisibility and Influence
$34.95
A rich literary study of AfroLatinx life writing, this book traces how AfroLatinxs have challenged their erasure in the United States and Latin America over the last century.
Invisibility and Influence demonstrates how a century of AfroLatinx writers in the United States shaped life writing, including memoir, collective autobiography, and other formats, through depictions of a wide range of "Afro-Latinidades." Using a woman-of-color feminist approach, Regina Marie Mills examines the work of writers and creators often excluded from Latinx literary criticism. She explores the tensions writers experienced in being viewed by others as only either Latinx or Black, rather than as part of their own distinctive communities. Beginning with Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg, who contributed to wider conversations about autobiographical technique, Invisibility and Influence examines a breadth of writers, including Jesús Colón; members of the Young Lords; Piri Thomas; Lukumi santera and scholar Marta Moreno Vega; and Black Mexican American poet Ariana Brown. Mills traces how these writers confront the distorted visions of AfroLatinxs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and how they created and expressed AfroLatinx spirituality, politics, and self-identity, often amidst violence. Mapping how AfroLatinx writers create their own literary history, Mills reveals how AfroLatinx life writing shapes and complicates discourses on race and colorism in the Western Hemisphere.
ISBN/SKU:
9781477329146
Publication Date:
June 4, 2024
Publisher:
Marvelous Solitude
$39.95
A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
A preeminent Renaissance scholar illuminates early modern encounters with books, in which literature became a portal to self-awareness and miraculous communion between author and reader. The experience of reading is often presented as personal and transformative--a journey of self-discovery and, perhaps, renewal. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the early modern roots of this attitude toward the readerly act. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, European men of letters increasingly came to see books as something more than compendia of knowledge: they could also help readers understand the human condition. As Bolzoni shows, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso all presented reading as a private encounter and a dialogue with the author. For many Renaissance intellectuals, reading was instrumental to the construction of the self, which was enriched by contact with other learned men. These readers imagined the book as a mirror image of its author, with whom they held a secret affinity. In their letters to one another, humanists described the book as a body, reflecting the notion that reading literature placed its author in the room with oneself. Reading the work of a deceased author became akin to a necromantic rite, as the writers of bygone times were resurrected and placed in contemporary conversation. The vogue for hanging portraits of authors in libraries and studios ensured that the image of the creator was never far from his words, cementing bonds of friendship across barriers of time. These myths--charming, fragile, and powerful--invested the readerly encounter with miraculous properties that lingered in the hearts of the Romantics. And something of those wonders persists today, in the intimate feeling that reading yet provokes.ISBN/SKU:
9780674660236
Publication Date:
December 5, 2023
Publisher: