Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan
Just weeks after multiple disasters struck Japan, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann ventures into the nuclear hot zone, outfitted only with rubber kitchen gloves, a cloth facemask, and a capricious radiation detector. He emerges with a haunting report on daily life in a now-ravaged Japan -- a country he has known and loved for many years. And in the cities and towns hit hardest by the earthquake, tsunami, and radioactive contamination, Vollmann finds troubling omens of a future heading toward us all.
In this dazzling series of essays, Robert Darnton exhumes the strange and wonderful world views of the ordinary and extraordinary people inhabiting the cities, towns, and countryside of France in what we like to call “The Age of Enlightenment.”
Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past)
A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In this book Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as 'the Negro farthest down' in labor camps.Patterson shows how Hurston's work coincides with the fragmented historical record.
The Rise of Medieval Towns and States in East Central Europe
This book is a contribution to efforts to understand the transformation that took place across the European continent, and in particular East Central Europe, during the second half of the first millennium. Its goal is to draw conclusions primarily on the basis of the archaeological evidence from important early medieval centres. A special emphasis is given to Pohansko near Breclav (Czech Republic), perhaps the best studied centre of its kind in the entire region.
