Contact!: A Book of Encounters PDF Download

Author: Jan Morris
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079139
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 208

View

Book Description
A delightful and hilarious companion for anyone taking a trip and an indispensable work for any fan of Jan Morris. With her travel chronicles unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, Jan Morris’s legendary books on Venice, Manhattan, and Trieste have made her one of our most beloved writers. Now reflecting back on over half a century, Morris has decided to write not about the destinations but about the people she has encountered. Whether writing as James or later as Jan, Morris introduces us to a panoply of memorable characters—the Sherpa guide who first scaled Mt. Everest, the lascivious Manhattan cabbie, and the proverbial spy in the raincoat. She provides insightful portraits of the famous, such as Harry Truman and Jordan’s King Hussein, and glimpses of the infamous, including Adolf Eichmann. Recalling human encounters on six continents, she paints a vibrant, funny, and moving picture of humanity. Ultimately, no figure comes into clearer focus than Morris herself, an astonishing chronicler of the human spectacle. Contact! is one book you’ll want to carry with you wherever you go.

Author: Tanja Stampfl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429581203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

View

Book Description
A Century of Encounters analyzes Arab, American, and European literary depictions of self and other as they interact with each other in Arab North Africa throughout the twentieth century and introduces the trope of the encounter as a lens through which to read contemporary world literature comparatively. A focus on the transnational encounter allows for the in-depth study of constructions of gender, race, and national identities both for the self and the other in order to answer the seemingly simple questions: What makes up different encounters in the twentieth century, and how can we facilitate a productive and positive encounter between these groups? This book illustrates connections between literary texts that have hitherto been overlooked and establishes an intertextual genealogy of transcultural encounters throughout the twentieth century that coalesce around the themes of desire, family, and travel. In its literary analysis, A Century of Encounters aims to facilitate a better understanding of other cultures in general and contribute to constructive cross-cultural interactions between the United States, Europe, and Arab North Africa in particular.

Author: George Seldes
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307775429
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 606

View

Book Description
"This extraordinary book . . . is a reminder . . . of the sins of suppression and untruth that have been and can be committed in the name of American journalism . . . One of the last first-person statements from a generation that included Hitler, Nehru, and Mao . . . and Seldes too." --Columbia Journalism Review

Author: Vanessa Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521573597
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

View

Book Description
This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. Texts designed to present self-affirming images of 'native' wonderment at European culture in fact betray the emergence of more complex modes of appropriation and interrogation by the Pacific peoples. Vanessa Smith argues that the Pacific islanders called into question the material basis and symbolic capacities of writing, even as they were first being framed in written representations. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, she suggests that complex modes of self-authorization informed the transmission of new cultural practices to the Pacific peoples. This shift of attention towards reception and appropriation provides the context for a detailed discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's late Pacific writings.

Author: Joseph Clarke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319782290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

View

Book Description
This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.

Author: Benno Gammerl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789202248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

View

Book Description
Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

Author: Melani McAlister
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520932013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

View

Book Description
Epic Encounters examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. In this innovative book—now brought up-to-date to include 9/11 and the Iraq war—Melani McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This remarkable and pathbreaking book skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history. The new chapter, titled "9/11 and After: Snapshots on the Road to Empire," considers and brilliantly analyzes five images that have become iconic: (1) New York City firemen raising the American flag out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, (2) the televised image of Osama bin-Laden, (3) Afghani women in burqas, (4) the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad, and (5) the hooded and wired prisoner in Abu Ghraib. McAlister's singular achievement is to illuminate the contexts of these five images both at the time they were taken and as they relate to current events, an accomplishment all the more remarkable since—to paraphrase her new preface—we are today struggling to look backward at something that is still rushing ahead.

Author: Dorothy Eber
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802092756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

View

Book Description
In Encounters on the Passage, present day Inuit tell the stories that have been passed down from their ancestors of the first encounters with European explorers.

Author: Adriana Craciun
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487503679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

View

Book Description
With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.

Author: Kenneth J. Andrien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780520072282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

View

Book Description
"A new and unique contribution to the study of the history of the early contact between Europe and the Americas."--Gary Urton, Colgate University "A new and unique contribution to the study of the history of the early contact between Europe and the Americas."--Gary Urton, Colgate University