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An impassioned argument for reassessing America's understanding of race and ethnicity

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Beyond Black and White by Ronald Fernandez
This is an interesting, compact, eminently readable book, loaded with (unfortunately) ugly information about immigration laws, social attitudes about race, and our even uglier obsession with black and white.Although the book is full of depressing facts and figures, Fernandez finds energy and enthusiasm in our diversity, and makes this almost a "how-to" book, by challenging the reader to stop defining our country and its inhabitants in black and white terms. Once we understand how we got into such dichotomous thinking about race, we can stop doing it.Sure it's hard to avoid categorizing people by skin color but each of us can contribute our part by paying attention to what we say and how we think.This book has shown me how to make a positive difference in the world every single day.It probably helps that I am acquainted with the author--I work at the university where he teaches.Fernandez is as open minded, curious, tolerant and sharp as they come.No matter though since I'd give five stars to whoever wrote it.

Time to redefine our culture
This fascinating book, moving beyond classic sociology's approaches to immigrant acculturation and on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork; propose a great reflection upon us to bridge -or erase- the gaps between newcomers and the U.S. society.Fernández examines the extraordinary contributions of the immigrants to this country.Moreover, he invites us to think and redefine our culture and reduce the obsession over who we are as a human being, about how we fit into a nation that continues to treat us as outsiders after all this time.Remarkably timely book when the politicians are campaigning for the presidency of the U.S.The book also includes data from the US presidential libraries but real facts based on experiences with diverse people who don't necessarily see themselves as political activists at all.With unique style and punctual ideas, Fernández demystifies ethnic markers and skepticisms of our presence.After reading this book, I feel that I am belonging to this society.

On america Beyond Black and White
In reading Dr. Fernandez' work, I marvel as his ability to capture the significance and relevance of immigrants in the fabric of American society. Amazing research, brilliant analisis and real contribution to the much polarized discourse on America's immigration. Dr. Fernandez has aptly captured how the current migratory trends have challenged racial definitions to the point that they will hopefully unite the racial divide that has plagued the United States since Reconstruction and have been responsible for the fracturing of American society. I am gay, I am Puerto Rican, I am American. Fernandez has helped me to realize that I am none and all of the above. ... Read more

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United States Marines in Humanitarian Operations.
Presents the events of May 10 to June 13, 1991, when the Joint Task Force Sea Angel, one of the largest military disaster relief forces ever assembled, was sent to the aid of the people of Bangladesh in the wake of the destruction of the tropical cyclone Marian.

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The US environmental movement has proven to be exceptionally successful and enduring, as demonstrated by the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990. The success of Earth Day 1990 indicates that the environmental movement is not only alive and well, but after two decades it may be stronger than ever. Few social movements achieve such widespread acceptance and fewer still are able to celebrate a 20th anniversary. Why has environmentalism been able to avoid the fate of most short-lived movements and how has it changed since the first Earth Day? Such questions are the focus of this book, which is intended to provide an overview of the evolution of US environmentalism during the past two decades. ... Read more

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Examining a history of the Environmental Movement
Riley Dunlap and Angela Mertig have gathered an excellent sample of essays that cover the evolution of the Environmental Movement in America. This work focuses on the period of 1970 to 1990, during which time the movementestablished itself as a lasting social force.

While obviously supportiveof the Environmental Movement the essays provide a fairly evenhandedoverview of the issues and forces that shaped the movement. This work is amust for anyone wanting a basic overview of American Environmentalism. ... Read more

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Colonial civil servant, Fabian socialist, and eminence grise of the Bloomsbury circle, Leonard Woolf, was one of the most prolific writers on international relations of the early-mid twentieth century. His report for the Fabian Society, International Government, was influential in the creation of the League of Nations.He was a co-founder of the popular pressure group, the League of Nations Society. He was a leading critic of Empire.He helped to educate the British Labour Party on global issues, constructing, in 1929, its first credible foreign policy.With his wife, Virginia, he founded the celebrated Hogarth press.He pioneered "functionalist" and " transnationalist" theory.He pioneered documentary journalism.He wrote towards the end of his long life one of the most insightful autobiographies of the twentieth century.

This book examines the thought of this fascinating and relatively unknown political thinker.It thoroughly reassesses his ideas, for decades condemned as 'utopian,' in the context of the much more fluid international scene of the twenty-first century.In particular, it asks whether his ideas about international government gained new pertinency in the post Cold War century.
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This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1941 and ’42 African American scholars from Fisk University—among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams, Jr.—joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mission was to explore the musical habits and history of the black community there and "to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community." Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publication of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. However, the field notes and manuscripts by the Fisk researchers became lost in Washington. Lomax’s own book drawing on the project’s findings, The Land Where the Blue sBegan, did not appear until 1993, and although it won a National Book Critics Circle Award, it was flawed by a number of historical inaccuracies.

Recently uncovered by author and filmmaker Robert Gordon, the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study now appear in print for the first time. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical traditions as they existed sixty years ago. Until the surfacing of these documents, Lomax’s perspective was all that was known of the Coahoma County project and its research. Now, at last, the voices of the other contributors can be heard.

Including essays by Bruce Nemerov and Gordon on the careers and contributions of Work, Jones, and Adams, Lost Delta Found will become an indispensable historical resource, as marvelously readable as it is enlightening. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Brilliant!
"A brilliant work as the editors restore the research of Fisk University scholars who joined Alan Lomax in Coahoma County, Mississippi to document the social and cultural historyof the amazing music by Muddy Waters and others. Like the ending in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" their research was lost in the Library of Congress archives until rescued in recent years."

the songs
To read some of these reviews, you'd think the introduction to the material was more important than the substance of the book - source material, copies of many previously unpublished songs in John Work's own handwriting, an essay that gives you the pulse and taste of life in the delta in 1941. "Down by the Green Apple Tree," a children's song collected from Sarah Teague, is worth the price of the book.I'm grateful to everyone who collected the songs, which to me are 99% of the whole point anyway. To give this book one star because you are quibbling with academic interpretations is to miss the whole point of the book - to revive the material itself, and to honor the people who created and sang it. The authors' intention is to celebrate John Work's contribution, not to denigrate Alan Lomax'.

"Down by the green apple tree, where the grass grows so sweet
Miss Julie, Miss Julie, your true love is dead
He wrote you a letter to turn back your head
Down by the green apple tree..."

Revisionist scholars
Revisionist scholarship is red hot, and no one, it seems, can escape its flame.All great men and women of the past, and especially liberal icons such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King are charred, act by act, word by word, until only the ashes are left.In the music field, there are similar targets, with Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax tied high on the burning stake.One can only wonder (but not for long, their faces and grimaces are so very familiar to us) who is behind the systematic rewriting of cultural history of which this book is a prime example.

Lost Delta Assassinated
An edition of the writings of the joint Fisk University-Library of Congress Cohahoma project undertaken in the 1940s is long overdue and would have been most welcome. Unfortunately, Lost Delta Found is sloppily and tendentiously edited. Most disgracefully, Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, themselves white, create a highly biased, falsified frame for the valuable writings they present by means of omission of key information, selective quotations, and bogus insinuations of romanticism and racism against Alan Lomax that pervade their editorial apparatus. They fail to duly credit Lomax with courage in initiating an unprecidented bi-racial study of a hotbed of racial discontent in the heart of Mississippi Delta plantation country in the 1941-42 Jim Crow South. They omit mention of the fact that Lomax and his wife were arrested and briefly jailed for fraternizing with black sharecroppers. They also don't mention that the Dixiecrat US congress cut out all arts funding in spring of 1942 while the study was going on, specifically prohibiting federal arts workers from collecting statistical information and and making field recordings of folk songs. It is to be hoped that some day a fair and factually accurate edition of the Coahoma Project materials will appear - one that reproduces all the relevant historical documentation. Tragically, the publication of this book may prevent that from happening.

Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: The Coahoma study was composer John Work's idea and was appropriated by Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress.

Fact: In 1940, Fisk Professor John Work proposed a study of ballad origins after a disastrous fire in Natchez, Mississippi. The grant application to fund it (written by Fisk President Thomas Johnson, not John Work, to a foundation in New York) was turned down. A year later, during a visit by Lomax to present a concert at Fisk, President Johnson, Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and Lomax proposed a different, joint Fisk-Library of Congress field recording project, centered in Clarksdale (in Coahoma), using sociology students to gather data. Alan Lomax wrote the application and questionnaire for the study. Gordon and Nemerov supply no evidence that Lomax knew of Work's earlier Natchez fire proposal much less "stole" it. (Funds for the Coahoma study came from Charles Seeger's Pan American Union, under the War Department - information they omit).

Claim: The Land Where the Blues Began is Alan Lomax's version of the Coahoma Study.

Fact: Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir written in 1993, when Lomax was in his seventies, covers Lomax's field recording experience from 1933 through the 1970s.

Claim: In Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax slighted the contributions of his African-American collaborators on the Coahoma Study -- Lewis Jones, Samuel Adams, and John Work.

Fact: Alan Lomax thanked and mentioned them (especially Lewis Jones) over 18 times and at considerable length, including in the formal acknowledgements of Land Where the Blues Began.

Claim [In Lost Delta Found]: Alan Lomax was not a Southerner and therefore had "romantic ideas" about the South.

Fact: Alan Lomax was a Southerner and a life-long champion of civil rights. The editors of Lost Delta Found smear his character (there are over 70 mentions of Lomax in the introductions and index, all derogatory) when they insinuate that he was a crypto-racist and "romantic' who did not acknowledge his black co-workers (when in fact he did so over and over). They also don't mention the fact that Lomax and Lewis Jones collaborated again in the early 1960s.

Claim: [In Lost Delta Found] Alan Lomax's Land Where the Blues Began has many inaccuracies "the most important of which" was his omission of mention of the August, 1941, preliminary Coahoma trip undertaken by Lomax and Work.

Fact: Lomax's omission of the 1941 preliminary trip in the Coahoma study is arguably a narrative expedient, not an error. No other "inaccuracy" in Land Where the Blues Began is identified. That all of Lomax's Library of Congress Coahoma recordings are, and have always been, acurately dated, with full and proper credit to participants (including Work) is not acknowledged by Gordon and Nemerov.

Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: Lomax ought to have edited the Coahoma study after leaving the employ of the Library of Congress.

Fact: The study was interrupted by US entrance into World War II. Alan Lomax's ethical obligation to the study ended after he left the Library in 1942 to join the army.

Claim: After the war, Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress suppressed the results of the Coahoma study when they lost or "filed away" the one extant manuscript of John Work's essay about the project.

Fact: Letters in the Library of Congress state that in 1943 the Library sent John Work multiple copies of his unfinished Coahoma manuscript drafts (along with mimeographed copies) after he wrote that he himself had lost them. After 1945, study participants had permission from Fisk and the Library to use the Coahoma material in their own writings. Lewis Jones used the material in completing his sociology degree; and in December, 1947, participant Samuel Adams published an article (albeit brief) about his Coahoma work in 'Social Forces' (pp. 202-205). In 1958, John Work wrote to the Library of Congress asking for permission to write a book based his Coahoma essay and received a go-ahead. He did not mention that his manuscript was "lost" at that time, suggesting that at that time he possessed copies of his own writings. None of this information, all on public record and available to any diligent researcher, appears in Lost Delta Found.

Claim [made by a reviewer]: Alan Lomax's black colleagues urged him to record newer, gospel music rather than older call-and-response spirituals.

Fact: The only "evidence" for this is Robert Gordon's highly implausible suggestion in Lost Delta Found that John Work's classified index of 68 spirituals collected during the Coahoma project constitutes a coded "hidden message" (a' la Leo Strauss) criticizing the emphasis on collecting spirituals. It especially strains credulity, since Work himself was a noted enthusiast of (nearly extinct) black string band and sacred harp music.(There is little point in collecting material that is widely commercially available.)

Claim [in Lost Delta Found]: John Work "anticipated the blues as poetry movement by ten years."
Fact: Harlem renaissance writers Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke championed blues as poetry ten years *before* John Work.

Essential!
This book takes a critical, but not cruel, look at Alan Lomax's scholarly work in recording some of the black music of the south.Lomax, in his celebrated treatise on his travels in the South, mostly neglected to mention his research associates, black scholars from Fisk University in Nashville.

Lomax's focus of the research trip described in this book was to find old black spirituals and work songs, which, of course, weren't really being sung any more, with black culture moving further toward modern gospel music.Lomax, despite the urgings of his colleagues, was looking for something that no longer existed.However, far from villainizing Lomax, the authors of this book celebrate his victories and hail him as the true American hero that he is, while also bringing to light another pair of American heroes, Lomax's black guides.

The book is well-written and easy to read, not overly scholarly, and most anyone with any interest in blues, gospel, delta music, American black music, American folklore, African-American culture and American traditional music in general will enjoy this book and find themselves using it as a crucial reference. ... Read more

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This volume examines US Army Special Forces efforts to mobilize and train indigenous minorities in Vietnam.

Christopher K. Ives shows how before the Second Indochina War, the Republic of Vietnam had begun to falter under the burden of an increasingly successful insurgency. The dominant American military culture could not conform to President Kennedy’s guidance to wage 'small wars', while President Diem’s provincial and military structures provided neither assistance nor security. The Green Berets developed and executed effective counterinsurgency tactics and operations with strategic implications while living, training, and finally fighting with the Montagnard peoples in the Central Highlands. Special Forces soldiers developed and executed what needed to be done to mobilize indigenous minorities, having assessed what needed to be known.

Combining Clausewitz, business theory and strategic insight, this book provides an important starting point for thinking about how the US military should be approaching the problems of today's ‘small wars’.

US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam will be of much interest to students of the Vietnam War, Special Forces operations, military innovation and strategic theory in general.

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The author was one of the major Expressionist painters of the first half of the 20th century, and also wrote a number of plays, poems, and stories. These autobiographical writings, first written for his wife, are an intense evocation of incidents and moments which reveal his spiritual development. This title is translated from "Das schriftliche Werk".Oskar Kokoschka's "Stories from My Life" is not a traditional autobiography. There is no attempt to produce a comprehensive account of the details of his life, to record where he went, what he did, or whom he met. Instead he has given us, Kokoschka says, 'a random selection of stories from my life, just as they occur to me'. 'Random' is perhaps an exaggeration. What these stories do provide is an inner autobiography, an intense and vivid evocation of incidents and moments which, while often apparently trivial in themselves, reveal the spiritual development of an artist who was not only one of this century's great painters, but also one of its great humanists. ... Read more

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Who are the important poets of Latin America since the 1950s? What are the key features of their work? This book shows that contemporary Latin-American poetry continues to be as exciting as it was with Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. Providing substantial excerpts from the work of Ernesto Cardenal, Nicanor Parra, Carmen Ollé, and others, together with translations and detailed readings, this is an excellent guide to the new poetry of Latin America. ... Read more

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This volume is an authoritative introduction to the history of African Americans in U.S. popular culture, examining its development from the early nineteenth century to the present. Kevern Verney examines the role and significance of race in all major forms of popular culture, including sport, film. television, radio and music. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

each day is a gift
You will be intrigued by Ms Dunbar and made a part of her family. Her diary is so well written that it will inspire you to change your form if you keep one. I read it like a novel. Her day to day entries really givesdetailed insight into the lives of African Americans and...it highlightsimportant historical facts with dates attached to them. I didn't realizehow valuale this was until I had to do a paper and include some of theinformation she had referred to. It was wonderful and very entertaining.The writer's sense of humor was an added, welcome surprise. ... Read more

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"It's hard to shock most Americans," Powers notes in a chapter on the shifts in sexual politics and culture. "But it's hard to engage them, too." Weird Like Us shows how this applies to many other aspects of social life besides sex: experimentation and variance have become increasingly normal in everything from drug use to pop-music styles, but with little or no conscious reflection on their consequences. Without that self-awareness, "alternative culture" risks becoming nothing more than an empty pose. "For too long we have united only within a culture of rebellion. What we need to refuse is the negativity that comes from always defining ourselves against a society we can't help but live within." For Powers, acknowledging and accepting one's position within mainstream culture isn't an act of "selling out," but an opportunity to act, in an individual capacity, as an agent for social change, an example of a good life worth living. Weird Like Us demonstrates that you don't have to be a cultural conservative to believe in "values," and Powers's emphasis on integrity, respect, and self-consciousness adds a new and inspiring voice to progressive cultural criticism. --Ron Hogan ... Read more

Customer Reviews (28)

Inspiring read
Great book on the bohemian lifestyle for those of us never quite gutsy enough to do it.

Surface Bohemianism
This is a much more personal book than I had anticipated. Ann Powers traces her own bohemianism from her childhood in Seattle to her present life in New York, all the while relating the life stories of friends and acquaintances who have defined their lives by their own versions of bohemia. Some of the ideas presented, like those regarding drugs and drug use, appear to be simply justifications of poor choices and bad behavior: junkies masquerading as bohemians. It's almost as if one can't be a bohemian without doing drugs. At the same time, Powers makes allowances for many of the "selling out" behaviors that would normally be scorned by true bohemians, such as working in corporate America.

Powers focuses mainly on her own brand of bohemianism, that of the punk scene of the 1980s. But, she never really delves that deeply into it. After reading this book, I don't feel like I understand the punk scene any better than before. The punk rockers and bohemians, as presented by Powers, feel superficial and somehow as if they're trying too hard. Another drawback is how outdated this book is. Powers devotes a whole section to the Speakeasy internet cafe in Seattle, which actually burned down in 2001, the same year my edition was published. Many of the cultural references are old, which some may think is excusable, but in all honesty, a book devoted to any cultural phenomenon or philosophy should be able to transcend time. This book doesn't do that.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but there were several aspects of it that disappointed me. But I would still recommend it to anyone interested in counter-culture or music.

I was there, man.
Well written, insightful, entertaining. Suggested reading for anyone interested in the counter-culture/underground of the '80s and for fans of North America's best city, San Francisco.

Werid Like Us by: Ann Powers
Very well written, interesting story. Would like to meet Ms. Powers in person and chat with her.

Lackluster Portrait of Contemporary "Bohemia"
I sympathize with the author who is trying to document an underground that is genuine and vibrant. But unfortunately she doesn't make it that way for her readers. I suspect it's because she wasn't there long enough; 4 years in a group house and at a minimum wage job at a record store apparently haven't qualifed her perspective. Her descriptions of eating ramen noodles, dying her hair blue, and sharing a bed with housemates while on multiple forms of drugs just sound adolescent. She was out of what she calls "bohemia" by her mid-twenties. She keeps identifying as "weird" but outside the context of a community of freaks. "Weird" becomes a professional identity.

That said, some of the people she interviews are truly living according to bohemian values, and her interviews offer some insight into their lives. The book also has the advantage of her connections as a journalist to provide interviews with some of the more visible of freaks.

But she misses out on the opportunity to really think hard about the complications of bohemia, about issues of class and also, how education impacts someone's social status within society, gentrification and our changing urban centers, and the cooptation of underground aesthetics by mass advertising, especially directed at young people.

Personally, I think she's watching too much TV in that Brooklyn condo of hers. But, then, watching MTV has become part of her job.

Too bad, because it'd be really cool if someone else could do a good job on this theme. ... Read more

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This book analyzes works of Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar in context of postcolonial theory and French-Algerian history, literature and visual arts. ... Read more