In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading of literary works, Ann C. Hall offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist and a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study of women characters in the modern dramatic texts of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard. This is the first study to treat these three writers in tandem, and while Hall uses the work of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings of specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, and historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new and significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid and necessary part of feminist dramatic criticism but a part of theatrical production as well. From Pinter’s play A Kind of Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination of O’Neill’s madonnas, Pinter’s whores, and Shepard’s female saviors as they are represented in O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten; Pinter’s Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska; and Shepard’s Buried Child, True West, and A Lie of the Mind. Since the works of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, Hall hopes that a better understanding of the female characters in these plays will influence the performances themselves.

The classic account of survivors of the sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I—and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” • “One of the most beautifully composed and moving works of our time" (The Washington Post) from the distinguished neurologist and the national bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Awakenings—which inspired the major motion picture starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams—is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives, and the extraordinary transformations which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

As a young adult, Katie Eberhart moved to Cabin 135, a house on a knoll in remote Alaska. Over the next decade, growing up and growing into her home, she found herself thinking through her ever-changing ideas about aging and place, a lot of which were wrapped up closely in her experience of living in the house itself. Cabin 135 provided shelter and security, and it also offered lessons on economic disruptions and how ideas of normalcy change. In these pages, we share Eberhart’s experience of digging into the past—figuratively and, in her garden, at an archaeology site, and in a national park, literally. Every layer peeled back, we find, reveals another story, another way of thinking about nature and the past—our own and that of others. In greenhouse and garden, yard, forest, and more distant places—a beach in southeast Alaska, the Arctic coast, Swiss Alps, Iceland, and even Biosphere-2 in Arizona—Eberhart engages with the world around her, and, through it, reflects on her own experiences and journey through life. Offering a journey of wonder and curiosity, through the author’s mind, a house’s structure, and other places, Cabin 135 is a deft combination of memoir and nature writing, rich with thought and full of appreciation for—and profound concerns about—the world and our place in it.

Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska features more than 200 objects representing the masterful artistry and design traditions of twenty Alaska Native peoples. Based on a collaborative exhibition created by Alaska Native communities, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, this richly illustrated volume celebrates both the long-awaited return of ancestral treasures to their native homeland and the diverse cultures in which they were created. Despite the North's transformation through globalizing change, the objects shown in these pages are interpretable within ongoing cultural frames, articulated in languges still spoken. They were made for a way of life on the land that is carried on today throughout Alaska. Dialogue with the region's First Peoples evokes past meanings but focuses equally on contemporary values, practices, and identities. Objects and narratives show how each Alaska Native nation is unique—and how all are connected. After introductions to the history of the land and its people, universal themes of “Sea, Land, Rivers,” “Family and Community,” and “Ceremony and Celebration” are explored referencing exquisite masks, parkas, beaded garments, basketry, weapons, and carvings that embody the diverse environments and practices of their makers. Accompanied by traditional stories and personal accounts by Alaska Native elders, artists, and scholars, each piece featured in Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage evokes both historical and contemporary meaning, and breathes the life of its people.

In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present. As his characters struggle for survival, Michener weaves together the exciting high points of Alaska’s story: its brutal origins; the American acquisition; the gold rush; the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry; the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway, undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. A spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic saga of the enduring spirit of a land and its people. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Alaska “Few will escape the allure of the land and people [Michener] describes. . . . Alaska takes the reader on a journey through one of the bleakest, richest, most foreboding, and highly inviting territories in our Republic, if not the world. . . . The characters that Michener creates are bigger than life.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Always the master of exhaustive historical research, Michener tracks the settling of Alaska [in] vividly detailed scenes and well-developed characters.”—Boston Herald “Michener is still, sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.”—The New York Times

Bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's fascinating second autobiography—a follow-up to her first, A Peculiar Treasure—in which she shares the adventures of her life from 1939 to 1963. Rather than just an autobiography, A Kind of Magic serves as a chronicle of American history from 1939-1963 through the eyes of a highly skilled and sensitive observer. A fan of the fine arts, Ferber offers intimate glimpses into the personalities of performers from James Dean to George S. Kaufman, and goes on to share her uncanny knack for having been consistently where the news of the day was breaking. She was in Washington the day President Roosevelt died, in London when the 8th Air Force launched its first long-range daylight raids, at Buchenwald and Nordhausen shortly after their liberation, and—more happily—in Paris on V.E. Day and in New York on V.J. Day. In these pages she recaptures that black-and-white insanity of that war and all wars, as well as the stifling, post-war complecency which gripped America at the time.