In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

Today, gated communities abound in our nation. But what was it like living in one 100 years ago? Author Arnold Rosen describes life in New York?s first gated community (the gate was erected in 1898) in his book, SEA GATE REMEMBERED. As the pages turn, this book tours you through the generation?s coming of age in the 1930?s and 40s—the games we played, the stores we shopped, the schools we attended and the somber war years. So much of the many privacies beyond the gate are revealed by the author and ex-Sea Gaters who spent their youthful years beyond the wired fences at the southwestern tip of Brooklyn walled off from Coney Island next door and extending to the rest of North America. Arnold Rosen, author of twenty books on computers and office technology, grew up in Sea Gate where his father owned and operated sideshows and amusement rides beyond the fence in Coney Island. Now professor emeritus at Nassau Community College, Rosen graduated with a BS degree from Ohio State University an an MS degree from Hunter College after serving in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. The author lived in Sea Gate from 1932 to 1952 and now has come ?full circle" to retire in another gated community—Sun City—Hilton Head, South Carolina.

From the Blurb: In this groundbreaking chronicle of the beginning of woman's emancipation Barbara Berg refutes the traditional interpretation that the women's movement emerged from the experiences of female abolitionists. Instead, she place the inception of feminism in the earliest years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Berg finds its roots in the complex responses to intricate social change that accompanied the urbanization of America, maintaining that the rise of the industrial city precipitated the subordination of women. Quietly tucked inside, the woman was expected to preserve the home as a haven of peacefulness and order-an artificial environment to compensate for the jarring world outside. Thus women fell victim to the "woman-belle ideal"--The monolithic creed that held women inferior, denying them access to the provinces of knowledge, responsibility, and dignity. Berg shows how women perceived and responded to this situation through an analysis of female invalidism, diaries, and works of fiction. In time, resigned listlessness gave way to an anguished search for identity, as women threw themselves into voluntary benevolent associations, activities that set the stage for a compelling feminist ideology. These activities took women outside the home, creating a context for the recognition of their oppression and helping them muster the spirit to elevate their self-image and, ultimately, their place in society. The effects of urban growth on the transformation of women's consciousness became evident through a study of the extant records of more than 150 female voluntary societies that flourished between 1800 and 1860. Newspaper accounts, municipal records, city guidebooks, and even popular songs reveal the gradual transformation of the ideas of women and men about themselves, each other, and their society. This book is the latest volume in The Urban Life in America series, edited by Richard C. Wade.

The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.

On growing up in the American South of the 1960s—an all-American white boy—son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. "My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher," writes John Archibald. "It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place." Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is "refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion." In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person? Archibald had seen his father, the Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., the son and grandson of Methodist preachers, as a moral authority, a moderate and a moderating force during the racial turbulence of the '60s, a loving and dependable parent, a forgiving and attentive minister, a man many Alabamians came to see as a saint. But was that enough? Even though Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father's pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, or banished, or worse. Archibald's father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. He spoke to his flock in the safety of parable, and trusted in the goodness of others, even when they earned none of it, rising through the ranks of the Methodist Church, and teaching his family lessons in kindness and humanity, and devotion to nature and the Earth. Archibald writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.

The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory “Highly entertaining.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “Funny, curious, erudite, and full of useful details about ancient techniques of training memory.” —The Boston Globe An instant bestseller that has now become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes." He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author's own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

John Barth's eminence as a postmodernist is indisputable. However, much of the criticism dealing with his work is prompted by his own theories of «exhaustion» and subsequent «replenishment, » leaving his writing relatively untouched by theories of postmodernism in general. This book changes that by focusing on the relationship between Barth's aesthetic and the ideology critique of the historical avant-gardes, which were the first to mobilize art against itself and its institutional practices and demands. Examining Barth's metafictional parodies in the light of theories of space and subjectivity, Clavier engages the question of ideology critique in postmodernism by offering the montage as a possible model for understanding Barth's fiction. In such a light, postmodernism may well be perceived as a mimesis of reality, particularly a recognition of the collective nature of self and the world.