Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by Gustaf Sobin. When Gustaf Sobin arrived in France at the age of twenty-seven in 1963, he befriended the poet Rene Char, who, as Sobin writes, "taught me my trade." "Rene Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary. One and the other, the visible and the invisible, were but the interface of a single, singular, vibratory surface: that of the poem itself." THE BRITTLE AGE AND RETURNING UPLAND are two volumes from Char's work of the mid to late 1960s that Sobin chose to translate in full. Here, side by side with Char's French text, it is possible to see Sobin building his poetic vocabulary within and as a result of the practice of his mentor, "scrupulously tracking the very trajectories of desire, [leading] one onto the sonorous landscapes of the revelatory."

Visualizing modernism in prewar Japan Modernity took many forms in 1930s Japan, but in the tumultuous years before militarism pushed the country toward global aggression, it was most visibly associated with a glittering consumer culture. Inundated with western jazz-age trends and new technologies, Japan's big cities, especially Tokyo, offered the most enticing attractions to a newly liberated generation: bustling streets of department stores, cafés and teahouses, movie theaters and ballroom dance halls. Modern architecture, industrial design and fashion overshadowed traditional arts as Japan strove to take its place in a cosmopolitan world. The Brittle Years examines the different ways in which designers and artists visualized what it meant to be modern in Japan in the years leading up to World War II. Its 160 full-color illustrations of paintings, textiles and graphic arts are astonishing not only for their great visual impact but also for the insight they provide into a rapidly transforming nation. Among the more surprising images are kimonos bearing patterns of tanks or futuristic cityscapes, paintings of fashionable Japanese women with bobbed hair in western dress and handbills of factory and agricultural workers joined in solidarity. Essays by leading experts on Japanese art and history, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John W. Dower, elucidate the many tensions within Japanese society and show how and why such images of power, progress, and beauty helped the nation celebrate and divert modernity to new purposes during these brittle years.

This seminal work focuses on human development from middle childhood to middle adulthood, through analysis of the research findings of the groundbreaking Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (JYLS). The JYLS project, which began in 1968, has generated extensive publications over many years but this is the first comprehensive summary that presents the conceptual framework, the research design and methodology, and the findings. The study looks at the development over time of issues related to personality, identity, health, anti-social behavior, and well-being and is unparalleled in its duration, intensity, comprehensiveness and psychological richness. The thorough synthesis of this study illustrates that there are different paths to adulthood and that human development cannot be described in average terms. The 42-year perspective that the JYLS provides shows the developmental consequences of children’s differences in socioemotional behavior over time, and the great significance of children’s positive socioemotional behavior for their further development until middle age. Not only will the book be an invaluable tool for those considering research methods and analysis on large datasets, it is ideal reading for students on lifespan courses and researchers methodologically interested in longitudinal research.