"Beth Brinkmann is not a little girl anymore, but not quite a young woman. Raised in a good home by loving parents in a comfortable little southern town where everyone knows everyone else, she realizes she has a good life. But there are growing pains. Some are small, like trying to adapt to waves of new kids at a different junior high. Others are deeply moving, such as watching the mother of a close friend suffer from multiple sclerosis. Beth, however, has the moxie of her father. She overcomes her fear of dogs, finds the courage to serve as mascot of the Mimosa High School football team, and learns to make friends of all ages (including an unlikely one who encourages her budding talent as an artist). And as the bond between father and daughter deepens, Beth is even able to provide Max with some much-needed insight into the difficult relationship he continues to have with his own elderly father, Josef."--Taken from front flap of book cover.

Focusing on Berlin's heyday as a hotbed of both artistic excellence and moral decadence, this survey also assesses the political and historical factors that encouraged - or failed to prevent - the rise of Nazism.

Sally Banes has been a preeminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and Before, Between, Beyond spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on Geroge Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes's detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance between description, context, and opinion, delineating the American artistic scene with remarkable grace. With contextualizing essays by dance scholars Andrea Harris, Joan Acocella, and Lynn Garafola, this is a compelling, insightful indispensable summation of Banes's critical career.

Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance offers a new look at the complex intersections between jazz music and popular dance over the last hundred-plus years. Author Christi Jay Wells shows how popular entertainment and cultures of social dancing were crucial to jazz music's formation and development even as jazz music came to earn a reputation as a "legitimate" art form better suited for still, seated listening. Through the concept of choreographies of listening, the book explores amateur and professional jazz dancers' relationships with jazz music and musicians as jazz's soundscapes and choreoscapes were forged through close contact and mutual creative exchange. It also unpacks the aesthetic and political negotiations through which jazz music supposedly distanced itself from dancing bodies. Fusing little-discussed material from diverse historical and contemporary sources with the author's own years of experience as a social jazz dancer, it advances participatory dance and embodied practice as central topics of analysis in jazz studies. As it explores the fascinating history of jazz as popular dance music, it exposes how American anxieties about bodies and a broad cultural privileging of the cerebral over the corporeal have shaped efforts to "elevate" expressive forms such as jazz to elite status.

The Dance between God and Humanity brings together thirty-one articles written by Bruce Waltke, reformed evangelical professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, on fascinating topics in biblical theology including: Studying the Psalms devotionally The text and canon of the Old Testament Preaching Proverbs Biblical authority Doing theology for the people of God Evangelical spirituality Old Testament texts about human reproduction Reflections on retirement The role of women in the Bible And much more!

Offers insights on Latino Caribbean writers born or raised in the United States who are at the vanguard of a literary movement that has captured both critical and popular interest. In this groundbreaking study, William Luis analyzes the most salient and representative narrative and poetic works of the newest literary movement to emerge in Spanish American and U.S. literatures. The book is divided into three sections, each focused on representative Puerto Rican American, Cuban American, and Dominican American authors. Luis traces the writers' origins and influences from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on the contemporary works of Oscar Hijuelos, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Piri Thomas, among others. While engaging in close readings of the texts, Luis places them in a broader social, historical, political, and racial perspective to expose the tension between text and context. As a group, Latino Caribbeans write an ethnic literature in English that is born of their struggle to forge an identity separate from both the influences of their parents' culture and those of the United States. For these writers, their parents' country of origin is a distant memory. They have developed a culture of resistance and a language that mediates between their parents' identity and the culture that they themselves live in. Latino Caribbeans are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo Americans as the dominant culture. Just as that dance represents a coming together of separate influences to make a unique art form, so do both Hispanic and North American cultures combine to bring a new literature into being. This new body of literature helps us to understand not only the adjustments Latino Caribbean cultures have had to make within the larger U.S. environment but also how the dominant culture has been affected by their presence.