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Beans: A History
Ken Albala
This is the story of the bean, the staple food cultivated by humans for over 10,000 years.
From the lentil to the soybean, every civilization on the planet has cultivated its own species of bean. The humble bean has always attracted attention - from Pythagoras' notion that the bean hosted a human soul to St. Jerome's indictment against bean-eating in convents (because they "tickle the genitals"), to current research into the deadly toxins contained in the most commonly eaten beans.
Over time, the bean has been both scorned as "poor man's meat" and praised as health-giving, even patriotic. Attitudes to this most basic of foodstuffs have always revealed a great deal about a society. Featuring a new preface from author Ken Albala, Beans: A History takes the reader on a fascinating journey across cuisines and cultures.
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La sonrisa afilada. Enrique Serna ante la crítica
Martín Camps
Observador mordaz de la realidad y la historia nacionales y dueño de un humor despiadado por incisivo, Enrique Serna es uno de los escritores mexicanos contemporáneos más reconocidos. Prolífico artífice de ocho novelas, tres volúmenes de cuentos, tres de ensayos y un libro para niños, además de biografías, libretos para televisión y columnas periodísticas, Serna se ha erigido como un moralista crítico y feroz alejado del tono medio con que la literatura nacional disfraza tantas veces su gazmoñería, al mostrarnos el reverso absurdo de la vida cotidiana, con sus amores desastrados, el patetismo de hombres y mujeres comunes y la sátira de los "usos y costumbres" del imaginario nacional. El presente volumen aborda su obra desde distintos enfoques críticos y ofrece un panorama que abre caminos para iniciar un diálogo con una obra en que el humor negro y el discurso políticamente incorrecto constituyen una estrategia de transgresión. Se reúnen nueve ensayos académicos a cargo de sendos especialistas, además de trece reseñas y una entrevista publicadas previamente por escritores de diversas generaciones que tienen como objetivo continuar la reflexión sobre uno de nuestros autores fundamentales y su particular universo narrativo, punzantemente cruel.
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Visual Phenomenology
Michael Madary
Phenomenological and empirical methods of investigating visual experience converge to support the thesis that visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment.
In this book, Michael Madary examines visual experience, drawing on both phenomenological and empirical methods of investigation. He finds that these two approaches—careful, philosophical description of experience and the science of vision—independently converge on the same result: Visual perception is an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment.
Madary first makes the case for the descriptive premise, arguing that the phenomenology of vision is best described as on ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment. He discusses visual experience as being perspectival, temporal, and indeterminate; considers the possibility of surprise when appearances do not change as we expect; and considers the content of visual anticipation. Madary then makes the case for the empirical premise, showing that there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of anticipation and fulfillment. He presents a range of evidence from perceptual psychology and neuroscience, and reinterprets evidence for the two-visual-systems hypothesis. Finally, he considers the relationship between visual perception and social cognition. An appendix discusses Husserlian phenomenology as it relates to the argument of the book.
Madary argues that the fact that there is a convergence of historically distinct methodologies itself is an argument that supports his findings. With Visual Phenomenology, he creates an exchange between the humanities and the sciences that takes both methods of investigation seriously.
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Latin American Women Filmmakers: Social and Cultural Perspectives
Traci Roberts-Camps
Women are noticeably marginalized from the Latin American film industry, with lower budgets and inadequate distribution, and they often rely on their creativity to make more interesting films. This book highlights the voices and stories of some of these directors from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Roberts-Camps’s insightful exploration is the most broad-ranging account of its kind, making the book relevant to the study of literature as well as film.
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At the Table: Food and Family Around the World
Ken Albala
What's for dinner? Not just in America, but around the world? And how is it cooked, what's the historical significance of that food, how is it served and consumed, and who gets to clean up? This book provides fascinating insight into how dinner is defined in countries around the world.
Almost universally, "dinner" is a key meal in most countries around the world, whether it be a simple dish of rice and beans, a slice of pizza on the go, or a multi-course formal meal. What do the specifics of how a meal is eaten—by hand instead of with utensils, for example—say about a specific culture? This fascinating one-volume reference guide examines all aspects of dinner in international settings, enabling insightful cross-cultural comparisons and an understanding of the effects of modernization and globalization on food habits.
Some 50 countries are covered in chapters focusing on present-day meal habits in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America. The commentary covers everything about the meal, such as the time, the cooking and preparation, shopping for ingredients, the clean-up process, gender-based participation roles, conversation or other social interactions, and etiquette—just about everything that happens at the table. The book is ideal for classroom teaching and learning, as the entries and photos are conducive to teaching students about other cultures, directly supporting the National Geography Standards. Students will be able to make informed comparisons between their own lives and the various cultural experiences described in the book.
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Exhibiting patriotism: Creating and contesting interpretations of American historic sites
Teresa Bergman
American nationalism, patriotism and citizenship are proudly on display at historical sites across America―but they are also contested and reshaped by visitors and their engagement with those places. In Exhibiting Patriotism, Bergman analyzes exhibits, interpretive materials, and orientation films at major US sites, from Mt. Rushmore and to the USS Arizona Memorial, where controversy has erupted over the stories they tell about the past. She shows how historic narratives are the result of dynamic relationships between institutions and the public, and how these relationships are changing in an era when museums are becoming more visitor-centered, seeing visitors as partners in historical interpretation. Drawing on film theory, memory studies, visual communication, and visitor studies, Bergman offers an important analysis for scholars and professionals in American studies, museum studies, public history, and communication and media studies.
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Technologies for Detecting Botulinum Neurotoxins in Biological and Environmental Matrices
Luisa W. Cheng, Kirkwood M. Land, Christina C. Tam, D. L. Brandon, and L. H. Stanker
Biomonitoring of food and environmental matrices is critical for the rapid and sensitive diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases caused by toxins. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has noted that toxins from bacteria, fungi, algae, and plants present an ongoing public health threat, especially since some of these toxins could compromise security of the food supply. Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs), produced by Clostridium spp., are among those bacterial toxins that pose life-threatening danger to humans. BoNTs inhibit the release of acetylcholine at peripheral cholinergic nerve terminals and cause flaccid paralysis. BoNTs are grouped in seven serotypes and many subtypes within these groups. Rapid and accurate identification of these toxins in contaminated food as well as in environmental matrices can help direct treatment. Herein, we discuss current methods to detect BoNTs with a focus on how these technologies have been used to identify toxins in various food and environmental matrices. We also discuss the emergence of new serotypes and subtypes of BoNTs and the increasing number of cases of botulism in wildlife. Finally, we consider how environmental changes impact food safety for humans and present new challenges for detection technology.
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Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family
Catherine M. Chin and Caroline T. Schroeder
Melania the Elder and her granddaughter Melania the Younger were major figures in early Christian history, using their wealth, status, and forceful personalities to shape the development of nearly every aspect of the religion we now know as Christianity. This volume examines their influence on late antique Christianity and provides an insightful portrait of their legacies in the modern world. Departing from the traditionally patriarchal view, Melania gives a poignant and sometimes surprising account of how the rise of Christian institutions in the Roman Empire shaped our understanding of women’s roles in the larger world.
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Against order(s): Dictatorship, absurdism and the plays of sony labou tansi
Macelle Mahala
Congolese playwright, director and novelist Sony Labou Tansi created a large body of work during his most prolific period, the late 1970s to mid-1990s, while living through a series of political coups and authoritarian governments.1 For two decades, Tansi’s plays, novels and essays offered an array of diverse forms of resistance to dictatorship. Alternately celebrated for his international success,2 harassed by state authorities,3 and posthumously accused of ethnic factionalism,4 Tansi’s career is a searing example of an artist writing through authoritarian conditions and political upheavals. Educated under a repressive colonial system, Tansi witnessed independence and the establishment of a Marxist state, participated in political efforts that brought about the creation of a new constitution and the emergence of an ostensibly multiparty democratic system in 1992, and suffered from the state of violence and chaos into which the Congo was plunged after the parliamentary elections of 1993 were contested and the nation entered a prolonged period of civil strife that eventually escalated into civil war. At the end of his life Tansi suffered personally for his political activities when his passport was revoked; the medical treatment he sought for himself and his wife in France for their AIDS-related illness was fatally delayed and they both died upon their return to the Congo in 1995 (Thomas 2002: 57; Kirkup 1995: n.p.).
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Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Agricultural Resettlement to Qinghai in the 1950s
Gregory Rohlf
Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Qinghai in the 1950s examines rural resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan cultural borderlands in the 1950s. More than 100,000 eastern Han and Hui Chinese were sent to Qinghai province—known in Mongolian as Kokonor and Amdo to Tibetans—to plow up new fields in areas that were being incorporated into the Chinese state for the first time. The settlers were to bring their skilled labor, literacy, and modern thinking to “backward” Qinghai to fully exploit its natural resources of oil, natural gas, gold, and empty lands for the benefit of the industrializing nation. The book is a social and political history of resettlement, focusing on the people who were moved and the overall impact the program had on the province. It is a frontier history, but it also narrates a story of state building in modern China that spans the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first.
A selection of published books and book chapters from faculty members of the College of the Pacific at University of the Pacific.
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