In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature. The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story.

Famished Road

Literature & Fiction

OKRI,BEN

Contemporary

Anchor Books/Doubleday

Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions" -- closed worlds such as prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monastaries, nursing homes and mental hospitals -- where the inmates are regimented, surrounded by other inmates, and unable to leave the premises. It describes what these institutions make of the inmate, and what he or she can make of life inside them. Special attention is focused on mental hospitals, drawing on the author's year of field work at St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C., one of America's most well-known institutions. It is the thesis of this book that the most important factor in forming a mental-hospital patient is the institution, not the illness, and that the patient's reactions and adjustments are those of inmates in other types of institutions as well. The first essay is a general portrait of life in a total instituion. The other three consider special aspects of this existence: the initial effects of institutionlization on the inmate's previous social relationships; the ways of adapting once in the institution; and the role of the staff in presenting to the inmate the facts of his or her situation.

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

Self-Help

Goffman, Erving

Personal Transformation

Examines the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hittites, Hurrians, Canaanites, Aramaeans, Israelites, and Persians, offers a synthesis of Near Eastern accomplishments in politics, society, literature, and the arts, and presents a wealth of quotations from the little-known writings. "A valuable introduction, perhaps the best available in English." - American Historical Review. 32 halftones, 5 figures, 1 map.

The Face of the Ancient Orient: A Panorama of Near Eastern Civilizations in Pre-Classical Times (Doubleday Anchor Book)

History

Moscati, Sabatino

Ancient Civilizations

Loka : a journal from Naropa Institute

Fields, Rick, editor

How I Got Ovah New and Selected Poems

Rodgers, Carolyn M

BRAND NEW UNREAD/UNMARKED BOOK! SHIPS SAME OR NEXT DAY!

A Restless People: Americans in Rebellion, 1770-1787

HANDLIN, Oscar

Americas

"The most important single volume on the sociology of voting yet to appear in the United States or anywhere else."--Political Science Quarterly.
"Lipset has once again demonstrated his preeminence in the fields of both sociology and political science."--Commentary.

Political man: The social bases of politics

Politics & Social Sciences

Lipset, Seymour Martin

Anthropology

A reprint of the Doubleday edition of 1967.
The most comprehensive one-volume collection in English of Marx's early writings (1835-1847) on the nature of religion, freedom of the press, the relation of the state to democracy, the humanistic critique of philosophical idealism, the alienation of humanity, and the relation of communism to historical praxis. Easton and Guddat’s translations are based on the best German editions and on the study of original manuscripts and first editions. A substantial Introduction and detailed analytical headnotes indicate the significance and historical setting of each selection, as well as its relationship to Marx's other writings. With one exception (Defense of the Moselle Correspondent) each article, chapter, or book section is presented in its entirety, without internal deletions.

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society

Marx,Karl

Lloyd D. Easton, and Kurt H. Guddat

Politics & Government

AMERICAN BUILDINGS AND THEIR ARCHITECTS: Technology and the Picturesque: the Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles

Arts & Photography

William H. Pierson Jr.

Architecture

The child of parents who divorce, remarry and then embark on adulterous affairs, Maisie Farange survives by her intelligence and spirit. For all its sombre theme of childhood innocence exposed to a corrupted adult world, this novel is one of James's comic masterpieces. The outrageous behaviour of the characters on the seedy fringes of the English upper class is conveyed with wit and relish. The dual perspective of a sophisticated narrator richly appreciative of the absurdities of the adult sexual merry-go-round and the candid vision of Maisie, 'rebounding' from one parent to another like a 'shuttlecock', together create an 'associational magic'. Strangely, unexpectedly, from so much that is tawdry, comes a tale of moral energy and subtlety. James's foresight was in understanding the modernity of his subject, which is even more relevant today in the twenty-first century.

What Maisie Knew

JAMES,HENRY

Europe

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