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Beatriz Allende
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ISBN: 9781469654294 9781469654317 1469654318 9781469654300 146965430X 1469654296 Year: 2020 Publisher: Chapel Hill

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This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942-1977)--revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende--portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s. Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the private and political as she reveals the human dimensions of radical upheaval. Exiled to Havana after Chile's right-wing military coup, Beatriz worked tirelessly to oppose dictatorship back home. Harmer's interviews make vivid the terrible consequences of the coup for the Chilean Left, the realities of everyday life in Havana, and the unceasing demands of solidarity work that drained Beatriz and her generation of the dreams they once had. Her story demolishes the myth that women were simply extras in the story of Latin America's Left and brings home the immense cost of a revolutionary moment's demise.


Book
Technologies of the human corpse
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ISBN: 9780262358095 0262358093 9780262043816 0262043815 Year: 2020 Publisher: Cambridge MIT Press

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How human technological interventions into death and the dead body since the nineteenth century have had a profound impact on today's (and future) end-of-life and human mortality realities. As Director of the Centre for Death and Society, the world's only interdisciplinary studies centre dedicated to researching death, dying, and the dead body, and the son of an American Funeral Director who grew up in the funeral industry, I am uniquely positioned to author a new book on the human corpse and technology. Death and the dead body are both extremely popular topics, and the books being currently published are tapping into that popular appeal. Most of these books, however, cover topics that remain perennially discussed. Indeed, it is striking how so many of the current books on death and dying reflect the same issues raised during the 1970's, a decade during which Publisher's Weekly enthusiastically told its readers "Death is now selling books!" A quick snapshot of some current(ish) death, dying, and dead body books includes, but is certainly not limited to: Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which was published in 2003 but remains widely read thirteen-years later; more recent books, such as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and Brandy Schillace's Death's Summer Coat have all tapped into this popular genre. Books by academic authors such as Margaret Schwartz's Dead Matter and Thomas Laqueur's The Work of the Dead present historical and cultural contexts that are equally important. My listing of texts could exceed several pages but what is important about most contemporary death books is that the texts rarely give the history of publishing books on death much analysis. If any death-topic authors' names appear they are usually Jessica Mitford, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and Ernest Becker. Sigmund Freud sometimes appears (in connection to Becker) but on the whole these specific authors represent a fraction of the 'death canon.' What I am writing improves on these texts by presenting readers with a more complex and interesting history than most books on death, dying, and the dead body currently pursue. In a nutshell I present a longer view on how human technological interventions into death and the dead body since the nineteenth century have had a profound impact on today's (and future) end-of-life and human mortality realities. It is too easy to sum up most current books on death, dying, and the dead body by simply saying, "We've been here before" - but it's also accurate. What my book presents are new and important ways to critically understand both the distant and recent past of human death, e.g., nineteenth century postmortem photography's crucial relationship to twentieth century life extension technology. Ironically, these nineteenth century historical records are often archived and accessible (and very well presented in MIT Press's Secure the Shadow by Jay Ruby), whereas web based material from twenty, even ten-years-ago often disappears before it can be analyzed and discussed. The key point for any book being written about death and dying today is that it really needs to understand and articulate how popular interest in death didn't emerge from nowhere. The current popularity of death, dying, and the dead body is the result of many individuals working in many different fields over the last two centuries as both academics and practitioners. More than anything the collective twenty-first century discourse on death needs to have its dominant narratives challenged and pushed in new directions. This book takes on that challenge and re-defines death, dying, and the dead body for readers by opening up human mortality's complicated and often vexing history.


Book
How dead languages work
Author:
ISBN: 0198852827 0191887110 0192594133 9780192594136 9780198852827 Year: 2020 Publisher: Oxford Oxford University Press

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What could Greek poets or Roman historians say in their own language that would be lost in translation? After all, different languages have different personalities, and this is especially clear with languages of the ancient and medieval world. This volume celebrates six such languages - Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew - by first introducing readers to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traitsplay out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace achieves striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf attains remarkable intensity of expression throughthe resources of Old English. But these are languages that have shared connections as well. Readers will see how the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda uses words that come from roots found also in English, how turns of phrase characteristic of the Hebrew Bible found their way into English, and that even as unusual a language as Old Irish still builds on common Indo-European linguistic patterns. Very few people have the opportunity to learn these languages, and they can often seem mysterious andinaccessible: drawing on a lucid and engaging writing style and with the aid of clear English translations throughout, this book aims to give all readers, whether scholars, students, or interested novices, an aesthetic appreciation of just how rich and varied they are.

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