Books about Recounting from Amazon.com

Can myth ever point to fact?

Do you believe our government would knowingly cover up certain important facts or events for "the common good?" Who really shot JFK? What happened at Roswell? What became of Project Blue Book? What is Area 59? Did we know beforehand the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor? Or that Al Qaeda would fly hijacked airplanes into New York's World Trade Center? Stories become rumors, then fade into that strange status of urban myth. Could this narration be one of them?.
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This collection of letters, written by a young German colonist in Dr. John Charles Beales's ill-fated colony Dolores, provides an almost daily account of the colonists' journey to the Rio Grande from New York City harbor and their labors to establish a settlement there on Las Moras Creek. Ludecus recounts in his letters the colonists' efforts to provide protection from Indian attacks by constructing around the settlement a high, thorny barrier of mesquite branches and cactus cleared from the land they wished to plant. He narrates how the carpenters among the colonists fashioned a cannon of oak which they successfully fired once to warn off hostile Indians in the area.

His record of life in the colony emphasizes the deprivation suffered by the colonists. From the day of their arrival at the colony site to the day most of the colonists abandoned the settlement in desperation, Ludecus's letters are filled with descriptions of the colonists' hardships and frustration as they tried to cope with an almost total lack of stone and timber in the vicinity of Dolores for constructing houses, outbuildings, and fencing around their young crops.

Eduard Ludecus's letters are also a source of valuable information about life and culture in pre-revolutionary Texas. His letters are one of just a handful of eyewitness reports about the early Texas frontier. His observations are those of a young, well-educated German merchant who had traveled from the urbane environment of Weimar, the center of art and literature in Germany in the early nineteenth century, to the raw, hostile environment of Texas. As a result, many of his remarks seem to have been recorded in wide-eyed awe of his new environment.

Ludecus's letters are written with a vivid directness often lacking in the recollections of such well-known narrators as John C. Duval, Noah Smithwick, and John Holland Jenkins. Ludecus's narrative style is so vivid, so lively that the reader often feels as if he were sharing the narrator's experiences and observations not as a reader, but as a companion..
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This is the first full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not fully appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's ordinary-language philosophy and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the skeptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn toward a species of moral perfectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies..
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How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached--not as one-time "testimony"--but as an ongoing, deepening conversation. Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now--burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. "It is not a story," insisted one survivor about his memories. "It has to be made a story." On Listening to Holocaust Survivors shows us both the ways survivors can "make stories" for the "not-story" they remember and--just as important--the ways they are not able to do so..
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"From the beginning, Engels has written with his tongue in his cheek—'Mine is the manner of fly fishermen without fish.' If you get it, you really get it—which is to say that you find this poetry simultaneously exhilarating, funny, heartbreaking, and deeply, oddly, singularly comforting. To appreciate how serious John Engels is you must first understand how hilarious he is. Both the comedy and the seriousness reside in the language—in the diction and the syntax." —from the Foreword by David Huddle

Recounting the Seasons gathers together the work of noted American poet John Engels. Engels's writing is distinguished by its astonishing range—long, short, easy, difficult, philosophical, casual, despairing, joyful, silly, bawdy, heartbreaking, angry, affectionate, uplifting, abrasive, sexy, chaste, polite, and bad-mannered. Arranged chronologically, this book contains nearly all of the poems that Engels has published and features a section of new and previously unpublished poems.

"What a great pleasure it is to have this collected edition of John Engels's poems. Back in the noble days of modernism, when we had such fearless exponents of poetic form and language as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Roethke, Engels was an acknowledged master. His poems remain as strong and compelling as ever. His expressly demonstrative relationship to nature is entirely cogent and stimulating. Engels will always be an American treasure. His poems are a joy for all readers and a model for the young." —Hayden Carruth

"John Engels is one of the handful of essential poets of his generation. What is distinctive about Engels's poetry is that it has not only sustained its power and craft over the many years of his efforts but also enhanced it." —Sydney Lea

"It is quite a joyous realization that the collected poems of John Engels have come together to comprise a rich volume. This is not just a significant moment for contemporary poetry; it is notable in the complete annals of American poetry—the coming together of all the resonant, inventive work of one of our most prodigiously gifted and dedicated poets." —Paul Zimmer.
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"A veritable encyclopedia of the khipu, this volume pulls together new and groundbreaking work by the foremost experts, attacking the problem from a wide variety of perspectives and integrating analysis from historical, archaeological, and ethnographic perspectives."

—Thomas A. Abercrombie, Associate Professor of Anthropology, New York University

The Inka Empire stretched over much of the length and breadth of the South American Andes, encompassed elaborately planned cities linked by a complex network of roads and messengers, and created astonishing works of architecture and artistry and a compelling mythology—all without the aid of a graphic writing system. Instead, the Inkas' records consisted of devices made of knotted and dyed strings—called khipu—on which they recorded information pertaining to the organization and history of their empire. Despite more than a century of research on these remarkable devices, the khipu remain largely undeciphered.

In this benchmark book, twelve international scholars tackle the most vexed question in khipu studies: how did the Inkas record and transmit narrative records by means of knotted strings? The authors approach the problem from a variety of angles. Several essays mine Spanish colonial sources for details about the kinds of narrative encoded in the khipu. Others look at the uses to which khipu were put before and after the Conquest, as well as their current use in some contemporary Andean communities. Still others analyze the formal characteristics of khipu and seek to explain how they encode various kinds of numerical and narrative data.

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