This thought-provoking but accessible book critically examines the dominant food regime on its own terms, by seriously asking whether we can afford cheap food and by exploring what exactly cheap food affords us. Detailing the numerous ways that our understanding of food has narrowed, such as its price per ounce, combination of nutrients, yield per acre, or calories, the book argues for a more contextual view of food when debating its affordability.
The world economy today is facing two major threats: increasing environmental degradation and a growing gap between rich and poor. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, this book argues that these two threats are symptomatic of a growing structural imbalance in all economies – how nature is exploited to create wealth. The root of this […]
For millennia, we have perceived water as an abundant and easily accessible resource. But water shortages are fast becoming a persistent reality for all nations, rich and poor. If water is so valuable and scarce, then why is it so poorly managed? Edward Barbier argues that the current water crisis is as much a failure […]
“Spool’s a year ‘written in threes’—its three word lines forming narrow columns or perhaps threads. ‘Thread’ is a word Cooperman explicitly associates with the lyric here and it is also Ariadne’s thread of rescue or at least return though, at times, ‘the tape is/broken now so / sick and sick.’ To change up the metaphor, […]
“In their compelling and moving collaboration, Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman chronicle the challenges and occasional triumphs of raising a child with autism. The three letters of the book’s title, NOS, embody the reduction—the negation—of individuals and bodies to medical and psychoanalytic acronyms. The poets realize, however, that the designation of autism to describe their […]
In today’s fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time—whether it’s at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with […]
Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue. Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the […]
The image of the lazy, media-obsessed American, preoccupied with vanity and consumerism, permeates popular culture and fuels critiques of American education. In Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism, Kelly Susan Bradbury challenges this image by examining and reimagining widespread conceptions of intellectualism that assume intellectual activity is situated solely in elite institutions of higher education. […]
From the back of the book: Midway through the journey of his life, Dan Beachy-Quick found himself without a path, unsure how to live well. Of Silence and Song follows him on his resulting classical search for meaning in the world and in his particular, quiet life. In essays, fragments, marginalia, images, travel writing, and […]
Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) embodies the imperial conquest of North America like no other eighteenth-century figure: born and raised to age seven in a New England garrison town, she was taken in wartime by the Wabanaki in 1703 and taught to pray as a Catholic and to live like a native girl. At age twelve, she […]
