万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village
Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village
Friedrich, Paul
¥188.35
Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village deals with a Tarascan Indian village in southwestern Mexico which, between 1920 and 1926, played a precedent-setting role in agrarian reform. As he describes forty years in the history of this small pueblo, Paul Friedrich raises general questions about local politics and agrarian reform that are basic to our understanding of radical change in peasant societies around the world. Of particular interest is his detailed study of the colorful, violent, and psychologically complex leader, Primo Tapia, whose biography bears on the theoretical issues of the "e;political middleman"e; and the relation between individual motivation and socioeconomic change. Friedrich's evidence includes massive interviewing, personal letters, observations as an anthropological participant (e.g., in fiesta ritual), analysis of the politics and other village culture during 1955-56, comparison with other Tarascan villages, historical and prehistoric background materials, and research in legal and government agrarian archives.
Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914
Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914
Hays, Samuel P.
¥188.35
In this new edition, Samuel P. Hays expands the scope of his pioneering account of the ways in which Americans reacted to industrialism during its early years from 1885 to 1914. Hays now deepens his coverage of cultural transformations in a study well known for its concise treatment of political and economic movements.Hays draws on the vast knowledge of America's urban and social history that has been developed over the last thirty-eight years to make the second edition an unusually well-rounded study. He enhances the original coverage of politics, labor, and business with new accounts of the growth of cities, the rise of modern values, cultural conflicts with Native Americans and foreign nations, and changing roles for women, African-Americans, education, religion, medicine, law, and leisure. The result is a tightly woven portrait of America in transition that underscores the effects of impersonal market forces and greater personal freedom on individuals and chronicles such changes as the rise of social inequality, shifting power, in the legal system, the expansion of the federal government, and the formation of the Populist, Progressive, and Socialist parties.
Nice Guys Finish Last
Nice Guys Finish Last
Durocher, Leo
¥147.15
"e;I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?"e;The history of baseball is rife with colorful characters. But for sheer cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win, very few have come close to Leo "e;the Lip"e; Durocher. Following a five-decade career as a player and manager for baseball's most storied franchises, Durocher teamed up with veteran sportswriter Ed Linn to tell the story of his life in the game. The resulting book, Nice Guys Finish Last, is baseball at its best, brimming with personality and full of all the fights and feuds, triumphs and tricks that made Durocher such a success-and an outsized celebrity.Durocher began his career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees and hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him "e;the All-American Out."e; But soon Durocher hit his stride: traded to St. Louis, he found his headlong play and never-say-die attitude a perfect fit with the rambunctious "e;Gashouse Gang"e; Cardinals. In 1939, he was named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers-and almost instantly transformed the underachieving Bums into perennial contenders. He went on to manage the New York Giants, sharing the glory of one of the most famous moments in baseball history, Bobby Thomson's "e;shot heard 'round the world,"e; which won the Giants the 1951 pennant. Durocher would later learn how it felt to be on the other side of such an unforgettable moment, as his 1969 Cubs, after holding first place for 105 days, blew a seemingly insurmountable 8-1/2-game lead to the Miracle Mets.All the while, Durocher made as much noise off the field as on it. His perpetual feuds with players, owners, and league officials-not to mention his public associations with gamblers, riffraff, and Hollywood stars like George Raft and Larraine Day-kept his name in the headlines and spread his fame far beyond the confines of the diamond.A no-holds-barred account of a singular figure, Nice Guys Finish Last brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball's greatest era to vivid life, earning a place on every baseball fan's bookshelf.
Ozone Journal
Ozone Journal
Balakian, Peter
¥147.15
from "e;Ozone Journal"e;?Bach's cantata in B-flat minor in the cassette,we lounged under the greenhouse-sky, the UVBs hackingat the acids and oxides and then I could hear the difference?between an oboe and a bassoonat the river's edge under cover-trees breathed in our respiration;?there was something on the other side of the river,something both of us were itching toward-?radical bonds were broken, history became science.We were never the same.?The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others-the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS-creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.
Bewilderment
Bewilderment
Ferry, David
¥147.15
Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry.To read David Ferry's Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against-and with-his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry's use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.?Ferry's translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them.?From Bewilderment:OctoberThe day was hot, and entirely breathless, soThe remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fallSeemed as if it had no cause at all.The ticking sound of falling leaves was likeThe ticking sound of gentle rainfall asThey gently fell on leaves already fallen,Or as, when as they passed them in their falling,Now and again it happened that one of them touchedOne or another leaf as yet not falling,Still clinging to the idea of being summer:As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day,Had read, and understood, the calendar.
Clayfeld Holds On
Clayfeld Holds On
Pack, Robert
¥147.15
from "e;Clayfeld's Farewell Epistle to Bob Pack"e; Beneath this mellow harvest moon,I can still picture you-a boy contentjust fishing with his father from a ledgeabove a foaming stream. The flailing troutyou caught is packed in gleaming ice;the pink stripe all along its sideis smeared across black shiny dotsthat seem to shine with their own light.I'm sure that you can picture mewith equal vividness, and though we're notidentical, there is a sensein which I am inventing youas much as you're inventing me.?In Clayfeld Holds On, Robert Pack offers his readers a comprehensive portrait of his longtime protagonist Clayfeld, who is also Pack's doppelgnger, his alternate self, enacting both the life that the poet has lived and the life he might have lived, given his proclivities and appetites. Poet and protagonist, taken together, are self and consciousness of self, the historical self and the embellished story of that literal self.Written with a masterly ear for rhythm, and interweaving narrative and lyrical passages, the poems recount Clayfeld's formative memories while exploring concepts such as loyalty, generosity, commitment, as well as cosmic phenomena such as the big bang theory and black holes. Through all of this, Pack attempts to find purpose and meaning in an indifferent universe, and to explore the labyrinth of his own proliferating identity.
This New Yet Unapproachable America
This New Yet Unapproachable America
Cavell, Stanley
¥141.26
Stanley Cavell is a titan of the academic world; his work in aesthetics and philosophy has shaped both fields in the United States over the past forty years. In this brief yet enlightening collection of lectures, Cavell investigates the work of two of his most tried-and-true subjects: Emerson and Wittgenstein. Beginning with an introductory essay that places his own work in a philosophical and historical context, Cavell guides his reader through his thought process when composing and editing his lectures while making larger claims about the influence of institutions on philosophers, and the idea of progress within the discipline of philosophy. In "e;Declining Decline,"e; Cavell explains how language modifies human existence, looking specifically at the culture of Wittgenstein's writings. He draws on Emerson, Thoreau, and many others to make his case that Wittgenstein can indeed be viewed as a "e;philosopher of culture."e; In his final lecture, "e;Finding as Founding,"e; Cavell writes in response to Emerson's "e;Experience,"e; and explores the tension between the philosopher and language-that he or she must embrace language as his or her?"e;form of life,"e; while at the same time surpassing its restrictions. He compares finding new ideas to discovering a previously unknown land in an essay that unabashedly celebrates the power and joy of philosophical thought.?
Simone
Simone
Lalo, Eduardo
¥141.26
Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now: this masterful translation of his most celebrated novel, Simone-which won the 2013 Romulo Gallegos International Novel Prize-will introduce an English-language audience to this extraordinary literary talent.A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writer's frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teaches-forces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appear-scrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiper-Simone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker. When the eponymous Simone's identity is at last revealed, the writer finds in the life of this Chinese immigrant a plight not unlike his own. Traumatized and lonely, the pair moves towards bittersweet collaborations in passion, grief, and art.
Invisible
Invisible
Ball, Philip
¥211.90
If offered the chance-by cloak, spell, or superpower-to be invisible, who wouldn't want to give it a tryWe are drawn to the idea of stealthy voyeurism and the ability to conceal our own acts, but as desirable as it may seem, invisibility is also dangerous. It is not just an optical phenomenon, but a condition full of ethical questions. As esteemed science writer Philip Ball reveals in this book, the story of invisibility is not so much a matter of how it might be achieved but of why we want it and what we would do with it.In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. ?Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. ?Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one-showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries.In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen-and seeing the unseen-reveal surprising truths about who we are.
O, How the Wheel Becomes It!
O, How the Wheel Becomes It!
Powell, Anthony
¥123.61
The first novel Anthony Powell published following the completion of his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! fulfills perhaps every author's fantasy as it skewers a conceited, lazy, and dishonest critic. A writer who avoids serving in World War II and veers in and out of marriage, G. F. H. Shadbold ultimately falls victim to the title's spinning-and righteous-emblem of chance. Sophisticated and a bit cruel, Wheel's tale of posthumous vengeance is, nonetheless, irresistible.Written at the peak of the late British master's extraordinary literary career, this novel offers profound insight into the mind of a great artist whose unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony will delight devotees and new readers alike.
Cycling City
Cycling City
Friss, Evan
¥265.87
Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles-where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them-have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.The Cycling City?is a sharp history of the bicycle's rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world.Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today's car-centric cities-and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.
Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility
Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility
Zambrana, Rocio
¥265.87
Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility?picks up on recent revisionist readings of Hegel to offer a productive new interpretation of his notoriously difficult work, the Science of Logic. Rocio Zambrana transforms the revisionist tradition by distilling the theory of normativity that Hegel elaborates in the?Science of Logic?within the context of his signature treatment of negativity, unveiling how both features of his system of thought operate on his theory of intelligibility. ?Zambrana clarifies crucial features of Hegel's theory of normativity previously thought to be absent from the argument of the?Science of Logic-what she calls normative precariousness and normative ambivalence. She shows that Hegel's theory of determinacy views intelligibility as both precarious, the result of practices and institutions that gain and lose authority throughout history, and ambivalent, accommodating opposite meanings and valences even when enjoying normative authority. In this way, Zambrana shows that the Science of Logic provides the philosophical justification for the necessary historicity of intelligibility. Intervening in several recent developments in the study of Kant, Hegel, and German Idealism more broadly, this book provides a productive new understanding of the value of Hegel's systematic ambitions.
Making of Tocqueville's America
Making of Tocqueville's America
Butterfield, Kevin
¥265.87
Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans' propensity to form voluntary associations-and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how and why early nineteenth-century Americans were, in Tocqueville's words, "e;forever forming associations."e; In The Making of Tocqueville's America, Kevin Butterfield argues that to understand this, we need to first ask: what did membership really mean to the growing number of affiliated Americans?Butterfield explains that the first generations of American citizens found in the concept of membership-in churches, fraternities, reform societies, labor unions, and private business corporations-a mechanism to balance the tension between collective action and personal autonomy, something they accomplished by emphasizing law and procedural fairness. As this post-Revolutionary procedural culture developed, so too did the legal substructure of American civil society. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training ground for democracy, where people learned to honor one another's voices and perspectives. Rather, they were the training ground for something no less valuable to the success of the American democratic experiment: increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people.
On Hysteria
On Hysteria
Arnaud, Sabine
¥365.93
These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women. But for a long time, it was seen as a legitimate category of medical problem-and one that, originally, was applied to men as often as to women.In On Hysteria, Sabine Arnaud traces the creation and rise of hysteria, from its invention in the eighteenth century through nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Hysteria took shape, she shows, as a predominantly aristocratic malady, only beginning to cross class boundaries (and be limited to women) during the French Revolution. Unlike most studies of the role and status of medicine and its categories in this period, On Hysteria focuses not on institutions but on narrative strategies and writing-the ways that texts in a wide range of genres helped to build knowledge through misinterpretation and recontextualized citation.Powerfully interdisciplinary, and offering access to rare historical material for the first time in English, On Hysteria will speak to scholars in a wide range of fields, including the history of science, French studies, and comparative literature.
Politics of Pain Medicine
Politics of Pain Medicine
Graham, S. Scott
¥329.62
Chronic pain is a medical mystery, debilitating to patients and a source of frustration for practitioners. It often eludes both cause and cure and serves as a reminder of how much further we have to go in unlocking the secrets of the body. A new field of pain medicine has evolved from this landscape, one that intersects with dozens of disciplines and subspecialties ranging from psychology and physiology to anesthesia and chiropractic medicine. Over the past three decades, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have struggled to define this complex and often contentious field as they work to establish standards while navigating some of the most challenging philosophical issues of Western science.In The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry, S. Scott Graham offers a rich and detailed exploration of the medical rhetoric surrounding pain medicine. Graham chronicles the work of interdisciplinary pain management specialists to found a new science of pain and a new approach to pain medicine grounded in a more comprehensive biospychosocial model. His insightful analysis demonstrates how these materials ultimately shape the healthcare community's understanding of what pain medicine is, how the medicine should be practiced and regulated, and how practitioner-patient relationships are best managed. It is a fascinating, novel examination of one of the most vexing issues in contemporary medicine.
Second-Best Justice
Second-Best Justice
Ramseyer, J. Mark
¥329.62
It's long been known that Japanese file fewer lawsuits per capita than Americans do. Yet explanations for the difference have tended to be partial and unconvincing, ranging from circular arguments about Japanese culture to suggestions that the slow-moving Japanese court system acts as a deterrent.With?Second-Best Justice, J. Mark Ramseyer offers a more compelling, better-grounded explanation: the low rate of lawsuits in Japan results not from distrust of a dysfunctional system but from trust in a system that works-that sorts and resolves disputes in such an overwhelmingly predictable pattern that opposing parties rarely find it worthwhile to push their dispute to trial. Using evidence from tort claims across many domains, Ramseyer reveals a court system designed not to find perfect justice, but to "e;make do"e;-to adopt strategies that are mostly right and that thereby resolve disputes quickly and economically.An eye-opening study of comparative law,?Second-Best Justice?will force a wholesale rethinking of the differences among alternative legal systems and their broader consequences for social welfare.?
Making the Mission
Making the Mission
Howell, Ocean
¥294.30
In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city's iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image.In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity-a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.
From Boom to Bubble
From Boom to Bubble
Weber, Rachel
¥294.30
During the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust in the same time period. In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake?In From Boom to Bubble, Rachel Weber debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so. Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Weber documents the case of Chicago's "e;Millennial Boom,"e; showing that the Loop's expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail-and how that affects cities.
Significant Life
Significant Life
May, Todd
¥147.15
What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful oneThroughout history most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about these questions, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey-and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life and memories alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them.?May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from-but also interact with-the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures-from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady's Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler-May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be. ?Clearly and eloquently written, A Significant Life is a recognition and a comfort, a celebration of the deeply human narrative impulse by which we make-even if we don't realize it-meaning for ourselves. It offers a refreshing way to think of an age-old question, of quite simply, what makes a life worth living.?
Dispatches from Dystopia
Dispatches from Dystopia
Brown, Kate
¥147.15
"e;Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?"e; asks one chapter of Kate Brown's surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montana-America's largest environmental Superfund site-have much more in common than one would think thanks to similarities in climate, hucksterism, and the perseverance of their few hardy inhabitants. Taking readers to these and other unlikely locales, Dispatches from Dystopia delves into the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history.In Dispatches from Dystopia, Brown wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version-the real or the virtual-is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese-Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the annual male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the midwestern industrial rust belt to investigate the rise of "e;rustalgia"e; and?the ways?her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands.?Dispatches from Dystopia powerfully and movingly narrates the histories of locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind.
Secret Lives of Teachers
Secret Lives of Teachers
Anonymous
¥147.15
Welcome to "e;East Hudson,"e; an elite private school in New York where the students are attentive, the colleagues are supportive, and the tuition would make the average person choke on its string of zeroes. You might think a teacher here would have little in common with most other teachers in America, but as this veteran educator-writing anonymously-shows in this refreshingly honest account, all teachers are bound by a common thread. Stripped of most economic obstacles and freed up by anonymity, he is able to tell a deeper story about the universal conditions, anxieties, foibles, generosities, hopes, and complaints that comprise every teacher's life. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, but always recognizable to anyone who has ever walked into a classroom, closed the door, and started their day.?This is not a how-to manual. Rather, the author explores the dimensions of teaching that no one else has, those private thoughts few would dare put into a book but that form an important part of the day-to-day experience of a teacher. We see him ponder the clothes that people wear, think frankly about money (and the imbalance of its distribution), get wrangled by parents, provide on-the-fly psychotherapy, drape niceties over conversations that are actually all-out warfare, drop an f-bomb or two, and deal with students who are just plain unlikeable. We also see him envy, admire, fear, and hope; we see him in adulation and uncertainty, and in energy and exhaustion. We see him as teachers really are: human beings with a complex, rewarding, and very important job.There has been no shortage of commentary on the teaching profession over the decades, but none quite like this. Unflinching, wry, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, it's written for every teacher out there who has ever scrambled, smirked, or sighed-and toughed it out nonetheless.?