Mistral is a portrait of Provence seen through its legendary wind. Photographer Rachel Cobb illustrates the effects of this relentless wind that funnels down the Rhône Valley, periodically gusting to 120 km per hour--hurricane strength on the Beaufort wind force scale. The region has, accordingly, adjusted to accommodate the mistral's impact. Some houses are built the traditional way, with few or no windows on the windward side and the main entrance on the sheltered side. Heavy stones hold down terra-cotta roof tiles. Rows of trees lining fields create windbreaks to shield crops. Cobb spent years chasing this capricious wind, challenging herself to photograph the invisible. As she became sensitive to its rhythms and effects, Cobb realized the mistral was not just a weather phenomenon; it was an integral part of the fabric of Provençal life. It was everywhere, yet always unseen. Mistral captures this invisible force of nature through its effects: a leaf caught in flight, a bride tangled in her veil, spider webs oriented to withstand the wind and grapes lashed by powerful gusts ("You can taste the wine better when the mistral blows," a Châteauneuf-du-Pape winemaker says). Writers have also tried their hand at conjuring this ungraspable phenomenon. Excerpts from writings by Paul Auster, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Giono and Frédéric Mistral are included in this volume, a luminous evocation of nature's unseen power.

In Love, Cecil, Lisa Immordino Vreeland offers an evocative por-trait of this talented whirlwind whose creative work captured many facets of the 20th century. Using photography, drawings, letters, and scrapbooks by Beaton and his contemporaries, along with excerpts from his sparkling diaries and other writ-ings, Immordino Vreeland brings his spirit to life in a way that no previous book has been able to do. Immordino Vreeland organizes her book around the circles of Beaton's daily life: the people who inspired and influenced him, his colorful friends, his fellow photographers, his Hollywood conquests, his wartime service, and his English roots. This cavalcade offers a shimmering vision of high style, but it also captures often-troubled souls struggling to create the open, tolerant, creative worlds of art and culture that we have inherited today.

This collection of 24 essays explores what happens when proponents of writing across the curriculum (WAC) use the latest computer-mediated tools and techniques--including e-mail, asynchronous learning networks, MOOs, and the World Wide Web--to expand and enrich their teaching practices, especially the teaching of writing. Essays and their authors are: (1) "Using Computers to Expand the Role of Writing Centers" (Muriel Harris); (2) "Writing across the Curriculum Encounters Asynchronous Learning Networks" (Gail E. Hawisher and Michael A. Pemberton); (3) "Building a Writing-Intensive Multimedia Curriculum" (Mary E. Hocks and Daniele Bascelli); (4) "Communication across the Curriculum and Institutional Culture" (Mike Palmquist; Kate Kiefer; Donald E. Zimmerman); (5) "Creating a Community of Teachers and Tutors" (Joe Essid and Dona J. Hickey); (6) "From Case to Virtual Case: A Journey in Experiential Learning" (Peter M. Saunders); (7) "Composing Human-Computer Interfaces across the Curriculum in Engineering Schools" (Stuart A. Selber and Bill Karis); (8) "InterQuest: Designing a Communication-Intensive Web-Based Course" (Scott A. Chadwick and Jon Dorbolo); (9) "Teacher Training: A Blueprint for Action Using the World Wide Web" (Todd Taylor); (10) "Accommodation and Resistance on (the Color) Line: Black Writers Meet White Artists on the Internet" (Teresa M. Redd); (11) "International E-mail Debate" (Linda K. Shamoon); (12) "E-mail in an Interdisciplinary Context" (Dennis A. Lynch); (13) "Creativity, Collaboration, and Computers" (Margaret Portillo and Gail Summerskill Cummins); (14) "COllaboratory: MOOs, Museums, and Mentors" (Margit Misangyi Watts and Michael Bertsch); (15) "Weaving Guilford's Web" (Michael B. Strickland and Robert M. Whitnell); (16) "Pig Tales: Literature inside the Pen of Electronic Writing" (Katherine M. Fischer); (17) "E-Journals: Writing to Learn in the Literature Classroom" (Paula Gillespie); (18) "E-mailing Biology: Facing the Biochallenge" (Deborah M. Langsam and Kathleen Blake Yancey); (19) "Computer-Supported Collaboration in an Accounting Class" (Carol F. Venable and Gretchen N. Vik); (20) "Electronic Tools to Redesign a Marketing Course" (Randall S. Hansen); (21) Network Discussions for Teaching Western Civilization" (Maryanne Felter and Daniel F. Schultz); (22) "Math Learning through Electronic Journaling" (Robert Wolfe); (23) "Electronic Communities in Philosophy Classrooms" (Gary L. Hardcastle and Valerie Gray Hardcastle); and (24) "Electronic Conferencing in an Interdisciplinary Humanities Course" (Mary Ann Krajnik Crawford; Kathleen Geissler; M. Rini Hughes; Jeffrey Miller). A glossary and an index are included. (NKA)

"Rather than the proverbial melting pot, Wilson asks us to recognize a West that is at least a place where, against a backdrop of aridity and expansive space, diverse lives can and do coexist." --John Rohrbach Renowned photographer Laura Wilson has captured the majesty, as well as the tragedy, of her home region of Texas and the wider West for more than three decades. A former assistant to Richard Avedon, she has published her work to wide acclaim over the past twenty-five years. As seen in this extraordinary book, Wilson's subjects range from legendary West Texas cattle ranches to impoverished Plains Indian reservations to lavish border-town cotillions. Also featured are compelling portraits of artists who are associated with the region, including Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, and Sam Shepard. The unforgettable images in That Day, most of which are previously unpublished, tell sharply drawn stories of the people and places that have shaped, and continue to shape, the nation's most dynamic and unyielding land. Text from Wilson's journals accompanies the photographs, recalling her personal experiences behind the camera at the moment when a particular image was captured. With her incisive eye, Wilson casts a fresh light on the West--a topic of enduring fascination.

Italy as a haven of gay liberty: a grand tour with Oscar Wilde, featuring previously unseen photographs and archival materials In Oscar Wilde's Italian Dream 1875-1900, leading Wilde scholar Renato Miracco combines written research with previously unseen visual material ranging from Wilde's earliest heady trips to Italy as an Oxford student to recently released court documents from his trial and his final days in France and Italy in 1900, after his incarceration in Reading Gaol, and his voluntary exile from Britain. Italy, and the larger world beyond London, was essential to the sensitivity and awareness of Wilde's identity, his contributions to prison reform and his challenges to social norms and sexual stereotypes in his last years. It also offered a great deal of sexual liberty compared to the oppressive moral atmosphere of England at that time. The previously unseen images Miracco has incorporated in this volume (including photos that Wilde received from the gay German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden) are mainly from private collections, and together with letters, reminiscences and magazine and newspaper articles (along with derogatory articles about Wilde from the Italian press) they play a key role in placing Wilde's character, and an entire generation, in a complex context. Oscar Wilde's Italian Dream 1875-1900is a major addition to the canon of one of the world's greatest literary figures. Renato Miracco(born 1953) is an Italian art critic and curator. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for Cultural Achievements in 2018. He served as Cultural Attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington from 2010 to 2018 and as advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy. Miracco has curated major exhibitions for Tate Modern in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London's Estorick Collection. His passion for Wilde dates from the early 1980s when he wrote his first essay on Wilde's time in Italy. This new book on Wilde is based on new materials that Miracco has found over the last few years.

'Nue York: Self-Portraits of a Bare Urban Citizen was born out of an initial questioning about clothing and the importance of fashion in modern society. As I watched an image-obsessed society care more about the sales at Barneys than the homeless people they ignore as they parade by, I began to wonder what the world would feel like naked, without the empowering or disempowering effect of clothing.

The House of Incest, Anais Nin's famous prose poem, was first published in Paris in 1936 and immediately drew attention from the era's prominent writers, including Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. While written in English, it is considered a landmark work in the French surrealist tradition and one of the most unique books in 20th century literature.

An argument that we have a moral duty to explore other planets and solar systems--because human life on Earth has an expiration date. Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, cataclysmic war, or the death of the sun in a few billion years. To avoid extinction, we will have to find a new home planet, perhaps even a new solar system, to inhabit. In this provocative and fascinating book, Christopher Mason argues that we have a moral duty to do just that. As the only species aware that life on Earth has an expiration date, we have a responsibility to act as the shepherd of life-forms--not only for our species but for all species on which we depend and for those still to come (by accidental or designed evolution). Mason argues that the same capacity for ingenuity that has enabled us to build rockets and land on other planets can be applied to redesigning biology so that we can sustainably inhabit those planets. And he lays out a 500-year plan for undertaking the massively ambitious project of reengineering human genetics for life on other worlds. As they are today, our frail human bodies could never survive travel to another habitable planet. Mason describes the toll that long-term space travel took on astronaut Scott Kelly, who returned from a year on the International Space Station with changes to his blood, bones, and genes. Mason proposes a ten-phase, 500-year program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space--with the ultimate goal of achieving human settlement of new solar systems. He lays out a roadmap of which solar systems to visit first, and merges biotechnology, philosophy, and genetics to offer an unparalleled vision of the universe to come.

“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Best Book of 2021 A poignant and funny exploration of authenticity in work and life by a woman doctor. In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"—a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a “real” doctor. Accessed by thousands of readers around the world, Koven’s “Letter to a Young Female Physician” has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine. Koven tells candid and illuminating stories about her pregnancy during a grueling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her child and aging parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother, and daughter converged, and sometimes collided; the sexism, pay inequity, and harassment that women in medicine encounter; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she traces the arc of her life, Koven finds inspiration in literature and faces the near-universal challenges of burnout, body image, and balancing work with marriage and parenthood. Shining with warmth, clarity, and wisdom, Letter to a Young Female Physician reveals a woman forging her authentic identity in a modern landscape that is as overwhelming and confusing as it is exhilarating in its possibilities. Koven offers an indelible account, by turns humorous and profound, from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher, and writer who sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.