Author Thomas Crowl, using newspaper and magazine accounts, interviews, and other primary source material (some previously unavailable), follows the investigation into the Mellett murder by a private detective who was hired by the Stark County prosecutor. The arrest of the prime suspect and the sensational trial of the cocky hitman received nationwide media coverage. The murder investigation also netted the two local hoodlums who hired McDermott. Additionally, a former police detective was arrested and convicted as the originator of the plot, and he in turn implicated police chief Lengel in the murder conspiracy. Nearly a year and a half later, however, Lengel was ultimately acquitted of the charges.

Displaying a range of voices and subjects—from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss—Creech’s poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the “kingdom of desire.” Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.

“These ‘stone’ poems by Karen Craigo are reminiscent of W. S. Merwin’s deep image poems or Vasko Popa’s surrealist ‘pebble’ poems. But Craigo does Merwin and Popa one better. She manages to create and sustain a complex and shifting personal mythos without sacrificing the mystery and evocative force of the focusing image. Popa’s ‘pebbles’ chanted a mean, gutteral, one-syllable song, but Craigo’s ‘stones’ belt out whole operas. A brilliant debut.”—George Looney

This is a major work, at once synthetic and analytical. The author has drawn on previous studies of Irish music and general melodic theory to describe the inner workings of a rich melodic tradition. Irish folk music, resting upon monophonic melodies which are varied and ornamented, and thus viewed from several perspectives—ethnographic and musical, “insider” and theoretical—to weave an integrated image of a still thriving genre. The concepts of “tune family” and “melody type” are starting points for the qualitative study of melodic change and tune relationships without recourse to simplified tune skeletons or statistics. The concept of “implicit” folk theory leads both to rigorous theoretical analysis and to an examination of the musicians’ own words, thus creating a working model in which a particular performance is understood in a larger context.

The stories in Chekhov’s Doctors are powerful portraits of doctors in their everyday lives, struggling with their own personal problems as well as trying to serve their patients. The fifth volume in the acclaimed Literature and Medicine Series, Chekhov’s Doctors will serve as a rich text for professional health care educators as well as for general readers.

Articulating the search for a cohesive American identity, Matthew Cooperman’s poetry attends to the slippery question of place: its history in personal and cultural memory and its tenuous constitution as family, nature, love, and community. Cooperman uses the metaphor of travel to invoke the necessary motion and distance required to look back at one’s past.

Placing the bilateral relationship in a global context, this military and diplomatic history examines the importance of ideology, material interests, and power in U.S.-Latin American relations. Historian Bradley Coleman demonstrates how the making of the Colombian-American alliance exemplified hemispheric interconnectedness, a condition of ever-growing importance in the twenty-first century. Employing available Colombian and U.S. archival sources, this book fills a gap in the literature on U.S. relations with less developed countries and provides new research on the origins an development of the U.S–Colombian alliance that will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars of U.S. and Latin American diplomacy.

“Imagine a love of small towns ringed by mountains, a shrewd ear for lonely folks’ dialogue, and a music that seems to pour out of your own life as you read these poems. Likely is a book brimming with surprises and beauty; it left me breathless.” —Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Filling a major gap in the literature, Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895–1919 is a comprehensive, thought-provoking intellectual history of American, Chinese, and Japanese thinking on modernity, national identity, and internationalism during the early twentieth century. Those with an interest in U.S. foreign relations, women’s and gender history, and U.S.-Asian relations will find this an innovative and fascinating title.

Our Human Hearts is a nonfiction exploration of the meanings of the human heart as interpreted by two traditions: medical science, which has made possible dramatic cardiac surgery and sophisticated drug treatments, and the much older cultural traditions that view the heart as a repository for wisdom, courage, emotion, and the soul. Carter interlaces medical and linguistic information with the stories of four heart patients, each with different illnesses and different personal approaches to healing. Much has been written about the heart from a medical standpoint, but few experts have explored the human side of the heart by giving a voice to the patients.