The Old Man and the Sea is a deceptively simple work. An old man goes fishing. He catches a giant marlin after much struggle. Sharks attack and destroy the fish. The old man is left with the bare bones of the fish—a Monday morning “fish story.” But much lies beneath the surface. The action is condensed and presented in carefully crafted images, in words and details selected because of their multivalent meanings, and in several external narrative strands, present primarily as allusions and echoes.

Through line-by-line annotations and accompanying commentary, this book weaves together the biographical, historical, and cultural threads of one of Hemingway’s more overlooked works, thus providing much needed guidance for Hemingway scholars and general readers alike.

During the 1870s, the organization and stewardship of American culture by the upper classes began to take hold on a mass scale, due in part to the founding of museums, municipal libraries, symphony halls, theaters, and public parks. In addition, periodicals such as Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly became major players in shaping the country’s cultural ideals. Founded in 1870, Scribner’s Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People, which became The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1881, offered its predominantly upper-middle-class readership historical and biographical essays, serialized novels, scientific and technological updates, and discussions of contemporary events and issues, such as woman suffrage, Chinese immigration, labor strikes, and “the Negro problem.”

The short reign of Edward VI was a turbulent one, even by Tudor standards. The kingdom was threatened by widespread unrest, riots, and rebellions among the common people. In this study, Beer looks at these dramatic events from the viewpoint of the rebellious commoners. Above the clamor of the streets and countryside runs the intricate story of the interaction and often confusing relations among
the commoners, the gentry, and the king’s councillors in London.

Recipe for Blackberry Cake is a collection of poems about women’s lives—poems about girlhood, about mothers and daughters, about how relationships between women are distorted by violence in the home. The poems tell the stories of four generations of women, beginning in the coal camps of West Virginia in the late 1940s and ending in a shopping mall in Ohio some 50 years later. At the heart of the collection is the choice to tell how dangerous and how brave the lives of our mothers, grandmothers, and daughters have been.

Carol Donley & Martin Kohn believe that “physicians stand at a unique vantage point as observers of the human condition.” In Recognitions: Doctors and Their Stories, the fourth volume in the Literature and Medicine Series, contributors such as Richard Selzer, Robert Coles, Perri Klass, and Jack Coulehan prove this assertion through their moving and enlightening prose.

Richard M. Reid’s introduction captures the ways the war dramatically reconfigured the American medical landscape. Prior to the war, the medical community was badly fragmented, and elite physicians felt undervalued by the American public. The war offered them the chance to assert their professional control and to make medicine more scientific and evidence-based. The introduction also includes an extensive historiographical analysis of Civil War medicine and situates Wilder’s recollections in the changing direction of the field.

Reconstructing Russia focuses on the Wilson administration’s efforts to find some way to provide economic support to Russian Siberia as a counterpoint to German economic influence. The connection between the Wilson administration’s efforts to provide economic assistance in Siberia and the Marshall Plan becomes even more significant at the close of the twentieth century as contemporary debates are waged over the issue of economic assistance to the former Soviet Union. Bacino places Wilson’s Russian policy in a new light and examines it from a government-wide perspective. He analyzes several significant issues and gives a fresh look at one of the most confusing episodes in Wilsonian foreign policy.

In this collection of interviews with major orchestra conductors, James Badal explores the impact of recording technology on contemporary musical culture. Spanning more than a decade with masters such a Vladimir Ashkenazy, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Christopher Hogwood, these discussions offer valuable commentary on the digital revolution and subsequent compact disc explosion.

First published in 1958, Red River Campaign examines how partisan politics, economic needs, and personal profit determined military policy and operations in Louisiana and Arkansas during the spring of 1864.
In response to the demands of Free-Soil interests in Texas and the New England textiles manufacturers’ need for cotton, Lincoln authorized an expedition to open the way to Texas. General Nathaniel Banks conducted a combined military and naval campaign up the Red River that lasted only from March 12 to May 20, 1864, but was one of the most destructive of the Civil War.