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The immensely human story of how world champion BMX dirt rider Stephen Murray won, lost his way, fought back to the top and then crashed and broke his neck, ending up paralysed from the shoulders down. Now he fights on a different front, his story is inspirational and his book is a triumph of the soul.
The first anthropological collection that reveals patterns of male and female homosexuality in the Muslim World The dramatic impact of Islamic fundamentalism in recent years has skewed our image of Islamic history and culture. Stereotypes depict Islamic societies as economically backward, hyper-patriarchal, and fanatically religious. But in fact, the Islamic world encompasses a great diversity of cultures and a great deal of variation within those cultures in terms of gender roles and sexuality. The first collection on this topic from a historical and anthropological perspective, Homosexuality in the Muslim World reveals that patterns of male and female homosexuality have existed and often f...
Breathtaking in its historical and geographical scope, this book provides a sweeping examination of the construction of male and female homosexualities, stressing both the variability of the forms same-sex desire can take and the key recurring patterns it has formed throughout history. "[An] indispensable resource on same-sex sexual relationships and their social contexts. . . . Essential reading." —Choice "[P]romises to deliver a lot, and even more extraordinarily succeeds in its lofty aims. . . . [O]riginal and refreshing. . . . [A] sensational book, part of what I see emerging as a new commonsense revolution within academe." —Kevin White, International Gay and Lesbian Review
A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear on a new approach to understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Plotting Gothic positions the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of three interlocking plots: a spatial plot tied to the material construction of the churches, a social plot stemming from the collaborative efforts that made Gothic output possible, and a rhetorical plot involving narratives that treat the churches as objects of desire. Drawing on the testimony of three witnesses involved in church building—Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, Gervase of Canterbury, and the image maker Villard de Honnecourt—and a range of secondary sources, Murray traces common patterns in the way medieval buildings were represented in words and images. Our witnesses provide vital information about the way the great churches of Gothic were built and the complexity of their meanings. Taking a fresh approach to Gothic architecture, Plotting Gothic offers an invigorating new way to understand some of the most lasting achievements of the medieval era.
The essays in this volume reflect on and build on the remarkable legacies of Robert Mark and Andrew Tallon, who pioneered the application of high-technology research methods to the study of Gothic architecture. Combining personal reminiscences and historiographical discussions with meticulous geometrical and structural analyses based on photogrammetric and laser-scanned building surveys, this book offers valuable new perspectives not only on Mark and Tallon themselves, but also on major churches including the abbeys of Saint-Denis and Alcobaça, Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Notre-Dame in Paris, and the cathedrals of Clermont, Reims and Wells. Contributors are: Sheila Bonde, Robert Bork, Lindsay S. Cook, Michael Davis, James Hillson, Kyle Killian, Peter Kurmann, Clark Maines, Ethan Mark, Stephen Murray, Sergio Sanabria, Dany Sandron, Ellen Shortell, Elizabeth B. Smith, Rebecca Smith, Arnaud Timbert, Stefaan Van Liefferinge, and Nancy Wu. See inside the book
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."
Offers historical and cultural analysis of indigenous conceptions of male homosexuality in South America.
Among the many myths created about Africa, the claim that homosexuality and gender diversity are absent or incidental is one of the oldest and most enduring. Historians, anthropologists, and many contemporary Africans alike have denied or overlooked African same-sex patterns or claimed that such patterns were introduced by Europeans or Arabs. In fact, same-sex love and nonbinary genders were and are widespread in Africa. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands documents the presence of this diversity in some fifty societies in every region of the continent south of the Sahara. Essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines explore institutionalized marriages between women, same-sex relations between...
"...Las Vegas is home to an abundance of wedding chapels, where blushing brides vow everlasting love to their knights in shining armor...Share the poignant, moving and occasionally humorous tales of the young and old, first-time sweethearts and long-lost loves. Discover the joys, sorrows and journeys that led each of them to the altar of the Chapel of Eternal Love."--Cover.
A controversial and devastatingly honest depiction of the demise of Europe