BiblioVault - Books about Thirty Years

Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas
By Alison Macor
University of Texas Press, 2010
Library of Congress PN1993.5.U78M33 2010 | Dewey Decimal 791.430976431

Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2011

During the 1990s, Austin achieved "overnight" success and celebrity as a vital place for independent filmmaking. Directors Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez proved that locally made films with regional themes such as Slacker and El Mariachi could capture a national audience. Their success helped transform Austin's homegrown film community into a professional film industry staffed with talented, experienced filmmakers and equipped with state-of-the art-production facilities. Today, Austin struggles to balance the growth and expansion of its film community with an ongoing commitment to nurture the next generation of independent filmmakers.

Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids chronicles the evolution of this struggle by re-creating Austin's colorful movie history. Based on revealing interviews with Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Mike Judge, Quentin Tarantino, Matthew McConaughey, George Lucas, and more than one hundred other players in the local and national film industries, Alison Macor explores how Austin has become a proving ground for contemporary independent cinema. She begins in the early 1970s with Tobe Hooper's horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and follows the development of the Austin film scene through 2001 with the production and release of Rodriguez's $100-million blockbuster, Spy Kids. Each chapter explores the behind-the-scenes story of a specific movie, such as Linklater's Dazed and Confused and Judge's Office Space, against the backdrop of Austin's ever-expanding film community.

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Collective History: Thirty Years of Social Text, Volume 27
Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy, eds.
Duke University Press

This issue marks the thirtieth anniversary of Social Text and celebrates the journal’s legacy. Offering a history of the journal since its inception in 1979, this issue explores the elements that have made Social Text what it is today: the intellectual impulses that first brought the editorial collective of scholars, artists, and activists together; the collective’s special commitment to collaborative journal editing; and the unique path the journal has taken to arrive at the distinctive place it now occupies in new left critical thought.

Featuring new interviews with Social Text’s founders and former editors—including Stanley Aronowitz, John Brenkman, Fredric Jameson, Randy Martin, Toby Miller, Bruce Robbins, Andrew Ross, Sohnya Sayres, and Anders Stephanson—the issue reflects on the journal’s legacy as a radical publication that has bridged politics and the academy and has made critical interventions in both arenas. Several contributors revisit the first issue of the journal and describe its lasting impact. Others examine the politics of production at Social Text and detail the hands-on process of putting the journal together. Notably, the issue also features thirty essays by members of the current editorial collective, on key topics that have been crucial to the journal. Ranging from aesthetics to war, and including empire, mass culture, revolution, science, and theory, these essays bring to life the cultural history of the journal and demonstrate how Social Text has shaped the way that these terms are conceptualized and used today.

Contributors. The forty-four contributors include the current members of the Social Text collective and a number of former members. For a complete list of the collective, visit socialtextonline.org.

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Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer
Richard Shelton
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Library of Congress PS3569.H39367Z46 2007 | Dewey Decimal 365.92

Ever since he was asked to critique the poetry of a convicted murderer, he has lived in two worlds.

Richard Shelton was a young English professor in 1970 when a convict named Charles Schmid—a serial killer dubbed the “Pied Piper of Tucson” in national magazines—shared his brooding verse. But for Shelton, the novelty of meeting a death-row monster became a thirty-year commitment to helping prisoners express themselves. Shelton began organizing creative writing workshops behind bars, and in this gritty memoir he offers up a chronicle of reaching out to forgotten men and women—and of creativity blossoming in a repressive environment. He tells of published students such as Paul Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca who have made names for themselves through their writing instead of their crimes. Shelton also recounts the bittersweet triumph of seeing work published by men who later met with agonizing deaths, and the despair of seeing the creative strides of inmates broken by politically motivated transfers to private prisons. And his memoir bristles with hard-edged experiences, ranging from inside knowledge of prison breaks to a workshop conducted while a riot raged outside a barricaded door. Reflecting on his decision to tutor Schmid, Shelton sees that the choice “has led me through bloody tragedies and terrible disappointments to a better understanding of what it means to be human.”

Crossing the Yard is a rare story of professional fulfillment—and a testament to the transformative power of writing.

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Futures Past: Thirty Years of Arts Computing
Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, and Hazel Gardiner
Intellect Books, 2007

In decades past, artists envisioned a future populated by technological wonders such as hovercraft vehicles and voice-operated computers. Today we barely recognize these futuristic landscapes that bear only slight resemblance to an everyday reality. Futures Past considers digital media’s transformative impact on the art world from a perspective of thirty years’ worth of hindsight. Herein a distinguished group of contributors—from researchers and teachers to curators and artists—argue for a more profound understanding of digital culture in the twenty-first century.

This unprecedented volume examines the disparities between earlier visions of the future of digital art and its current state, including frank accounts of promising projects that failed to deliver and assessments of more humble projects that have not only survived, but flourished. Futures Past is a look back at the frenetic history of computerized art that points the way toward a promising future.

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I'll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program
Edited by Hope Edelman and Robin Hemley
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress PS688.I45 2015 | Dewey Decimal 814.5408

The University of Iowa is a leading light in the writing world. In addition to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for poets and fiction writers, it houses the prestigious Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP), which was the first full-time masters-granting program in this genre in the United States. Over the past three decades the NWP has produced some of the most influential nonfiction writers in the country.

I’ll Tell You Mine is an extraordinary anthology, a book rooted in Iowa’s successful program that goes beyond mere celebration to present some of the best nonfiction writing of the past thirty years. Eighteen pieces produced by Iowa graduates exemplify the development of both the program and the field of nonfiction writing. Each is accompanied by commentary from the author on a challenging issue presented by the story and the writing process, including drafting, workshopping, revising, and listening to (or sometimes ignoring) advice. The essays are put into broader context by a prologue from Robert Atwan, founding editor of the Best American Essays series, who details the rise of nonfiction as a literary genre since the New Journalism of the 1960s.

Creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing writing concentration in the country, with more than one hundred and fifty programs in the United States. I’ll Tell You Mine shows why Iowa’s leads the way. Its insider’s view of the Iowa program experience and its wealth of groundbreaking nonfiction writing will entertain readers and inspire writers of all kinds.

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John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807
Oressa M. Teagarden
Ohio University Press, 1992
Library of Congress E275.S53 1992 | Dewey Decimal 973.38

In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.

A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.

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The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization
António Costa Pinto
Intellect Books, 2013
Library of Congress JV4203.L37 2003 | Dewey Decimal 946.9044

This book is the result of a conference organised by the Contemporary Portuguese Political History Research Centre (CPHRC) and the University of Dundee that took place during September 2000. The purpose of this conference, and the resulting book, was to bring together various experts in the field to analyse and debate the process of Portuguese decolonisation, which was then 25 years old, and the effects of this on the Portuguese themselves. For over one century, the Portuguese state had defined its foreign policy on the basis of its vast empire &endash; this was the root of its 'Atlanticist' vision. The outbreak of war of liberation in its African territories, which were prompted by the new international support for self determination in colonised territories, was a serious threat that undermined the very foundations of the Portuguese state. This book examines the nature of this threat, how the Portuguese state initially attempted to overcome it by force, and how new pressures within Portuguese society were given space to emerge as a consequence of the colonial wars.

This is the first book that takes a multidisciplinary look at both the causes and the consequences of Portuguese decolonisation &endash; and is the only one that places the loss of Portugal's Eastern Empire in the context of the loss of its African Empire. Furthermore, it is the only English language book that relates the process of Portuguese decolonisation with the search for a new Portuguese vision of its place in the world.

This book is intended for anyone who is interested in regime change, decolonisation, political revolutions and the growth and development of the European Union. It will also be useful for those who are interested in contemporary developments in civil society and state ideologies. Given that a large part of the book is dedicated to the process of change in the various countries of the former Portuguese Empire, it will also be of interest to students of Africa. It will be useful to those who study decolonisation processes within the other former European Empires, as it provides comparative detail. The book will be most useful to academic researchers and students of comparative politics and area studies.

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On Burning Ground: Thirty Years of Thinking About Poetry
Sandra M. Gilbert
University of Michigan Press, 2009
Library of Congress PN1031.G49 2009 | Dewey Decimal 809.1

The highly esteemed literary critic and poet Sandra M. Gilbert is best known for her feminist literary collaborations with Susan Gubar, with whom she coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, as well as the three-volume No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.

The essays assembled in On Burning Ground display Gilbert's astonishing range and explore poetics, personal identity, feminism, and modern and contemporary literature. Among the pieces gathered here are essays on D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück, as well as reviews and previously unpublished articles.

Sandra M. Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships and is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 and, most recently, Belongings.

Praise for Sandra M.Gilbert

"Sandra Gilbert's poems are beautifully situated at the intersection of craft and feeling. Belongings is a stellar collection by a virtuoso with heart."
---Billy Collins

". . . brilliantly combines literary and cultural criticism with the intimacy of memoir."
---Joyce Carol Oates

"An enduring contribution to the literature of grief."
---New York Times Book Review

Poets on Poetry collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

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Stuttering in Children and Adults: Thirty Years of Research at the University of Iowa
Wendell Johnson, Editor
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Stuttering in Children and Adults was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

One of the largest groups of handicapped people in the world today is made up of the estimated fifteen million persons who stutter. Their predicament has been one of man's most baffling problems ever since it was first recorded by the ancients, but not until the present century has the mystery of stuttering showed any signs of lifting.

The studies collected in this volume represent a substantial step toward the solving of the mystery. The University of Iowa, a pioneer in research on the causes and treatment of stuttering, has carried on its work for many years. This book presents all previously unpublished papers and dissertations (a total of forty-three) that have resulted from this research program.

Much of the work centers on the onset of stuttering in children and underlies the theory that stuttering begins with the hearer rather than the speaker. Interrelationships between personality and stuttering have been investigated, a search has been made for a possible physical basis for stuttering, conditions affecting severity of stuttering have been studied, and research on therapy has been attempted.

This is an important book for psychologists, educators, social workers, physicians, parents, and others concerned with speech disorders. For those who devote their full effort to the problems discussed—the specialists in speech pathology and therapy—the book is essential.

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Thirty Years of Phoenix Poets, 1983 to 2012: An E-Sampler
Selected by University of Chicago Press Staff
University of Chicago Press, 2013

For thirty years now the Phoenix Poets series has been publishing the best poets working in English, from young poets publishing their first books to renowned masters at the peak of storied careers. This sample presents some of the best poets and poems from those three decades—it’s sure to whet your appetite and get you coming back for more!

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Thirty Years of Radical History: The Long March, Volume 2001
Van Gosse, ed.
Duke University Press

This special issue of Radical History Review (RHR) offers not only a self-portrait of the journal but also a retrospective of radical history as a movement, an ideology, and a transformative force in historical scholarship. In an engaging combination of interviews, articles, and round-table discussions, this issue highlights the relentless challenge that radical history has posed to liberal and conservative paradigms.
Recognizing the creative power of pluralism, the RHR editors have marshalled a diverse troop of historical scholars in this issue. In “Forum on Radical History,” sixteen historians discuss how the notion of radicalism has affected the way they write, teach, and live, and in "A Conversation about the Radical History Review," past and present members of the editorial board zero in on the journal itself and the political and academic context in which it was born. Offering a more personal perspective, Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize winner and radical history founder, shares his thoughts on RHR and the movement. Other articles in this special issue tackle the state of radicalism today, analyzing the academic labor movement, the significance of physical space in Pinochet’s reign of terror, and the enduring symbolism of a particular statue in Prague.
This retrospective issue celebrates the journal’s past, but it also reflects on the present and looks forward to a future in which radicalism will continue to shape the landscape of historical and political discourse.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dan Bender, Paul Buhle, Gabriela Cano, Anna Clark, Martin Duberman, Ellen Carol DuBois, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Rob Gregg, Harry D. Harootunian, Winston James, Nikki R. Keddie, Dave Kinkela, Staughton Lynd, Teresa Meade, Joanne Pope Melish, Ellen Noonan, Enrique C. Ochoa, Gary Y. Okihiro, Cynthia Paces, Max Page, Vijay Prashad, David Price, David Roediger, Andor Skotnes, Mike Wallace

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Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America
Yohko Tsuji
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Library of Congress HQ1064.U5T78 2020 | Dewey Decimal 305.260973

In Through Japanese Eyes, based on her thirty-year research at a senior center in upstate New York, anthropologist Yohko Tsuji describes old age in America from a cross-cultural perspective. Comparing aging in America and in her native Japan, she discovers that notable differences in the panhuman experience of aging are rooted in cultural differences between these two countries, and that Americans have strongly negative attitudes toward aging because it represents the antithesis of cherished American values, especially independence. Tsuji reveals that American culture, despite its seeming lack of guidance for those aging, plays a pivotal role in elders’ lives, simultaneously assisting and constraining them. Furthermore, the author’s lengthy period of research illustrates major changes in her interlocutors’ lives, incorporating their declines and death, and significant shifts in the culture of aging in American society as Tsuji herself gets to know American culture and grows into senescence herself.

Through Japanese Eyes offers an ethnography of aging in America from a cross-cultural perspective based on a lengthy period of research. It illustrates how older Americans cope with the gap between the ideal (e.g., independence) and the real (e.g., needing assistance) of growing older, and the changes the author observed over thirty years of research.

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Unraveling Time: Thirty Years of Ethnography in Cuenca, Ecuador
Ann Miles
University of Texas Press, 2022
Library of Congress GN564.E2M45 2022 | Dewey Decimal 305.80094647

Ann Miles has been chronicling life in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca for more than thirty years. In that time, she has witnessed change after change. A large regional capital where modern trains whisk residents past historic plazas, Cuenca has invited in the world and watched as its own citizens risk undocumented migration abroad. Families have arrived from rural towns only to then be displaced from the gentrifying city center. Over time, children have been educated, streetlights have made neighborhoods safer, and remittances from overseas have helped build new homes and sometimes torn people apart. Roads now connect people who once were far away, and talking or texting on cell phones has replaced hanging out at the corner store.

Unraveling Time traces the enduring consequences of political and social movements, transnational migration, and economic development in Cuenca. Miles reckons with details that often escape less committed observers, suggesting that we learn a good deal more when we look back on whole lives. Practicing what she calls an ethnography of accrual, Miles takes a long view, where decades of seemingly disparate experiences coalesce into cultural transformation. Her approach not only reveals what change has meant in a major Latin American city but also serves as a reflection on ethnography itself.

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The Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years
Timothy Fay
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Library of Congress F616.W37 2023 | Dewey Decimal 977.7

In 1988, Timothy Fay published the very first issue of the Wapsipinicon Almanac at his Route 3 Press in Anamosa, Iowa. Fay’s goal was to offer a journal somewhat outside of mainstream Iowa journalism. For thirty years, the annual Wapsipinicon Almanac entertained midwestern readers with timely essays, works of fiction, news notes, art, poetry, and so much more. This book celebrates selections from three decades of the WapsipiniconAlmanac, so that readers can enjoy this important regional publication for years to come.

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