Conversations with Arthur Miller


Book Description

Interviews with Miller and his essays provide an insight into his dramatic works and the man behind the works.




Conversation


Book Description

Essayist Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking an historical and philosophical view of the subject. He chronicles the art of conversation in Western civilization from its beginnings in ancient Greece to its apex in eighteenth-century Britain to its current endangered state in America. As Harry G. Frankfurt brought wide attention to the art of bullshit in his recent bestselling On Bullshit, so Miller now brings the art of conversation into the light, revealing why good conversation matters and why it is in decline. Miller explores the conversation about conversation among such great writers as Cicero, Montaigne, Swift, Defoe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Virginia Woolf. He focuses on the world of British coffeehouses and clubs in “The Age of Conversation” and examines how this era ended. Turning his attention to the United States, the author traces a prolonged decline in the theory and practice of conversation from Benjamin Franklin through Hemingway to Dick Cheney. He cites our technology (iPods, cell phones, and video games) and our insistence on unguarded forthrightness as well as our fear of being judgmental as powerful forces that are likely to diminish the art of conversation.




Conversations with Henry Miller


Book Description

Here is the inimitable Henry Miller speaking candidly about himself and his robust fiction - Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. In this enticing collection he argues convincingly for the things that have mattered in his full and exhilarating life. He and his interviewers cover the range of his engrossing works that stirred obscenity charges, as well as his life as an expatriate, his loves and conquests, his goals, his beliefs, and his probing insights into the culture that produced him and repulsed him. These conversations serve as a retrospective visit with one of America's most distinctively opinionated, most singularly identifiable, and most invigorating authors - arguably the grand guru of sex in American literature.




Halfway Home


Book Description

A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson). Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast. As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society. Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens. PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences 2022 PROSE Awards Finalist 2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air




Bad Gays


Book Description

An unconventional history of homosexuality We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive. Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events. Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.




Conversations with Miller


Book Description

(Applause Books). Conversations with Miller offers a personal and revealing account of one of the major playwrights of our time. Arthur Miller is revealed in deep and candid conversation with the highly regarded dramatic critic, Mel Gussow. In this series of interviews, which took place over 40 years, Miller is astonishingly forthcoming about his creative sources, his accomplishments and his disappointment; about his staunch resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950's; about his private life including his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The result is an intimate portrait of a cultural giant who is both refreshingly down to earth and a fiercely original writer and thinker.




Legacy in the Making: Building a Long-Term Brand to Stand Out in a Short-Term World


Book Description

Named one of Forbes' Top Ten Business Books American Marketing Association Berry Book Award Winner International Book Award Winner American Business Awards Silver Medalist Business Book Awards Finalist for International Book of the Year A book for a different breed of business leader, one who looks beyond the moment to create a life of significance. Most of us are familiar with the traditional way of looking at legacy—something preserved in the past. Traditional legacy is all around us, evidenced by the steady churn of autobiographies, bequests, commemorations, and dedications we are forever leaving in our collective cultural wake. This is not the legacy you will find in this book. Legacy in the Making celebrates an active, dynamic form of “modern legacy,” seen through the eyes of a select group of extraordinary men and women who are pursuing their enduring ambitions in the age of now. More than caretakers of the past, these modern legacy builders are also the authors of a vital today and tomorrow. Rather than leaving their legacies behind them, they are looking ahead to harness their long-term ambitions and inspire others to help carry them forward. These are not static, traditional legacies. These are legacies in the making.




Miller's Valley


Book Description

~The New York Times bestselling novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer~ ‘Miller's Valley reads like a companion to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge’ Elisabeth Egan, author of A Window Opens Mimi Miller’s family have lived in Miller’s Valley for generations and at times it feels like nothing ever changes – until now when the town is under threat. But as Mimi looks back on the span of her life in this place, she confronts the toxicity of secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the risks and inequalities of friendship, loyalty and passion. Home, she acknowledges, is somewhere it’s just as easy to feel lost as contented. A captivating, beautifully crafted story of family and memory that recalls the work of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, Miller's Valley reminds us that the place where you grew up can disappear, and the people in it too, but all will live on in your heart for ever. 'Qualities and shades of love are this writer's strong suit, and she has the unusual talent for writing about them with so much truth and heart that one is carried away on a tidal wave of involvement and concern' Elizabeth Jane Howard 'Mesmerizing. Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it’s impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbor . . . Overwhelmingly moving’ New York Times




Why Fish Don't Exist


Book Description

Nineteenth-century scientist David Starr Jordan built one of the most important fish specimen collections ever seen, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered his life's work.




The End of Greatness


Book Description

The Presidency has always been an implausible—some might even say an impossible—job. Part of the problem is that the challenges of the presidency and the expectations Americans have for their presidents have skyrocketed, while the president's capacity and power to deliver on what ails the nations has diminished. Indeed, as citizens we continue to aspire and hope for greatness in our only nationally elected office. The problem of course is that the demand for great presidents has always exceeded the supply. As a result, Americans are adrift in a kind of Presidential Bermuda Triangle suspended between the great presidents we want and the ones we can no longer have. The End of Greatness explores the concept of greatness in the presidency and the ways in which it has become both essential and detrimental to America and the nation's politics. Miller argues that greatness in presidents is a much overrated virtue. Indeed, greatness is too rare to be relevant in our current politics, and driven as it is by nation-encumbering crisis, too dangerous to be desirable. Our preoccupation with greatness in the presidency consistently inflates our expectations, skews the debate over presidential performance, and drives presidents to misjudge their own times and capacity. And our focus on the individual misses the constraints of both the office and the times, distorting how Presidents actually lead. In wanting and expecting our leaders to be great, we have simply made it impossible for them to be good. The End of Greatness takes a journey through presidential history, helping us understand how greatness in the presidency was achieved, why it's gone, and how we can better come to appreciate the presidents we have, rather than being consumed with the ones we want.