A Twentieth Century Job


Book Description

This is the autobiography of G. Cabrera Infante, recognized as one of the most original Latin American writers. He has written novels, stories, critical essays, articles and screenplays and has lectured at universities from Cambridge to Chicago, and grew up in Cuba under the dictator Batista, knew Guevara and Fidel Castro personally and now lives in England as an exile. He is the author of Three Trapped Tigers, Infante's Inferno, Holy Smoke and View of Dawn in the Tropics.




The First Book


Book Description

An illuminating look at the poetic debut in twentieth-century American literary culture "We have many poets of the First Book," the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, The First Book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of poets ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, Jesse Zuba illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. Zuba investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, The First Book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.




The Right Tools for the Job


Book Description

This volume examines scientific practice through studies of research tools in an array of twentieth-century life sciences. The contributors draw upon and extend the multidisciplinary perspectives in current science studies to understand the processes through which scientific researchers constructed the right--and, in some cases, the wrong--tools for the job. The articles portray the crafting or accessing of specific materials, techniques, instruments, models, funds, and work arrangements involved in doing scientific work. They demonstrate the historical and local contingencies of scientific problem construction and solving by highlighting the articulation between the tools and jobs. Indeed, the very "rightness" of the tools is contingently constructed, maintained, lost, and refashioned. The cases examined include evolutionary biology laboratory systems (James R. Griesemer), the plasmid prep procedure in molecular biology (Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch), models in the human ecology of African pastoralists (Peter Taylor), the micromanometer in metabolic studies (Frederic L. Holmes), genetics research and the role played by Planaria (Gregg Mitman and Anne Fausto-Sterling) and by corn (Barbara A. Kimmelman), quantitative data in field biology (Yrj Haila), taxidermy in natural history (Susan Leigh Star), technical standardization in bacteriology (Patricia Peck Gossell), and the discipline of immunology as the tool for stabilizing conceptual definitions in the field (Peter Keating, Alberto Cambrosio, and Michael Mackenzie). Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Brilliant Careers


Book Description

A collection of one hundred anthologies, one for each year in the 20th century.




Are Bad Jobs Inevitable?


Book Description

An edited book in the Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment Series that is associated with the annual International Labour Process Conference, it focuses on job quality: debates, developments, issues and trends; workplace practice and interventions. Written by world-leading academics, it contains cutting-edge research.







Out of Work


Book Description

Argues the cause of unemployment may be the government itself Redefining the way we think about unemployment in America today, Out of Work offers devastating evidence that the major cause of high unemployment in the United States is the government itself.




Workplace Flexibility


Book Description

Although today's family has changed, the workplace has not—and the resulting one-size-fits-all workplace has become profoundly mismatched to the needs of an increasingly diverse and varied workforce. As changes in the composition of the workforce exert new demands on employers, considerable attention is being paid to how workplaces can be structured more flexibly to achieve the goals of employers and employees. Workplace Flexibility brings together sixteen essays authored by leading experts in economics, demography, political science, law, sociology, anthropology, and management. Collectively, they make the case for workplace flexibility, as well as examine existing business practices and public policy regarding flexibility in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Workplace Flexibility underscores the need to realign the structure of work in time and place with the needs of the changing workforce. Considering the positive and negative consequences for employer and employee alike, the authors argue that, although there is not an easy solution to creating and implementing flexibility practices—in the United States or abroad—redesigning the workplace is essential if today's workers are effectively to meet the demands of life and work and if employers are successfully able to attract and retain top talent and improve performance.




Dying for Work


Book Description

This pathbreaking volume explores the history of occupational safety and health in America from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. Thirteen essays tell a story of the exploitation of workers as measured by shortened lives, high disease rates, and painful injuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplines examine the history of protection and compensation for injured workers, state and federal involvement, controversies over the dangers of lead, and the three emblematic industrial diseases of this century -- radium poisoning, asbestos-related diseases, and brown lung.




Work and Pay in Twentieth-century Britain


Book Description

The 20th century was a period of unrivalled change in the British labour market. Covering topics from lifetime work patterns and education to unemployment and the welfare state, this volume charts the transformation of work and pay across the 20th century. It provides the labour focused history of Britain.