Author Serguei Blinov grew up in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the son of an engineer and a high school history teacher. Early on in life, he set his sights on becoming a medical doctor. He also met the love of his life, Lioudmila Vertiasheva. She graduated before him as a pediatric medical doctor before getting a job at a maternity hospital. Soon thereafter, Blinov also found himself working in medicine.In this, his memoir, Blinov recalls the hard work it took for him to succeed, the good times, and the bad--as well as what led him and his family to the United States of America. His honest assessment of life in both the Soviet Union and the United States showcases cultural differences and the positives and negatives of communism and capitalism.If you're interested in learning more about the former Soviet Union and what life there was really like, this personal narrative offers firsthand accounts of villages, agriculture, the educational system, and everyday life. What's more, Blinov relives his experiences from his first memory to the present, recounting in great detail each event that shaped him into the man he is today.

At a time in which many in the United States see Spanish America as a distinct and, for some, threatening culture clearly differentiated from that of Europe and the US, it may be of use to look at the works of some of the most representative and celebrated writers from the region to see how they imagined their relationship to Western culture and literature. In fact, while authors across stylistic and political divides-like Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez-see their work as being framed within the confines of a globalized Western literary tradition, their relationship, rather than epigonal, is often subversive. Borges and Kafka, Bolano and Bloom is a parsing not simply of these authors' reactions to a canon, but of the notion of canon writ large and the inequities and erasures therein. It concludes with a look at the testimonial and autobiographical writings of Rigoberta Menchu and Lurgio Gavilan, who arguably represent the trajectory of Indigenous testimonial and autobiographical writing during the last forty years, noting how their texts represent alternative ways of relating to national and, on occasion, Western cultures. This study is a new attempt to map writers' diverse ways of thinking about locality and universality from within and without what is known as the canon.

In "Ethnicity, Inc." anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity?

Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland's efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San "Bushmen" with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs' incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe.

"Ethnicity, Inc." is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation--while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.

An anthology of essays on the new syncretic, or 'fusion', styles of music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific region, who have adopted forms of popular music as an expression of their cultural identity. Its strength lies in the layering up of a sense of community of inquiry, and the fostering of an intertextual head of steam, grounded in a set of empirical, rather than theoretical, concerns. It considers the interrelation between music, popular culture, politics and (national) identity, but also looks at the business aspect of producing and distributing music in the Pacific region.

Jason Edward Black examines the ways the US government's rhetoric and American Indian responses contributed to the policies of Native-US relations throughout the nineteenth century's removal and allotment eras. Black shows how these discourses together constructed the perception of the US government and of American Indian communities. Such interactions--though certainly not equal--illustrated the hybrid nature of Native-US rhetoric in the nineteenth century. Both governmental, colonizing discourse and indigenous, decolonizing discourse shaped arguments, constructions of identity, and rhetoric in the colonial relationship. American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment demonstrates how American Indians decolonized dominant rhetoric through impeding removal and allotment policies. By turning around the US government's narrative and inventing their own tactics, American Indian communities helped restyle their own identities as well as the government's. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indians lobbied for the successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934, changing the relationship once again. In the end, Native communities were granted increased rhetorical power through decolonization, though the US government retained an undeniable colonial influence through its territorial management of Natives. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal--as the conclusion of this book indicates--are emblematic of the prevalence of the duality of US citizenship that fused American Indians to the nation, yet segregated them on reservations. This duality of inclusion and exclusion grew incrementally and persists now, as a lasting effect of nineteenth-century Native-US rhetorical relations.

In the summer of 2006, the author received a message that read, Love the Nazis, and KILL THE JEWS DEAD. And that was the trigger that launched internationally known scholar Falk into work on this book. Anti-Semitism has once again become a worldwide phenomenon, growing largely during the last decade of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. Among the spurs for this are the migration of Muslim populations and the ongoing Israeli-Arab wars. In this far-reaching and comprehensive volume, Falk delves deeply into the current events, history, and literature on anti-Semitism, integrating insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and political science. The result is an absorbing exploration of one of the oldest scourges of humanity, spotlighting the irrational and unconscious causes of anti-Semitism. In the summer of 2006, the author received a message that read, Love the Nazis, and KILL THE JEWS DEAD. And that was the trigger that launched internationally known scholar Avner Falk into work on this book. Anti-Semitism has once again become a worldwide phenomenon, growing largely during the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. Among the spurs for this are migration of Muslim populations and the ongoing Israeli-Arab wars. In this far-reaching and comprehensive volume, Falk delves deeply into the current events, history and literature on anti-Semitism, integrating insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and political science. The result is an absorbing exploration of one of the oldest scourges of humanity, spotlighting the irrational and unconscious causes of anti-Semitism. This book also features chapters on the psychodynamics of racism, fascism, Nazism, and the dark, tragic, and unconscious processes, both individual and collective, that led to the Shoah. Holocaust denial and its psychological motives, as well as insights into the physical and psychological survival strategies of Holocaust survivors, are explored in depth. There are also chapters on scientific anti-Semitism including eugenics.

Samuel Wesley Gathing: A Closer Look is the moving true story of Sam and Beatrice Gathing and the struggles they faced rearing their fourteen children during the era of the Jim Crow laws. These laws meant that both society and the system enforced the damaging view that their children were just stupid black kids. In this climate of institutionalized discrimination, Sam had to maneuver his way through a massive minefield of irrational hatred intended to destroy him and his family.

Sam and Beatrice began their life together in December 1929, in Desoto County, Mississippi, taking the gift of a mule named Rock and a big red cow to start their farm. Over the years, as their family expanded, so did the land that they farmed. Sam learned to live by the rules of the day but was always a true leader to both his family and to his friends. Through all the challenges that Sam encountered, his faith in God never wavered-he believed that the truth could be found in God's words and actions, not in the laws that were meant to harm him and his people.