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When E.J. Levy arrived in northern Brazil on a fellowship from Yale
at the age of 21, she was hoping to help save the Amazon rain
forest; she didn't realize she would soon have to save herself.
Amazons: A Love Story recounts an idealistic young woman's coming
of age against the backdrop of the magnificent rain forest and
exotic city of Salvador. This elegant and sharp-eyed memoir
explores the interaction of the many forces fueling deforestation -
examining the ecological, economic, social, and spiritual costs of
ill-conceived development - with the myriad ones that shape young
women's maturation. Sent to Salvador (often called the 'soul of
Brazil' for its rich Afro-Brazilian culture), a city far from the
rain forest, Levy befriends two young Brazilians, Nel, a brilliant
economics student who is estranged from her family for mysterious
reasons, and Isa, a gorgeous gold digger. When the university
closes due to a strike, none of them can guess what will come of
their ambitions. Levy's course of study changes: she takes up
capoeira, enters cooking school (making foods praised in Brazilian
literature as almost magical elixirs), gains fluency in Portuguese
and the ways of street life, and learns other, more painful lessons
- she is raped, and her best friend becomes a prostitute. When Levy
finally reaches the Amazon, her courage - and her safety - are
further tested: on a barefoot hike through the jungle one night to
collect tadpoles, she encounters fist-sized spiders, swimming
snakes, and crocodiles. When allergies to the antimalarial drugs
meant to protect her prove life-threatening, she discovers that
sometimes the greatest threat we face is ourselves. Eventually, her
work as a 'cartographer of loss,' charting deforestation, leads her
to realize that our relationships to nature and to our bodies are
linked, that we must transcend the logic of commodification if we
are to save both wilderness and ourselves. The Amazon is a
perennially fascinating subject, alluring and frightening, a site
of cultural projection and commercial ambition, of fantasies and
violence. Amazons offers an intimate look at urgent global issues
that affect us all, including the too-often abstract question of
rain forest loss. Levy illuminates the burgeoning sex-tourism trade
in Brazil, renewed environmental threats, global warming, and the
consequences of putting a price on nature. Accounts of the region
have most often been by and about men, but Amazons offers a fresh
approach, interweaving a personal feminist narrative with an urgent
ecological one. In the tradition of Terry Tempest Williams, this
timely, compelling, and eloquent memoir will appeal to those
interested in literary nonfiction, travel writing, and women's and
environmental issues.
This collection of essays grew out of a symposium commemorating the
250th anniversary of the founding of Georgia. The contributors are
authorities in their respective fields and their efforts represent
not only the fruits of long careers but also the observations and
insights of some of the most promising young scholars. "Forty Years
of Diversity" sheds new light on the social, political, religious,
and ethnic diversity of colonial Georgia.
Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, is the
shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among
the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery
O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes,
which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the
Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging,
often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this
anthology on childhood-and for planned anthologies on such topics
as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can
whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or
bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and
rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories
reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of
it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.
In this funny, brainy, thoroughly engaging debut collection, an
award-winning writer looks at romance through the lens of scholarly
theories to illuminate love in the information age. In ten
captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through
the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart
and modern take on the age-old theme of love-whether between a man
and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a
child-drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and
heartbreak. A disheartened English professor's life changes when
she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay
oncologist attending his sister's second wedding ponders dark
matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric
patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love
affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of
an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian
student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way-by
falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from
physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein
Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly
explore the heart and mind-shooting cupid's arrow toward a target
that may never be reached.
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