This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues-predominantly purpose-exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid. Accessibility across areas of expertise and experience is stressed in this book. Critics range from junior faculty to emeritus, and represent a broad spectrum of views on criticism. In this sense the book offers a snapshot of the views of a wide swath of successfully practicing, contemporary rhetorical critics.

This edited volume fills a void in the literature concerning the purpose, practice, and pedagogy associated with performing rhetorical criticism. Literature regarding these issues-predominantly purpose-exists primarily as scattered journal articles and as sections within chapters of textbooks on rhetorical criticism. This book brings together 15 established rhetorical critics, each of whom offers well thought out and argued opinion pieces that stress the more personal nature of criticism. The purpose of this book is to serve as a disciplinary resource, and as a teaching and learning aid. Accessibility across areas of expertise and experience is stressed in this book. Critics range from junior faculty to emeritus, and represent a broad spectrum of views on criticism. In this sense the book offers a snapshot of the views of a wide swath of successfully practicing, contemporary rhetorical critics.

Winter Solstice: Selected Poetry 1975-2012, edited by James Hepworth, gathers together the very best of Michael Hogan's work from the Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, the Iowa Review and dozens of other journals and magazines, as well as several out-of-print books. It is a valuable addition to the American poetry library. Sam Hamill in his Introduction to this volume writes: "These poems written over the past thirty years most often contain a narrative thread that leads into an awakening insight, a meditative revelation that arrives not with a shock, but with a sigh or a moment of stillness capturing an essence that is pure poetry, that moment between image-making and philosophy, between the intimate whisper of truth and the song's need to be sung."

This book explores the culture of our thinking in relation to spirituality. It focuses largely on psychological science and the problems faced by scientists as they attempt to understand spirituality in action. The book attempts to untangle the concept of spirituality from various cultural attachments and it considers the way different worldviews and different philosophical perspectives can influence the models of spirituality we build. The book moves toward a contextualist view of spirituality, focusing in particular on the act in context, and it moves the reader to consider spirituality as the ultimate testing ground for pragmatic analysis. In this context, spirituality has to become more than a simple abstraction to survive, because to survive the test of pragmatic analysis it must facilitate successful action in context. The fact that spirituality has survived as a working concept for thousands of years suggests that it is resilient in this respect. However, to survive in the modern culture of science it needs to constantly reinvent itself as a working concept. Ultimately, spirituality, in this book, resurfaces from the depths of abstraction as part of an ongoing action state that has real functional significance. Spirituality comes to be identified as a worthy focus of analysis for children and adults alike as part of the science of education itself. Spirituality is not an abstraction to be feared and branded as anti-scientific. But to reverse engineer spiritual consciousness and spiritual action is no easy task either. Insight and out-sight must reach some form of compromise.

When Michael Regan falls off the rocks to his death on the Ocean Drive, it is first seen as an accident. Regan's son Gary, a washed-up tennis pro living in Mexico, returns home to Newport, RI, for the funeral. He connects with an old friend who suspects Gary's father was murdered and that evidence is being suppressed. The death of a Latino teenager at Fort Adams State Park also seems to be related. Soon the underside of Newport is exposed as Gary discovers other deaths unresolved going all the way back to the 1960s with Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress a prime suspect. Full of the richness of an island paradise with the colorful vistas of Cliff Walk, Rough Point, and the Breakers' Mansion, this detective novel also explores the dark side of a resort town with its undesirables and socially marginal, as well as the super-rich, and powerful landowner-politicians. Meanwhile, for tennis fans, it also contains a compelling and action-filled match with sizzling serves and volleys.

This colorful memoir of growing up in the Fifties and early Sixties in Newport, RI by award-winning poet and historian, Michael Hogan, provides a rich and multi-layered description of the city in the days before the building of the Newport Bridge. Then the island was still isolated from the mainland and only accessible from Jamestown by ferry. Downtown Thames Street had its seamy side with sailors and marines fighting in honky-tonk bars as Destroyer Fleet Atlantic brought troops back from Korea. Still, it was the summer home of the Vanderbilts, the Astors and Goelets, and the aspiring young author greeted both Eisenhower and Kennedy at the Summer White House and made a car trip to Amherst to meet Robert Frost. PUBLISHER'S REVIEW "Before the Jazz Festivals, the condominiums, the gentrification of Thames Street, the Bed and Breakfasts, and the Bridge that let the tourists and New York investors turn my hometown into a theme park, there was another Newport. Shrouded by fog, slowed by cobblestone streets, full of abandoned mysterious mansions, turreted and dark, it was a town that held history as mysteriously as the true wine in some misplaced Medieval grail. Like all really interesting towns, Newport had its seamy side as well. Although nowadays it is largely upscale, in 1955 there was still the Gas House Gang, the Irish toughs of the Fifth Ward, the sailors and the Marines in the rough bars along Thames (pronounced then in the English way, "Tems") Street, the "Colored" neighborhood, the rough and tumble docks, Long Wharf, the cinder lots and broken pavement near the railroad depot, the vacant lots and haunted houses, Tim the Ragpicker, and the Crazy Lady on Carroll Street. There was also the Newport of the Ocean Drive and the Cliff Walk where one could see the magnificent homes of the last of the robber barons of the 1890s: the Duponts, the Rockefellers, the Pierponts, the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. It was the vacation spot of presidents and the locus of the summer White House for Dwight D. Eisenhower and later for John F. Kennedy. The early mists rising from the trees, the sounds of flickers and wrens, occasionally a song bird, were part of every morning. The bleat of sheep from a hill off in the distance, the fog horns of destroyers out in Narragansett Bay, the thin scrape of a garden rake were my summer music. Had my parents wished me to become a poet, they could not have planned it better. Always on these summer mornings there was the sense of the world being born again."

1940s adventure in which two brothers become rivals when they fall for the same woman. Kamar (Leif Erikson), brother of Haroun al-Rashid (Jon Hall), the Caliph who rules over Baghdad, encounters circus dancer Scheherazade (Maria Montez) and soon falls for her. With a prophecy predicting that Scheherazade will become queen, Kamar attempts to overthrow Haroun and claim the throne for himself. His plot forces the ruler to go on the run and take shelter among the circus troupe. When Haroun meets the dancer for himself the two fall in love. Kamar later shows up to claim Scheherazade's hand in marriage and the situation is further complicated by Grand Vizier Nadan (Edgar Barrier) who has his own plans to usurp the Caliph. The brothers fight for both the throne and the woman they love in a final battle that will determine the victor.

This most recent collection of Michael Hogan's stories is an occasion for celebration. Lucid, real and unforgettable, the characters are sometimes ordinary people trapped in their own lives waiting for the rescue that surely someday will come. A college girl tricked into becoming a confidential police informant, a teacher caught up in a Mossad plot in Argentina, a Jewish family trapped in Nazi-era Poland, all become as vivid as our neighbors. Two of the stories are about dogs, heroic and sensitive, travelling a long journey in the direction of what once was home. It is a book of infinite betrayals and surprises, some delightful, some heart-breaking. Two-time winner of the Ojo del Lago Fiction Award in Mexico.

"Hogan's poems are virtually free of the ego and fake emotion, the public posturing and self-regard that infect so much recent poetry. For Hogan to undertake the poem is to undertake the possibility of radical transformation. The humility and compassion of his poems warm me when others leave me chilled to the bone. He rewards the reader with intelligence and warmth and a wide sweep of understanding." Sam Hamill, American Poetry Review. "This long-awaited gathering of Michael Hogan's poems contains his most memorable and disturbing work. Hogan built his reputation among small presses and chapbook publishers, creating finely crafted poems full of demonic power and dark beauty. He is a poet who learned the hard way about the saving power of poetry. His presence is troubling because he reminds us that poets who write to cut people with the truth can never go away. Hogan understands what it takes to make us listen and he has never given up." Ray Gonzalez, Bloomsbury Review