Michael Shapiro

An award-winning travel writer journeys to visit all the great writers who have motivated him, finding out where they live and how it influences their writing, and how the writers themselves describe their lives, their craft, and their world. Original.

Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration

A Sense of Place

Aspects of Russian Morphology; a Semiotic Investigation

Japan in the Land of the Broken-Hearted

The Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and Their Plays

Children of the Revels

Creative people have a certain spark: a brightness in their eyes, an inquisitive way of looking at the world, a desire to make things. But that spark doesn’t reside solely in people you may view as creators. It’s in all of us. The Creative Spark is a collection of interviews with some of the most creative people of our time: musicians, authors, visual artists and chefs. These makers speak about what drives them, what helps them to see the world in fresh ways, and what inspires them turn their visions into art. During the past decade, Michael Shapiro has interviewed some of our brightest creative luminaries. Among the authors are Amy Tan, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, Pico Iyer, and Frances Mayes. His work as a music journalist has led to interviews with legends including Smokey Robinson, Lucinda Williams, Graham Nash, Lyle Lovett, Melissa Etheridge, Merle Haggard, and Jethro Tull bandleader Ian Anderson. And he’s spoken with creative masters in other field, such as director Francis Ford Coppola and comedian Joan Rivers. Yet it’s not simply that Shapiro has had access to so many supremely talented and creative people — it’s that he gets them to go deep. Moments into his conversation with Lucinda (her fans call her by her first name), she tells Shapiro about how decisions made about her mother’s funeral led to fissures in her family. From this achingly personal conversation, readers can glean fresh insights into why Lucinda has such a devoted following and why her songs open listeners’ hearts. There are people who you might not expect to find in this collection, such as explorer Jane Goodall, whose entire life has been a creative endeavor. Then there’s San Francisco Giants announcer Mike Krukow, who turns every broadcast into a work of art. And there are a couple of chefs, such as SingleThread’s Kyle Connaughton, who are transforming the way we approach fine dining. Unexpected revelations pop up in every chapter of The Creative Spark. Iowa folksinger Greg Brown isn’t a household name, but his fellow musicians revere his poetic compositions. Each chapter starts with a short biography of the creative person being profiled then segues into Q+A. This collection brings together some of the best-known artists of our time with others who may not be as famed but who have something important to say about living an artful life. The Creative Spark stands as a testament to human achievement, showing how creativity illuminates our world and how it resides in each and every one of us, just waiting to break out.

How musicians, writers, explorers, and other artists found their inner fire and followed their dreams

The Creative Spark

The creative spark resides in all of us, but some activate that spark more than others. In 32 interviews, musicians, authors, explorers and chefs speak about what drives them, how they see in fresh ways, and what inspires them to turn their visions into art.

How Musicians, Writers, Explorers, and Other Artists Found Their Inner Fire and Followed Their Dreams

John Hill

Jason Langer

Julia Dolan

"Three years ago, the artist James Drake (born 1946) began the ambitious project of creating 1,242 drawings that would trace and reference all of the developments of his multifaceted career. Known as both a sculptor and video artist, Drake has always considered draftsmanship to be a key to his process, and this body of drawings does not disappoint. It is both a fascinating tour of Drake's creative thinking and a testament to the simple power of graphite and ink on paper in the hands of a master of the craft. The volume is published to accompany a touring exhibition (titled The Anatomy of Drawing and Space) opening at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in July 2014--the largest show of Drake's work to date"--Publisher's website.

Twenty Years

Russian Phonetic Variants and Phonostylistics

Daniele C. Struppa

Daniel Alpay

Maria Elena Luna-Elizarrarás

This book provides the foundations for a rigorous theory of functional analysis with bicomplex scalars. It begins with a detailed study of bicomplex and hyperbolic numbers and then defines the notion of bicomplex modules. After introducing a number of norms and inner products on such modules (some of which appear in this volume for the first time), the authors develop the theory of linear functionals and linear operators on bicomplex modules. All of this may serve for many different developments, just like the usual functional analysis with complex scalars and in this book it serves as the foundational material for the construction and study of a bicomplex version of the well known Schur analysis.

Basics of Functional Analysis with Bicomplex Scalars, and Bicomplex Schur Analysis

More Memories of the Jewish East End

This book serves as a basis for the exploration of language in a more systematic way. By surveying the several major divisions of language (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, tropology) and explicating the way in which sound and meaning cohere in them, this text lays bare––for students, scholars and advanced readers alike––the lineaments of an understanding of what makes language the sign system par excellence, in the service of its most important function as the instrument of cognition and of communication. This book is intended as a companion volume to Shapiro’s The Speaking Self: Language Lore and English Usage. The two volumes taken in tandem will provide a solid grounding in the observational science of linguistics, linking theory with practice in a way that will expand one’s understanding of language as a global phenomenon.

A Semiotic Study of Speech

The Logic of Language

A prize-winning investigative journalist illuminates the often problematic relationship between the child's best interest and the best intentions of child welfare agencies, policymakers, and the courts

Two Families and the Children the State Took Away

Solomon's Sword

John Cossey

Charles F. Miller

Walter D. Neumann

The series is aimed specifically at publishing peer reviewed reviews and contributions presented at workshops and conferences. Each volume is associated with a particular conference, symposium or workshop. These events cover various topics within pure and applied mathematics and provide up-to-date coverage of new developments, methods and applications.

Proceedings of a Special Year in Geometric Group Theory, Canberra, Australia, 1996

Geometric Group Theory Down Under

Kraig Lieb

Invites you to jump on one of the country's brightly painted chicken buses and visit its bustling marketplaces, Mayan monuments, colonial town squares, and whitewashed churches, where baroque Catholic rituals meld with ancient Mayan beliefs to create a unique style of worship. This book invites you to jump on one of the country's brightly painted chicken buses and visit its bustling marketplaces, Mayan monuments, colonial town squares, and whitewashed churches, where baroque Catholic rituals meld with ancient Mayan beliefs to create a unique style of worship. From

A Journey Through the Land of the Maya

Guatemala

Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguise--man-playing-woman-playing-man--in all its theatrical and social complexity. Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England. The popularity of the "female page" is examined as a playful literary and theatrical way of confronting, avoiding, or merely exploiting issues such as the place of women in a patriarchal culture and the representation of women on stage. Looking beyond and behind the stage for the cultural anxieties that found their way into Shakespearean drama, Shapiro considers such cases as cross-dressing women in London being punished as prostitutes and the alleged homoerotic practices of the apprentices who played female roles in adult companies. Shapiro also traces other Elizabethan dramatists' varied uses of the cross-dressing motif, especially as they were influenced by Shakespeare's innovations. "Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them." --Choice Michael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.

Boy Heroines and Female Pages

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

Tracing South Korea's meteoric rise to powerful status in Asia, this study describes the historic political and economic changes occurring in the the small, divided Asian nation

A Korean Year of Love and Sorrow

The Shadow in the Sun

This book’s chapters analyze aspects of urban politics with a combination of critical thinking (influenced by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Ranciere, Henri Lefebvre, and Achille Mbembe, among others) and readings of artistic genres (film, literature, and architecture). The coverage of cities includes, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Nairobi, Boston, Berlin and Hong Kong.

Genre and the City

By affirming the relativity of the American historical imagination, political theorist Michael J. Shapiro offers a powerful polemic against ethnocentric interpretations of American culture and politics. Deforming American Political Thought analyzes issues that range from the nature of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an egalitarian nation to the persistence of racial inequality. Shapiro offers a multifaceted argument that transcends the myopic scope of traditional political discourse. Deforming American Political Thought illustrates the various ways in which history, architecture, film, music, literature, and art provide approaches to the comprehension of diverse facets of American political thought from the founding to the present. Using these seemingly disparate disciplines as a framework, Shapiro paints a picture of American political philosophy that is as distinctive as it enlightening. Shapiro explores the historically vital role of dissenting points of view in American politics and asserts its continuing importance in today’s political landscape. Exploring such diverse works as slave narratives, contemporary films, genre fiction, and blues and jazz music, Shapiro reveals that there have always been dissenting voices casting doubt on the moral purpose and exceptionalism of the American mind. An unprecedented inquiry into American politics, Deforming American Political Thought will surely serve to reinvigorate discussions about the essence of American political thought.

Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre

Deforming American Political Thought

Daniel Shapiro

This survey of the most influential Jewish lives includes short biographies of Karl Marx, Jesus, Einstein, Freud, Moses, Chaim Weizmann, Haym Salomon, and many other Jews of note. Reprint.

A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time

The Jewish 100

A fusion of memoir, family chronicle, and author's commentary that provides a fascinating view into the lives and minds of two passionate scholars, and the rarefied and often treacherous universe in which they lived. Told with conviction and wry humor, Palimpsest of Consciousness traces the author's life from his beginnings as a stateless Russian child in pre-World War II Japan through his eventual journey to the United States, his meeting and marriage to the Dante scholar, Marianne Shapiro, and their life together. Along the way, we glimpse an extraordinary world, a place where classical music, baseball, ballet, a brother behind the Iron Curtain, a decades-long vendetta by corrupt academics, a family scattered across the continents, a birthday party for General MacArthur's son, and Hollywood High School co-exist in an unconventional balance. Towering above everything is the story of the couple's steadfast love for each other and for their magical daughter. But most delectably of all, the author reveals the real-life villains behind the academic scandal that fueled his earlier groundbreaking work, My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge. Illustrated by photos from the author's personal collection, Palimpsest of Consciousness recreates the times and multicultural milieux of an exceptional family moving through a singular era of world history.

Michael Shapiro

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