West of Center

West of Center
Author: Elissa Auther
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0816677255

Recovering the art and lifestyle of the counterculture in the American West in the 1960s and '70s

The Betty Ford Center Book of Answers

The Betty Ford Center Book of Answers
Author: James W. West
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1997-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0671001825

Answers questions about alcoholism and heredity, co-dependence, recovery from cocaine addiction, tranquilizer abuse, and factors affecting recovery.

Lynching in the West, 1850-1935

Lynching in the West, 1850-1935
Author: Ken Gonzales-Day
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822337942

This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.

Ray Stanford Strong, West Coast Landscape Artist

Ray Stanford Strong, West Coast Landscape Artist
Author: Mark Humpal
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-12-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0806159952

Throughout his long and prolific career, Ray Stanford Strong (1905–2006) strove to capture the essence of the western American landscape. An accomplished painter who achieved national fame during the New Deal era, Strong is best known for his depiction of landscapes in California and Oregon, rendered in his signature plein air style. This beautiful volume, featuring more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations, is the first comprehensive exploration of Strong’s life and artistry. Through family papers, archives, photographs, and a two-year series of interviews conducted with the artist personally, Mark Humpal traces Strong’s journey from his childhood on an Oregon berry farm to his artistically formative years in New York and San Francisco. After moving back to the West Coast, Strong produced important works for the WPA, executed major diorama projects for two world expositions, helped organize the Santa Barbara Art Institute, and served as teacher and mentor for a new generation of plein air artists. But, as Humpal emphasizes, Strong distinguished himself by resisting the drumbeat of the avant-garde. During an era when many artists were experimenting with abstract expressionism, Strong never relinquished his personal vision and adherence to a more traditional style. With his outgoing personality, he forged friendships and associations with such prominent artists as Frank Vincent DuMond, Maynard Dixon, Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Steinbeck. Ultimately, Strong had little concern for his place in the sweep of art history. The proficiency he achieved through years of formal and informal study allowed him to craft a personal style difficult to categorize but unique and engaging. By expanding our understanding and appreciation of Strong’s artistic contributions, this book offers a fitting tribute to one of America’s finest landscape artists.

Visions of the Big Sky

Visions of the Big Sky
Author: Dan Louie Flores
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Northwest, Canadian
ISBN: 9780806138978

Ancient ecstasies -- Visualizing Lewis and Clark and the meaning of the West -- The eye and the heart in George Catlin's West -- Karl Bodmer's gift -- Alfred Jacob Miller's new Western American -- Jesus and animus beneath the Bitterroots -- An entire Heaven and an entire Earth : audubon on the Missouri -- Albert Bierstadt and the mountains of Mars -- Thomas Moran's Rocky Mountain romance -- Coming to terms with the Little Bighorn -- Altitude equals beatitude : William Henry Jackson and the Northern Rockies -- L.A. Huffman and the frontier disconnect -- Catching shadows in the northern West -- Through Indian eyes : the Crows and Richard Throssel -- Evelyn Cameron's time machine -- Carl Rungius and the son of wild folk -- Loving the West, hating the West, painting the West : the troubled times of Fra Dana -- Frederic Remington's Kiss of death -- Maynard and Montana -- Winold Reiss's beautiful Blackfeet -- Motion and poetry -- The bear in the mirror -- Emily Carr and the Great Mother -- The ripples beyond Ansel Adams -- In the end, what was Charlie Russell trying to tell us?

Encountering Kali

Encountering Kali
Author: Rachel Fell McDermott
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2005
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9788120820418

Encountering Kali explores one of the most ramarkable divinities the world has seen. The Hindu goddess Kali is simultaneously understood as a blood thirsty warrior a deity of ritual possession a tantric sexual partner and an all loving compassionate mothe. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the west in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon McDermott and Kripal`s volume focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kali in both her indigenous south Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnation. Through the shifting lenses of scriptural history temple architecture political reflection and the goddess`s recent guises on the Internet the contributors pose questions that illuminate our understanding of Kali while addressing the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross cultural interpretation.

West of the West

West of the West
Author: Mark Arax
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2010-10-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1458759865

Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, ''When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West,'' and in this book, Mark Arax sets out to explain just what TR meant. His is a compelling, sometimes ominous portrait of a place and its people who are often surviving on the edge, reliving history, and losing their way in the promised land: ''The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman'' is a deeply-felt portrait of an immigrant family from Oaxaca, followed through harrowing border crossings and raisin harvests; ''the Last Okie of Lamont,'' (the inspiration for the town featured in The Grapes of Wrath) has only one Okie left, who tells Arax his life story as he drives to a funeral to bury one more Dust Bowl migrant; and ''Highlands of Humboldt'' is a visit to the marijuana growing capital of the U.S., where the local bank collects a sizeable daily deposit of cash, most of which reeks of marijuana. Combining hard-hitting reporting and stellar writing, Arax captures both the atmosphere of social upheaval and the sense of being rooted in a community. Once you meet the people portrayed in this book, you won't forget them.

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country
Author: Sergei Kan
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806189290

This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country, which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff’s striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff’s photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff’s work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff’s photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people’s then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making “Indian curios” to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.

West of Slavery

West of Slavery
Author: Kevin Waite
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469663201

When American slaveholders looked west in the mid-nineteenth century, they saw an empire unfolding before them. They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states. Across this vast swath of the map, white southerners defended the institution of African American chattel slavery as well as systems of Native American bondage. This surprising history uncovers the Old South in unexpected places, far beyond the region's cotton fields and sugar plantations. Slaveholders' western ambitions culminated in a coast-to-coast crisis of the Union. By 1861, the rebellion in the South inspired a series of separatist movements in the Far West. Even after the collapse of the Confederacy, the threads connecting South and West held, undermining the radical promise of Reconstruction. Kevin Waite brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.

In West Mills

In West Mills
Author: De'Shawn Charles Winslow
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635573416

"A bighearted novel about family, migration, and the unbearable difficulties of love. Here's a cast of characters you won't soon forget." -Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie "Winslow's impressive debut novel introduces readers to both a flawed, fascinating character in fiction and a wonderful new voice in literature." -Real Simple, Best Books of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Named a Most Anticipated Novel by TIME MAGAZINE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * NYLON * SOUTHERN LIVING * THE LOS ANGELES TIMES * ESSENCE * THE MILLIONS * REAL SIMPLE* HUFFINGTON POST * BUZZFEED Let the people of West Mills say what they will about Azalea “Knot” Centre; they won't keep her from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, when motherhood looms, Knot begins to learn that her freedom has come at a high price. Low on money, ostracized from her parents and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home. Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt to help his older sister, who lives a precarious life in the North, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he's busy trying to fix Knot's life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light. Spanning decades in a rural North Carolina town where a canal acts as the color line, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.