Briefly Noted

“In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since WWII… All Else Failed is Dana Sachs’s compelling eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, it tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.”

“Here are poems of music, violence, faith, doubt, and the creaturely world, composed in the unignorable shadow of Holy Scripture. Here, too, are childhood and child-rearing, small sagas of fortune and failure across the generations. Like the dissonant chords for which the book is named, Hillard’s poems seek resolution but find it only sparingly.”

“This Afterlife: Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint… Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself.”

“[Porter’s memoir] explains for future generations how his own Boomer generation evolved through struggles against racism, the Vietnam War, and myriad forms of oppression, both at home and internationally. I believe the book will be an important resource for future scholars interested in the social and political events of the mid to late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”

“When her outspoken best friend Coralee recruits Ellie and her other best friend, über-organized Bert, to help her compete in the Oklahoma Little Miss Boots and Bows pageant, Ellie welcomes the distraction. When Coralee begs Ellie to enter as well, Ellie acquiesces despite her distaste for pageants…and to spite her father, who thinks she can’t handle it.”

“[Schedneck] presents to readers the most important practices and beliefs of Theravada Buddhists, illustrated through contemporary debates about what represents proper Theravada practice within Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand in the twenty-first century.”