Book Description
hen it comes to understanding the great cultural ocean that divides Brits and Yanks, it's not just our vocabulary but also our attitudes that differ. This irreverent guide surveys a whole gamut of British-American divergences, from sex to food, from pets to religion, from sports to money, and from war to-most divergent of all-humor. Entertaining and invaluable, Brit-Think, Ameri-Think has been updated to reflect changes in political, cultural, and social trends, and includes new chapters on cultural icons Oprah Winfrey and Bridget Jones, and on Brit-cool vs. Ameri-cool.
Customer Reviews:
Truly Brilliant!!!.......2007-08-17
I am both and English and American citizen, and I finally understand how I have become so screwed up : )
This explains it all, and is laugh out loud funny.
A gem!!!
DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.......2007-08-15
At the risk of going on a tirade, it deplicted all Americans to be gum-chewing, pink-cowboy-hat-wearing, loud, uneducated, boorish idiots. Conversely, it depicted the English/ British as pompous, bowler-hat-wearing, demure, easily-offended, hyper-mannered, stifled bores. I am American and my husband is English; we are nothing if not the polar opposite of these depictions. I was constantly offended my the author's wide-cast net of stereotypes. I agree there are many in ANY country of these type-casts, but to write a book attempting to acclimatize people to a new country/ lifestyle/ attitude... honey, do some more research that isn't heavily embedded in watching old reruns of "Keeping Up Appearances" and/ or "Dukes of Hazard".
Two branches of the same tree. .......2006-12-28
This book Pokes fun but tells the truth about our two cultures. It is a very entertaining eye-opener as it compares the American and the British point of view concerning all the basics of living. A quick read with quite a few chuckles.
Don't take it too seriously.......2006-10-25
I know some reviewers found this book offensive, but my mother is British and I can honestly say I was not offended. In fact, I found myself smiling and laughing more than once while reading it. Different chapters made me think back on some of my adventures with the "relatives" I was surrounded by when I was a child (while summering with Mum in the UK) and trying to figure everyone out!
I don't think the author meant to imply that Americans were in any way superior (goodness knows we have our faults!), and I do concur that some of the descriptions of Brits were a tad outdated. Just remember if you do buy this book to take it with a grain of salt.
Opinionated, but insightful.......2006-07-06
Ms Walmsley clearly grinds her axe on both sides, but there's a lot of food for thought here, both as comparisons between the two English-speaking populations and as "if the shoe fits" mirrors
Customer Reviews:
CREATIVE, SCHOLARLY, & VASTLY ENTERTAINING.......2007-08-29
What a treasure to read a well researched, provocative book in the intellectual desert of the mainstream. Dr. Forbes' book is an oasis of reason and evidence measured against mainstream books seeking to make career gains by parroting the already said.
Dr. Forbes is Professor Emeritus, and although his career is not over, he certainly doesn't have to publish or perish. Clearly, this book was a labor of love, and it is filled with hard work and creativity that few can match.
This work challenges the omnipresent mindset that Europeans discovered America and challenges the concomitant assumption that Native Americans do not have agency, nor do they explore or do anything of importance. In other words, Dr. Forbes' book challenges the status quo, something every one of his books has done over the last five decades.
I have read almost every book Dr. Forbes has written, and I can say without equivocation that this book delivers.
Now, when you challenge the status quo you have to have your game down and provide plenty of evidence to support your case. You have to cite, cite, cite or the naysayer conformists will crucify you and your work.
Of course, the naysayer conformists will still crucify you with the complaint that you cited too much. What they are truly upset about is that you provided too much evidence and reason, so they are mad you whooped them on their own court with their ball. So they whine.
For the scientific at heart, for people looking for truth and reason in a mainstream fraught with destitute intellectual anomie, this latest book by Dr. Forbes is a refreshing feast of evidence, creativity, and reason spun with his unique blend of humor, wit, and irony.
Be sure to read this intellectual work par excellence!
I'm Sorry..........2007-07-27
"The American discovery Of Europe" by Jack D. Forbes.
University of Illinois Press, 2007.
I'm sorry. I wanted to like this book based upon the central thesis alone, but. The central thesis is wonderful: due to the prevailing winds and prevailing waves, flotsam from the American continents must have washed up on European shoes long before Christopher Columbus made his voyage of discovery in 1492. As a person of Irish descent, I am happy to see a neglected area of history/geography investigated which would make Ireland more important in the story of mankind. But! Then...
It appeared to me that the author quoted person after person SO his first chapter (entitled "Americans Across The Atlantic"), seemed to be filled more with other people's words than the author's original work. (As an example, look at pages 30 & 31.) My historiography professor once corrected me and told that I had to put some original ideas in between all the citations.
And then!! The author wants to be more than just a little bit politically correct, and he tells us that he will use three (3) different names for Christopher Columbus: English, Italian and Spanish. I looked at the publisher: University of Illinois Press, so I figured that the book was intended for an English-speaking audience ... and all the three different names did was to interrupt the flow of reading the book. Do you know what a Colon is in human anatomy? This kind of political correctness ain't worth it. In future books, I do hope that the author, Jack D. Forbes, uses Karl der Grosse for Charlemagne and Maria Antonia for Marie Antoinette, or is that kind of political correctness not acceptable?
Chapter 4, "Ancient Travelers And Migrations", was interesting, exhibiting the wealth of knowledge the author has on American Indians. But, even here, his prose turned me off. On page 83, he states "The Tuscarora also move north to join the Six Nations". Illogical! The Tuscarora moved north to join the FIVE Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca), to BECOME the Six Nations. See Wikipedia: "A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined after the original five nations were formed." In my opinion, this is sloppy writing on the part of the writer..
The killer of it all is on the back cover. Professor Hartmut Lutz, Greifswald University, East Germany, is quoted as saying, "...the slaver Christopher Columbus". I would observe that any German professor in a German university should wait for a couple more centuries before he calls any historical figure a slaver, unless, of course, he is addressing Adolf or perhaps Hermann. I am surprised at the lack of sensitivity on the part of the editors of the University of Illinois. I was offended.
For a wonderful thesis: five stars. For writing that did not flow: one star. For silly political correctness: zero stars. If you are writing for an English speaking audience, use the common English names. For maps that are TERRIBLE: zero stars. (See pages 26 and 28. By the way, in this period of global warming, I think that the author's audience is terribly familiar with the effects of the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream stops flowing, Ireland freezes.) Four into six is 1.5 stars, so round up to two stars.
Amazon.com
With its legacy of brutality and of the horrific overseas passage, the transatlantic slave trade may be imagined as the kidnapping of Africans without regard to nationality or ethnicity. Based on his research, however, Michael A. Gomez suggests that Africans, upon arriving in America, were dispersed much more closely along ethnic and cultural lines than previously acknowledged. The underlying theme of his provocative work, Exchanging Our Country Marks, is that while blacks eventually replaced their African ethnic identities with new racial ones after arriving in the American South, they retained much of their original cultures far longer than was originally suspected. Some of his most interesting evidence of this comes in the form of runaway-slave advertisements, which identified the slaves by their ethnic roots ("Dinah, an Ebo wench that speaks very good English"). By scrutinizing ex-slave narratives, stories, music, and even the location and nature of slave rebellions, Gomez pieces together a genealogy of blacks in the American South, attempting to examine their notions of identity. Of course, much is based on significant speculation, a fact that only underscores the difficulty of such scholarship. Gomez manages to present a wide range of information clearly as he expands on a wealth of recent research regarding the slave trade and the history of blacks in America, making Exchanging Our Country Marks a vast and creative exploration of African identity in the United States from 1526 to 1830.
Book Description
The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge.
After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent and Highly Educational!.......2007-03-08
This is an excellent book. I want every one of African descent to read this book. It is fantastic. This book is in my 10 list.
Early on the Africans were well aware of their ethnic identities, but over time, they were forgotten, and a new people emerged. Now this took generations. It was a slow and torturous process.
If you want to educate yourself about black folks in America and where they came from, and how they evolved, read this book.
Opening a new door to our history and our struggle.......2006-12-08
This book is of decisive importance, for by studying the convergence of an African American nationality out of the various nationalities and ethnicities that people were brought here from Africa, Michael Gomez underlines the function of the African-origins cultures and the construction of an African-American culture in a process of resistance and opposition to the inslavement, dehumanization, and degredation that Africans and their descendants have face.
Contrary to many popular assumptions, Gomez shows that in colonial and early independent America slave holders and slaves were quite aware of the different African cultures and ethnicities represented among the enslaved. Trade patterns, affinities of slave buyers for certain types of ethnicities, beliefs that some peoples were good for some tasks, others for others, led to many concentrations of slaves from the same culture and language groups in colonial America. This ensured that Africans in American tended to preserve very much of their native cultures, religions, and outlooks.
Indeed, Gomez illustrates that in language and religion large sections of the African American people in becoming retained their African religion, and at first retained their African languages, and then began our own African American language (Black English) precisely because the context of the dominant culture and its language and religion were hostile to the human dignity of Africans in America and their descendants.
Gomez's solid research and clear evaluation of massive amounts of original sources upsets many ideas on African American history that were assumptions and not facts. One of the most important is the lateness and difficulty that Christianity had in gaining seizable conversions among Africans in America and their descendants. He suggests that only by the time of the Civil War were African Americans substantially Christian. Gomez demonstrates that except for an overly assimilationist minority among "freed" slaves, Christianity only caught on where African religeous practices were mixed into it. More importantly, Gomez explains the reason for the final victory of Christianity is that it could be manipulated to provide a rationale and hope of liberation from racism and oppression both metaphysical and physical, that the individual African religions could not provide. Gomez illustrates that what occured was the development of an African American religion, rather than the adoption of a European religion.
In the process, the reader will learn new and more accurate views of whence and when Africans were brought to America during the period of slavery. The reader will learn the general political and religious outlooks of the different major groups of Africans who came here. The reader will learn a survey of the historical, economic, and political upheavals in AFrica wrought by the slave trade.
This is a serious and important book, written at the highest level of scholarship. Thus, it is sometimes not easy reading and certainly is not written as a popular entertainment. Yet, even the casual reader who sticks with this book and turns to Gomez's notes and bibliographic material for more to read will be vastly rewarded.
Excellent!.......2006-03-08
This book is excellent. Like someone said everyone of African ancestry needs to read this book. I had to buy my own copy.
A must read.......2000-10-29
A superb book that is a "must read" for every African African American man, woman and child. This book is the stuff of seminars, workshops and discussion groups at all levels. One of the fascinating positions exposed by Gomez was why it took the diverse ethnic Africans to achieve an African American consciousness. The depth of documentation was monumental. I always wondered why the color "red" had such significance in the African American "red clawt" tales. Gomez' book inspired me to research this aspect of African American tales. Thank you Mr. Gomez!
This work is a must read!.......1999-03-16
Gomez has done a tremendous service to the study of Africana by giving tangible evidence to what have heretofore been the answers rather than the questions on the who, what, where, when and WHY's of the African slave in America. Readers will be surprised at the degree to which something other than fact has helped form the base of their "knowledge". Suddenly the image of tobacco or rice will gain greater resonance than cotton. Virginia and Senegambia, for example, will have new and sharper meanings as we better ferret out who we were as Ghanaians, Senegambians, Angolans, etc. and how we became who we are as African-Americans.
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Transatlantic Translations: Dialogues in Latin American Literature
Julio Ortega
Manufacturer: Reaktion Books
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ASIN: 186189287X |
Book Description
Christened the New World, Latin America represented a new beginning for Spanish colonists. In fact, the discovery of Latin America was only part of a continuing, worldwide search for new resources: fertile land, precious metals, and slave labor. Nevertheless, this idealized image of Latin America continues to dominate interpretations of “natives,” who are transformed into marginalized, romanticized figures, either unusually wise or wildly heroic.
Transatlantic Translations refigures Latin American narratives outside of this standard postcolonial framework of victimization and resistance. Julio Ortega traces the ways in which Latin America has been represented through the works of many “native speakers,” including Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Maria Gutierrez. Language, Ortega reveals, was not solely a way for colonizers to indoctrinate and civilize; instead, it gave Latin Americans the means to tell their own history. Spanning literatures from the early modern period to the present day, the essays in Transatlantic Translations demonstrate the rich history of shared language between old and new worlds.
Book Description
This collection of essays by Bernard Vincent covers most aspects of Thomas Paine's life, thought, and works. It highlights Paine's contribution to the American and French Revolutions, as well as the active role he played in the intellectual debates of the Age of Enlightenment, in particular through his heated arguments with Edmund Burke or the Abbé Raynal. More than two centuries later, those debates—on the `universal' nature of human rights or the `exceptionalism' of the American experience—seem today to be more relevant than ever. Not only have Common Sense, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason become classics of Anglo-American literature, but, from the moment they appeared, they ushered in a new type of writer, a new way of writing—and a new class of readers. How Paine stormed the "Bastille of Words," and in so doing served both the "republic" of letters and the cause of democracy, is the real subject of this book.
Book Description
[Ireland's tumultuous heritage combined with the promise of cosmopolitan New York to forge a new Irish-American immigrant identity. Between the Great Irish Famine and the creation of the Irish Free State, the New York Irish world preserved as much from the old country as it adopts from the new. The Shamrock and the Lily illuminates a set of remarkable transatlantic connections dominated by the road to Ireland's independence, in an absorbing study of a people driven from a troubled past toward freedom for themselves and for those they left behind.
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- NATO, the European Union, and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered
- Sloan's Latest NATO Update
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NATO, the European Union, and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered
Stanley R. Shalikashvili, General John Sloan , and
Stanley R. Sloan
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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NATO Divided, NATO United: The Evolution of an Alliance
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NATO : Its Past, Present and Future
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NATO Transformed: The Alliance's New Roles in International Security
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Defending Europe: The EU, NATO, and the Quest for European Autonomy (Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series)
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Allies At War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq
ASIN: 0742517608 |
Book Description
This accessible book provides a full interpretive history of the transatlantic alliance, which has been at the heart of U.S. and European foreign and security policies.
Customer Reviews:
NATO, the European Union, and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered.......2006-07-07
it's a good book, so interesting. I glad whit that book
many thank's
Sloan's Latest NATO Update.......2003-09-17
Stanley Sloan pairs an easy-reading writing style with a well-documented text to produce an outstanding work for both novice and scholar. His book focuses on the issues surrounding the formation of NATO, the historical events that shaped the alliance, and its relevance in today's political environment.
The majority of the book is dedicated to examining the historical events surrounding the formation of NATO and the European Union. He begins with NATO's genesis out of World War II by discussing the need for a collective defense system, the struggles to gain organizational consensus and early challenges faced by NATO. At center stage of the conflict is the European distrust of US intentions and the US's desire for greater European financial/military support for European issues.
He moves to the Cold War period, examining the impacts of nuclear weapons policy on NATO and he looks at lessons from the Cold War. This book provides a great deal of insight on US Nuclear Policy development as we confronted both a Soviet threat and European political challenges. The post-Cold War portion of the book provides an exceptional look at the wartime missions faced in the Balkans, the issue of NATO expansion, and the impacts of 9/11.
The final three chapters examine NATO's relevance in today's environment and potential organizational changes for the 21st Century. He finishes with his draft of a "contemporary" North Atlantic Treaty and his rationale for why changes need to be made to the 1949 original.
Sloan includes two appendicles which compliment this book. The first is the 1949 Articles of the North Atlantic Treaty and the second is a chronological history of NATO from 1941-2001. Both are outstanding references. He also includes a bibliography as well as web links for updated information. All are great additions.
I recommend this book.
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Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature
Christopher Mulvey
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521303664 |
Book Description
Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travelers writing about their journeys abroad--Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States--during the eighty years following the War of 1812. The writings of travelers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value and that variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of either nation. The impact of such different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters that explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey's text draws on the writings, letters, and reports of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold, and Fanny Trollope among others.
Book Description
While scholars of traditional imperial history see the formation of the larger British Atlantic world as a consequence of competing European powers' efforts at nation-building, Atlantic historians see the transatlantic empire shaped more by the motives of a wide variety of subnational groups. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas have compiled a volume that reflects these different viewpoints concerning the transatlantic experience during Britain's rise to world dominance between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the book's opening chapters, contributors consider the effect of transatlantic emigration, discussing European and African migration and slave trade; the enslavement of Native American peoples; and the ways individuals adapted their national and religious identities in a world of expanding cultural influences. The second section addresses the roles played by trade, religion, ethnicity, and class in linking the Atlantic borders, with essays examining how mariners circulated political and religious news along with trade goods; how British common law supplanted the diverse legal systems of the early colonies; and how Protestant leaders in the colonies challenged the theological assumptions of their European contemporaries. The chapters in the final section address the increasingly complicated legal relationships between the British sovereign and colonial charterholders; the simultaneous establishment of a British colonial government in East Florida and the Royal Gardens of Kew; the popularity of imperial landscape art in eighteenth-century Britain; and the British roots of Pennsylvania Quakers.
The Creation of the British Atlantic World provides insight into the competing forces that forged the Atlantic world as well as the reciprocal relationships between the growing British Empire and the individuals, groups, and subnations within that empire.
Book Description
Wayward Reproductions breaks apart and transfigures prevailing understandings of the interconnection among ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. Alys Eve Weinbaum demonstrates how these ideologies were founded in large part on what she calls âthe race/reproduction bindâ––the notion that race is something that is biologically reproduced. In revealing the centrality of ideas about women’s reproductive capacity to modernity’s intellectual foundations, Weinbaum highlights the role that these ideas have played in naturalizing oppression. She argues that attention to how the race/reproduction bind is perpetuated across national and disciplinary boundaries is a necessary part of efforts to combat racism.
Gracefully traversing a wide range of discourses––including literature, evolutionary theory, early anthropology, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis––Weinbaum traces a genealogy of the race/reproduction bind within key intellectual formations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She examines two major theorists of genealogical thinkingâFriedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucaultâand unearths the unacknowledged ways their formulations link race and reproduction. She explores notions of kinship and the replication of racial difference that run through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work; Marxist thinking based on Friedrich Engel’s The Origin of the Family; Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection; and Sigmund Freud’s early studies on hysteria. She also describes W. E. B. Du Bois’s efforts to transcend ideas about the reproduction of race that underwrite citizenship and belonging within the United States. In a coda, Weinbaum brings the foregoing analysis to bear on recent genomic and biotechnological innovations.
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- Buyers Are Liars & Sellers Are Too!: The Truth About Buying or Selling Your Home
- Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life
- Class Act: William Haines Legendary Hollywood Decorator
- Conversations with God : An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1)
- Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
- Culture and Values, Volume II: A Survey of the Humanities (with CD-ROM) (Culture & Values)
- Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts
- Don Troiani's Soldiers of the American Revolution
- Esquire The Meaning of Life: Wit, Wisdom, and Wonder from 65 Extraordinary People
Books Index
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Divided by a Common Language: A Guide to British and American English
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