A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings.
Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist.
Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only 33.
What We Are Reading Today: Paul Laurence Dunbar by Gene Andrew Jarrett
https://arab.news/cnfz5
What We Are Reading Today: Paul Laurence Dunbar by Gene Andrew Jarrett
What We Are Reading Today: ‘So Simple a Beginning’
- A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra
Author: RAGHUVEER PARTHASARATHY
The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree.
A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it.
“So Simple a Beginning” shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Data Analysis for Social Science’
Authors: Eleba Llaudet and Kosuke
“Data Analysis for Social Science” provides a friendly introduction to the statistical concepts and programming skills needed to conduct and evaluate social scientific studies.
Assuming no prior knowledge of statistics and coding and only minimal knowledge of math, the book teaches the fundamentals of survey research, predictive models, and causal inference while analyzing data from published studies with the statistical program R.
What We Are Reading Today: Sparks Like Stars
Author: Nadia Hashimi
If you need a story that is thought-provoking and emotional, give ‘Sparks Like Stars’ a try. Or if you love historical fiction, because it’s about an actual event — a Soviet-backed coup against the president of Afghanistan.
The story starts with getting to know Sitara. She is a privileged 10-year-old whose father is a diplomat and close friend of the country’s president; she spends many days running around the presidential palace. That is until the soldiers kill her entire family, and she sees it all happening, forever changing her.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘NOVEL RELATIONS’
Author: ALICIA MIRELES CHRISTOFF
‘Novel Relations’ engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.
Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.
These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures — characters, narrators, authors, and other readers — shape and structure us too.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning’
Author: Gary Tomlinson
In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks meaning far out into the animal world. At the same time he discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all.
