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for anyone interested in the role of journalism in the city, New York politics, and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Clarence Taylor, author of Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long history of Police Brutality in New York City
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The untold story behind one of America’s greatest dramas
In early 1957, a low-budget black-and-white movie opened across the United States. Consisting of little more than a dozen men arguing in a dingy room, it was a failure at the box office and soon faded from view.
Today, 12 Angry Men is acclaimed as a movie classic, revered by the critics, beloved by the public, and widely performed as a stage play, touching audiences around the world. It is also a favorite of the legal profession for its portrayal of ordinary citizens reaching a just verdict and widely taught for its depiction of group dynamics and human relations.
Reginald Rose and the Journey of “12 Angry Men” tells two stories: the life of a great writer and the journey of his most famous work, one that ultimately outshined its author.
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AWARD WINNING TITLES & AUTHORS
Resist! This exhortation animates a remarkable range of theological reflections on consumer culture in the United States. And for many theologians, the source and summit of Christian cultural resistance is the Eucharist. In Commodified Communion, Antonio Eduardo Alonso calls into question this dominant mode of theological reflection on contemporary consumerism. Reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support it, he argues, undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in and in spite of consumer culture, this book offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.
James Collins Johnson made his name by escaping slavery in Maryland and fleeing to Princeton, New Jersey, where he built a life in a bustling community of African Americans working at what is now Princeton University. After only four years, he was recognized by a student from Maryland, arrested, and subjected to a trial for extradition under the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. On the eve of his rendition, after attempts to free Johnson by force had failed, a local aristocratic white woman purchased Johnson’s freedom, allowing him to avoid re-enslavement. The Princeton Fugitive Slave reconstructs James Collins Johnson’s life, from birth and enslaved life in Maryland to his daring escape, sensational trial for re-enslavement, and last-minute change of fortune, and through to the end of his life in Princeton, where he remained a figure of local fascination.
Emphasizing the revolutionary potential of the “dark proletariat” in 1930s African American literature, James Edward Ford III’s research shows how antiracist writers forged a creative path where there appeared to be no way forward. With adroit close readings of writing by W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, Thinking through Crisis also connects Depression-era struggles with the long history of political activism. This book adds a capacious, imaginative account to the history of radical writing and thought.
Cathay, the slim volume of poems that Ezra Pound “translated” from classical Chinese in 1915, has long been considered one of Pound’s crowning achievements and a cornerstone of modernism itself. Because Pound himself did not know Chinese and relied upon notes left behind by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa to compose his own idiosyncratic versions, the collection has also been controversial from the start, spawning a century of fierce debate over the merits and flaws of Pound’s translations, modernism’s problematic engagement in cultural appropriation and Orientalism, and the practice and goals of translation itself. Enter this groundbreaking new critical edition, which, for the first time, presents Pound’s lapidary, moving poems alongside the original source material he drew upon to create Cathay. Read more.
