2006 Book Descriptions (A-F)

For every woman who pays taxes and uses public services, and everyone who cares about an effective and fair tax system, Taxes Are a Woman's Issue dares to expose not only how tax policies shape the size of our bank accounts but also how they sculpt our government and the nation's identity. Authors Mimi Abramovitz and Sandra Morgen, writing for the National Council for Research on Women, convincingly dispel myths about the current welfare system and expose how the IRS-supported tax system was created in, and caters to, a time before women entered the work force. By honestly discussing the many ways that the current tax system disadvantages women, Taxes Are a Woman's Issue courageously teaches, as the President of the Council Linda Basch states, "about positive changes that will improve the lives of all women and their families, their communities, and the nation as a whole." Mimi Abramovitz is a professor of social welfare at Hunter College and The Graduate Center.

Experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship produced on what is arguably Friedrich Nietzsche's most rewarding but more challenging text. Comprising essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped studies of Nietzsche alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. Sections are devoted to the general topic of genealogy, numerous essays on specific passages, applications of genealogy in later thinkers, and the import of Nietzsche's Genealogy in contemporary politics, ethics, and aesthetics. A lengthy introduction, annotated bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. Christa Davis Acampora is an associate professor of philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center.

Art across Time, 3rd ed.
Volume 2: The Fourteenth Century to the Present
McGraw-Hill, 1998, 2001, softcover 2006

Art across Time, Combined, 3rd ed.
McGraw-Hill, 1999; 2001; hardcover and softcover 2006

Art across Time combines sound scholarship and lively prose, engaging students with both its narrative and its lavish visual program. Popular with majors and non-majors alike, Art across Time offers readers more than a chronology of art; it discusses political, economic, social, and personal concerns that influence the artists and inform their work, uniquely conveying the ideas, beliefs, and circumstances that inspire creativity. Visual reproductions in the text are larger in scale and higher in quality than those in other art history texts, enhancing visual appeal and allowing students to view details and elements of composition with greater ease. This third edition is embellished by new visual connections between works, more use of color and architectural diagrams, an enhanced map program, new boxed readings, and more. In addition, the Core Concepts in Art CD-ROM included in previous editions has now been replaced by the book’s Online Learning Center which offers resources for students and teachers, with Web links to digital images and information, along with learning tools, including online quizzes and outlines. Adopting instructors may also now avail themselves of the text's illustration program in digital format via The Image Vault—McGraw-Hill's new Web-based presentation manager. Images from The Image Vault can be incorporated into digital presentations that can be used in class offline, burned to CD-ROM, or embedded in course Web pages. Laurie Schneider Adams is a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

Exploring the Humanities, Volume II
Laurence King Publishing, Ltd and Prentice Hall, 2006; paperback

Exploring the Humanities, Combined
Laurence King Publishing, Ltd. and Prentice Hall, 2006; paperback with CD

Intended for undergraduate courses in Introduction to the Humanities, this text ignites students’ passion to know more—and think more about the influence of the humanities on their own lives with a clear, engaging writing style, striking layout, and beautiful full-color reproductions. The first introduction to humanities text in years, Laurie Schneider Adams set out to write the most coherent, straight-forward and accessible text for students. Combining her gift for writing clearly and succinctly with a breath-taking design, she makes humanities come alive for the average freshman, who may or may not pursue a liberal arts degree. Prentice Hall also provides, at additional cost, an exciting array of digital and print resources which are aimed at instructors and/or students using this text. Laurie Schneider Adams is a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

This first edition volume is intended for one-quarter or one semester courses that introduce students to the visual arts and art history. The author asks students to consider how art is created and defined using the words of contemporary artists themselves, and she helps them understand that art is not only located in museums but is an integral part of their own everyday lives. The book is divided into six parts: creating and defining works of art; purposes of art; the artist’s visual language; two-dimensional media and techniques of art; three-dimensional media and techniques; and art in history. Prentice Hall can provide, at an additional cost, an array of resources aimed at instructors and/or students using this text. Print resources include the Instructor’s Manual and Test Item File, and a Study Guide. Digital resources include the Prentice Hall Digital Art Library; a Discovering Art CD-ROM; a free access companion website for students which has study materials and quizzes they can take; a Prentice Hall Test Generator on CD-ROM which makes it easy for instructors to put a test together; and Vango Notes (going live in summer 2007) which provides chapter reviews in downloadable mp3 format. Laurie Schneider Adams is a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

This book, an interdisciplinary study of two Renaissance princes, addresses the struggle between Federico da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and how it affected their patronage of arts and letters. While each vied for political, economic, and artistic predominance over the other, they were supported by young and talented wives. The humanistic Pope Pius II played a fundamental role in their struggle for power. Laurie Schneider Adams is a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

This is a new biography of a Renaissance woman who lived during the heyday of Medici power. A remarkable person in her own right, the author of religious poems and sacred narratives, as well as an accomplished businesswoman, Lucrezia was the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the grandmother of two popes, and the great-great grandmother of Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France. This glimpse of her life and times is a window onto the political intrigues and intellectual achievements of Medici Florence. Laurie Schneider Adams is a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center

This revolutionary book expands one’s vision of how computers can be programmed and designed by introducing wisdom, virtue, values, and ethics within the context of processing data, information, knowledge, and intelligence. The author’s “wisdom machine” scans large amounts of Internet data and applies artificial intelligence strategies to filter the data and derive initial knowledge bases. These knowledge bases are reprocessed with human oversight to discover underlying axioms of wisdom and then evaluated to identify a value structure that leads to the greatest benefits to society. The book is a must-read for all students, researchers, engineers, and executives interested in exploring the potential of the next generation of computers and how they will benefit both their organizations and society. Among other things, readers will learn basic concepts in total program control of intelligent agents and machines, and methodologies to track actions and decisions within an organization that infringe upon its ethical, legal, and social codes of conduct. Syed Ahamed is a professor of computer science at the College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center.

from the warring factions is a book-length poem in five parts dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica where some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995. Drawing on documentary sources, the themes of the poem are the relationship of memory to event, the ebb and flow of civilizations and empires, and the means of recording history. On a dizzying journey through time and place, we are brought to the Roman Empire, Native America, the Gulf War, and events in the former Yugoslavia. Accompanying the text is a long interview with the author conducted by the poet Benjamin Hollander. Ammiel Alcalay is a professor of English and comparative literature at Queens College and The Graduate Center.

Despite the widespread acceptance of human rights at the normative level, actual progress toward the realization of human rights globally has been far from satisfactory. In taking a look at the question, this book departs from those analyses that focus on the role of the state and transcends, as well, the literature on the role of the NGOs. Instead, it urges the study of the entire human rights universe; examines a broad range of non-state actors engaged in various activities that violate, promote, or protect human rights; and stresses the need for mechanisms to curb human rights violations. Among the important issues explored by the contributing authors are bioethics, the genetic revolution, armed conflicts, battered women, the impact of the media, and welfare reform. George Andreopoulos is an associate professor of criminal justice and political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center.

Building a new platform for change, prominent social critic Stanley Aronowitz diagnoses America’s crisis of democracy and the dangers of the new authoritarianism. Aronowitz draws on his vast knowledge of history and political theory and from currents of political change around the globe, from the traditions of the European left to the newest political trends in Latin America that have challenged the “death of socialism.” Demonstrating why Democrats lose when they cling to centrism and compromise their core values, this book shows us what a new left party in America would look like in an era of globalization, terrorism, and a crisis of public confidence in government. Stanley Aronowitz is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center.

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D. A. Posey and Michael J. Balick, eds.
Human Impacts on Amazonia: The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Conservation and Development
Columbia University Press, 2006

Edited by ethnobotanists Darrell Addison Posey and the Botanical Garden's own Michael J. Balick and featuring essays by environmental scientists, botanists, and anthropologists, this volume explores historic and contemporary visions of Amazonia and the effects of human development in the region. The collection reveals the long history of cultural and biological destruction in the Amazonian ecosystem, particularly by outsiders. The contributors argue that by protecting and drawing upon local knowledge and values, further environmental ruin can be avoided. Standing in stark contrast to the environmental exploitation practiced by outside interests, native Amazonians have successfully utilized and conserved the land around them, from the pre-Columbian era to the present. The unmistakable imprint of these indigenous inhabitants is reflected in the forests, savannas, hills, and streams of the Amazon Basin, which for them serve as homes, gardens, and hunting reserves, as well as spiritual and sacred spaces. Michael Balick is Vice President for Botanical Science, Director and Philecology Curator, at the Institute of Economic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden and an adjunct professor of biology at the Graduate Center.

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Geoffrey Batchen
Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006

In this volume, a noted photography historian focuses on the relationship between photography and memory and explores the centuries-old practice of strengthening the emotional appeal of photographs by embellishing them—with text, paint, frames, embroidery, fabric, string, hair, flowers, bullets, cigar wrappers, butterfly wings, and more—to create strange and often beautiful hybrid objects. The book features color photographs of eighty such objects created by ordinary people from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. In addition, Forget Me Not offers an alternative way to look at the history of photography, a history that effectively excludes most of the photographs taken since the invention of the camera—candid views, family snapshots, and the like. This is a paperback of the catalogue which accompanied an exhibition that opened at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, in 2004 and closed at the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2005. Geoffrey Batchen is a professor of art history at The Graduate Center.

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Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara Deutsch Lynch, editors
Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms
(Rutgers University Press, 2005)

The popular image of the Caribbean's exotic landscape overshadows the rich island cultures that are both linguistically and politically diverse, but trapped in a global economy that offers few options for development. The region is also fraught with environmental problems, including water and air pollution, solid waste mismanagement, destruction of ecosystems, and deforestation. Bringing together ten essays by social scientists and activists, this book provides the most comprehensive exploration to date of the range of environmental issues facing the region and the social movements that have developed to deal with them. The authors consider the role that global and regional political economies play in this process and provide valuable insight into Caribbean environmentalism. Many of the essays by prominent Caribbean analysts are made available for the first time in English. Sherrie Baver in an associate professor of political science at City College and The Graduate Center.

Medical care of the terminally ill is one of the most emotionally fraught and controversial issues before the public today. David Bearison looks at the issue from the perspective of the medical staff caring for dying children—doctors, nurses, and counselors. In capturing their stories, he moves beyond broad, abstract ideas about end-of-life care to convey the situated contexts of such care, including the complications, disagreements, frustrations, confusions, and unexpected setbacks. In discussing questions regarding whether or not to withhold or withdraw curative treatments, he explores the medical practitioners’ crucial concerns: education and training, relation with one another, communicating with patients and families, and finally, coping and moving on. Ultimately, the threads connecting these themes are the great costs and rewards of this difficult work, and the lessons that can be drawn from the nitty-gritty experiences of medical practitioners who struggle to find the balance between trying to defeat death and trying to provide comfort. David Bearison is a professor of educational psychology and psychology at The Graduate Center.

Described as “a continuous carnival” and “the crossroads of the world,” Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To esteemed scholar and author Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life, and he takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour, revealing a landscape both mythic and real, giving us a unique look through the lens of the ideas and works of art that inspired—or were inspired by—this landmark’s allure. Interleafing his own recollections with astute social commentary, Berman reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square’s voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Marshall Berman is a distinguished professor of political science at The City College and The Graduate Center.

The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this groundbreaking history, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died. Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband's place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence. Carol Berkin is a professor of history at Baruch College and The Graduate Center.

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Steven M. Cahn, ed.
Classics of Western Philosophy, 7th ed.
(Hackett Publishing Company, 2007)

For more than a generation this anthology has informed the philosophical education of students, educators, and a larger non-academic public. It contains the complete texts or substantial selections from fifty-seven philosophical masterpieces, representing thirty-three of the world’s greatest philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein and Sartre. Those texts not originally written in English are included in readable translations crafted to the highest standards of contemporary scholarship. An introduction to each author by a noted authority in the field offers biographical data, philosophical commentary, and bibliographical guides. Annotations are provided to clarify textual references. This seventh edition adds selections from Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Plotinus' Enneads, Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, Husserl's Paris Lectures, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The readings from Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit have been expanded, while selections from Hobbes' Leviathan, Mill's On Liberty, and Russell's The Problems of Philosophy have been reedited. Steven Cahn is a professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center.

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Mary Ann Caws and Jean-Pierre Cauvin, editors and co-translators
Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology
(Black Widow Press, 2006; revised edition)

This revised edition (with additional poems) is the single most comprehensive critical edition of Breton's poems available in English. Other editions may claim to be “comprehensive,” but none come close to the range of poems presented in this edition. Surrealist scholar Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Breton scholar Mary Ann Caws translate and edit this title with critical introductions, prefaces, commentary, bibliography, and notes. This title has remained elusive and expensive in the used market, as students and scholars have snapped up the few copies ever available through any book search. Like him or hate him, few have had as important an impact on twentieth-century artistic thought and culture as Breton and his Surrealist movement. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

Henry James was an intensely visual writer—in his notebooks he recorded the observation that “the scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation.” This concise illustrated biography of the master opens new doors to James’s readers and students of his work by showing the vast scope of the master’s visual imagination. The images collected in this book, some previously unpublished, depict the members of his illustrious and accomplished family; artwork that influenced him; as well as the friends and acquaintances who formed the inspiration for James’s unforgettable protagonists and the places in Boston, London, and Venice that formed the settings for his novels. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise, and shows how the elimination of certain passages from the original—Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar rendering Virginia Woolf into French—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—Yves Bonnefoy’s of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

This volume presents the text of Capital of Pain in its entirety in a bilingual format. Translator Mary Ann Caws also provides an insightful and in-depth survey of Eluard’s poems and writings. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

This book explores the life and art of seven extraordinary women of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, who had a tremendous if not yet fully acknowledged impact on the modernist movement and its reception. Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, Dorothy Bussy, Dora Carrington, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emily Carr and Claude Cahun were powerful forces in their various fields. Each lived an unusual life, the eccentricity of which was in large part responsible for its creative intensity. Drawing on much unpublished material, the stories recounted here, often involving very famous men—including Utrillo, Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wagner, Hugo, Rilke, and Gide—show a singular courage and determination. Whether as writers, translators, painters, or photographers, these innovators stood out among their contemporaries as remarkable contributors to modernism. Mary Ann Caws is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at The Graduate Center.

This volume, which appeared simultaneously in the United States and Peru, in English and Spanish, collects the essays presented by leading scholars at an interdisciplinary symposium, sponsored by CUNY’s City College and The Graduate Center, inaugurating the celebration of the fourth centennial of the 1605 publication in Lisbon of La Florida del Inca. In this chronicle Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, offers the history of Hernando de Soto’s journey (1539–43) into a vast territory then known as La Florida. The book includes ten essays, an introduction, a chronology, a general bibliography, and 55 illustrations. Raquel Chang-Rodríguez is a distinguished professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at City College and The Graduate Center.

This comprehensive field guide features two-page spreads with concise but thorough descriptions; a color-coded range map faces a page of color photos, and the map shows both where the plant grows and what time of year it is likely to be in bloom. The full-color photos generally show the flowers of the plant, and insets of leaves (and occasionally fruits) are often included to help in identification. A bar on each photo allows users to accurately judge the actual size of each flower. In addition to the more common and conspicuous wildflowers, many of the lesser known species are also depicted. The beginning of the book has a simple key that allows one to quickly narrow one's search to a few pages. Both serious botanists and casual nature observers will welcome this beautifully illustrated and expertly detailed guide. Steven Clemants is an adjunct professor of biology at The Graduate Center and a taxonomist and Vice President of Science at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

The essays in this volume discuss the social, political, and economic contexts of youth conflict across fourteen countries on seven continents. Distinguished contributors from around the world draw on research and interventions to describe young people's participation in armed conflict, fighting, and social exclusion from the time they enter the public sphere to adulthood, as defined in their local environments. Case studies include children in Africa, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Brazil, Colombia, Israel, China, the United States, Germany, and Korea. The volume aims to shift the foundation of youth conflict study from the more typical focus on maturation, behavior, and personality to a characterization of youth as participants in society. It also expands the analysis of youth development to include societal problems such as political instability, unequal access to material resources, racism, and social injustice. This groundbreaking, international compilation describes processes of a violent world rather than of violent youth. Colette Daiute is a professor of psychology and urban education at The Graduate Center.

In To Be an Immigrant, social psychologist Kay Deaux argues that in addition to looking at macro-level factors like public policies and social conditions and micro-level issues like individual choices, immigration scholars should also study influences that occur on an intermediate level, such as interpersonal encounters in order to understand how immigrants adapt to a new homeland and form distinct identities. As a case study for her framework, Deaux examines West Indians, exploring their perceptions of the stereotypes they face in the United States and their feelings of connection to their new home. Though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican. Deaux’s research adds to a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat, which suggests that negative stereotypes about one’s group can hinder an individual’s performance. Kay Deaux is a distinguished professor of psychology at The Graduate Center.

Marcel den Dikken presents a syntax of predication and the inversion of the predicate around its subject, emphasizing meaningless elements (elements with no semantic load) that play an essential role in the establishment and syntactic manipulation of predication relationships. One such element, the RELATOR, mediates the relationship between a predicate and its subject in the base representation of predication structures. A second, the LINKER, connects the predicate to its subject in Predicate Inversion constructions. Den Dikken argues that all subject-predicate relationships are syntactically mediated by a RELATOR and that predication relationships in syntax are configurationally asymmetrical and non-directional. Discussing the inversion of the predicate around its subject and the distribution of LINKER elements surfacing between the inverted predicate and the subject, den Dikken presents an in-depth analysis of Predicate Inversion from the perspective of the minimalist theory of locality. Marcel Den Dikken is a professor of linguistics at The Graduate Center.

Is the Chomskian revolution in linguistics right about the mind? What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there "a language faculty"? Ignorance of Language gives some decidedly un-Chomskian answers to such questions: that linguistics is about linguistic reality and not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that linguistics should be concerned with what idiolects share, not with idiolects; that language processing is a fairly brute-causal associationist matter; that the rules of "Universal Grammar" are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. Michael Devitt is a distinguished professor of philosophy at The Graduate Center.

This book reveals the fortieth president to be an exemplar of the truest conservative values. According to John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan was marginalized following his departure from office, thanks to liberal biases that dominate the teaching of American history. Yet Reagan, like Lincoln (who was also attacked for decades after his death), deserves to be regarded as one of our three or four greatest presidents. He was far more active as president and far more sophisticated than we ever knew; his negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev and his opposition to foreign interventions demonstrate that he was not a rigid hawk; and in his pursuit of Emersonian ideals in his distrust of big government, he was the most open-minded libertarian president the country has ever had, combining a reverence for America's hallowed historical traditions with an implacable faith in the limitless opportunities of the future. Jack Diggins is a distinguished professor of history at The Graduate Center.

In this exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, the authors demonstrate “typecasting” as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as history, pop culture, racial science, and film, and including over 100 images, many published here for the first time, the authors present a vivid portrait of stereotyping as it was forged by colonialism, industrialization, mass media, urban life, and the global economy. They reveal how stereotyping or typecasting continues to inform our most fundamental and unconscious judgments of beauty, humanity, and degeneracy. Stuart Ewen is a distinguished professor of history and sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center.

Taking advantage of recently declassified U.S. and Soviet documents as well as biographical and narrative literature from Cuba, Samuel Farber focuses on three key years, 1959 to 1961, to explain how the Cuban rebellion rapidly evolved from a multiclass, antidictatorial movement into a full-fledged social revolution. Exploring how historical conflicts between U.S. and Cuban interests colored the reactions of both nations' leaders after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, Farber argues that the structure of Cuba's economy and politics in the first half of the twentieth century made the island ripe for radical social and economic change, and the ascendant Soviet Union was on hand to provide early assistance; and rather than treating Cuba's revolutionary leaders as having merely reacted to U.S. policies or domestic socioeconomic conditions, Farber shows that while these leaders acted under serious constraints, they were nevertheless autonomous agents pursuing their own independent ideological visions, although not necessarily according to a master plan. Samuel Farber is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center.

Speakers, in their everyday conversations, use language to talk about language. They may wonder about what words mean, to whom a name refers, whether a sentence is true. They may worry whether they have been clear, or correctly expressed what they meant to say. That speakers can make such inquiries implies a degree of access to the complex array of knowledge and skills underlying our ability to speak, and though this access is incomplete, we nevertheless can form beliefs—de lingua beliefs—about linguistic matters of considerable subtlety, about ourselves and others. Fiengo and May focus on the beliefs speakers have about the semantic values of linguistic expressions, exploring the genesis of these beliefs, and the explanatory roles they play in how speakers use and understand language. Their key insight is that the content of beliefs about semantic values can be taken as part of what we say by our utterances. Robert Fiengo is a professor of linguistics at Queens College and The Graduate Center.

José Martí, poet, scholar, and revolutionary, contributed greatly to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. He has been hailed as an heroic martyr who inspired Cuban republican traditions, although he died before the formation of an independent republic. Traditionally nationalistic twentieth-century literature reinforced an uncritical idealization of Martí. However, recent new approaches have explored the formation, reception, uses, and abuses of the Martí myth. The essays in this volume explore the diverse representations and interpretations of Martí and they provide a critical analysis of the ways in which both the left and right have used his political and literary legacies to argue their version of contemporary Cuban “reality.” Mauricio Font is a professor of sociology at Queens College and The Graduate Center and director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies; Alfonso Quiroz is a professor of history at Baruch College and The Graduate Center.