Barbara Hepworth: Strings is the first publication dedicated to the artist’s stringed sculptures, paintings and drawings. In 1939, Hepworth (1903–1975) made her first sculpture threaded with strings. For the rest of her career, she intermittently combined string with works made from plaster, wood, metal and stone. These were some of her most personally distinctive artistic achievements. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, Barbara Hepworth: Strings provides for the first time a comprehensive thematic account of string in the artist’s work, exploring the different ways that she used it and the symbolism she invested it with.This publication includes a fully-illustrated catalogue of Piano Nobile’s accompanying exhibition. It features essays by some of the leading specialists on Hepworth’s work. The exhibition co-curator Michael Regan offers a personal response to the stringed sculptures and considers their affective quality. In his essay, Dr Stephen Feeke explores fresh perspectives and previously unpublished source materials relating to Hepworth and string. A further text by Eleanor Clayton, senior curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, gives a close reading of the most significant stringed works including the artist’s celebrated commission for John Lewis’s flagship store on Oxford Street. The book also includes a comprehensive, illustrated list of Hepworth’s stringed sculptures.

Patrick Naughton’s father barely spoke of his time in Vietnam to his family, yet his service was the sole reason Patrick joined the U.S. Army as a teenager. Patrick Naughton Sr served in Vietnam with the 82nd Airborne and advising the South Vietnamese Army, while Patrick himself would serve in Iraq. Three decades of history and politics divided their service yet the similarities between their experiences are undeniably striking.Patrick’s attempts to understand his father led to a search for those who served with him in Vietnam, an examination of the personal relationship of a father and son whose few connections have been war, and a quest to understand war and its undeniable generational influence. The result is an engaging and eye-opening weaving together of the combat experiences of two generations of a military family.From the failure of grand stratagem, through personal combat stories, and the memories of those lost—America’s wars against communism and terror are laid raw through the experiences of one family.

During the Iraq War, the U.S. Army found itself in a very similar situation to the 1st Air Mobile Cavalry Division during the Vietnam Conflict—facing an enemy who knew the terrain and was determined to fight for their cause. The difference between the two conflicts is that American forces could not take full advantage of armor superiority in Vietnam. For the infantry to truly be effective and dominant, they need to have the backing of tanks, enabling them to continue dismounted operations overwatched by tanks.The history and battle techniques of the army’s armored core have been discussed in other military conflicts in depth, but this will be the first full discussion of the role and usefulness of the tanks in Iraq, analyzing battles that were completely shaped or significantly aided due to the presence and efficiency of armor units. These units were well-trained and well-equipped and provided armored support and devastating firepower that the enemy could not easily counter. They were such a powerful force that the insurgents in Iraq had to completely change their tactics to account for the Abrams that they were facing. This work will attempt to illuminate the importance of the tanks themselves as well as the tankers who fought inside of them and show how valuable they were to the army and Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003–2009.

From the first steps taken into the darkness of High Pasture Cave, it was clear that this complex site would challenge current thinking on cave use and function in prehistory, and wider understanding of Iron Age cultural practice and beliefs. Situated in a dramatic location under the slopes of the Cuillin Mountains on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, this cave and its monumentalised environs were a focus for specific and special activities throughout the Iron Age – a venue for spectacular and extensive ceremonies featuring feasts, fire, crafts and the symbolic deposition of a plethora of artefacts and environmental materials, as well as human remains. This volume sets out the results of fieldwork carried out at High Pastures between 2004 and 2010, presents results from the extensive post-excavation analysis, and provides a biography of the High Pasture Cave complex from the early Bronze Age through 900 years of Iron Age activity. Recent research has led to a resurgence of interest in caves, in particular the place of these enigmatic sites in the worldviews of later prehistoric communities. Their investigation in the past has generally attributed a domestic function, comprising temporary homes and shelter for hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists, and as workshops and places of refuge. However, it is now proposed that many caves, including High Pasture, were used for rituals involving the preparation and display of human remains, the deposition of material culture and other types of organic materials. These were clearly performative acts and the recurrent use of caves as the arenas for such performances, tells us much about their role in the cosmology of later prehistoric communities.

The “Battlin’ Bastards” of B Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, fought daily against a well-trained and determined enemy during their tours in Vietnam, 1968–71. Before the war, these men were brothers, sons, sweethearts, husbands, and fathers. Some were athletes, some musicians. Some were just out of high school, some in established careers. There is no monolithic “Battlin’ Bastard,” but when they joined the 101st Airborne Division—one of the most highly decorated divisions in the United States Army—in Vietnam, they united, fighting for each other, and fighting to return safely home.It was difficult to put their experiences behind them. As Bravo veteran, Terry Taylor, recalled, “I learned at the age of 18 that you don’t have to die to go to hell. Vietnam was hell on earth.” And yet despite the obstacles, many of these men built successful lives post-war. Decades after returning from the war, when the men were ready to cautiously revisit their experiences, the Bastards started stateside reunions.From these reunions came the wish to share their stories with the world, to honor, to educate, and to inspire. The result is this book, written from interviews and diligent archival research, in which the surviving “Battlin’ Bastards” tell their stories of combat in their own words, and honor those who “sacrificed for their country and their unit.”Additionally, the author of A War of Their Own has requested an update to the long description. Please update the final sentence in the second paragraph to: “In the United States at the time of the fall, he tried to learn their fate with Chickering's help, but Cambodia had become a tomb.”

The authors explore multifaceted aspects of the competing cultural landscapes that comprise the northeast of Scotland. This interdisciplinary collection uses a deep temporal perspective at a range of scales, from microlandscape studies to largescale geological and archaeological environments. It presents collaborative research carried out by a local conservation group, the Bailies of Bennachie, and the University of Aberdeen across a twelveyear period – the ‘Bennachie Landscapes Project’. Far from being a cultural backwater, the book shows how key physical and social processes have interacted in the landscape of northeast Scotland since prehistory. Authors present new understandings of glacial geology, Mesolithic settlements, Roman, Viking and medieval settlements and environments, and recent crofting landscapes. Today’s landscape is shown to be an extraordinarily rich resource for cultural and environmental history that is well worthy of continued protection and care. The research is itself used as a means of reaching into the wider community and engaging in a twoway process of education that connects the various participants.This book, therefore, explores ways of ‘doing’ environmental archaeology and cultural landscape studies that are not mainstream. All of the studies have a greater or lesser degree of community input. Some are communitydriven, others more academically oriented. But all add value to the others and help to create a better understanding of the cultural landscapes of northeast Scotland. The narrative flows from late glacial times, through prehistoric and historic periods forward, through the actions of the present engaging communities, seamlessly on and into the future.

Keen, pithy meditations on a world that continues to surprise us /> />The poems in Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout's new book are concerned with "this ongoing attempt/ to catalog the world" in a time of escalating disasters. From the bird who "check-marks morning/once more//like someone who gets up/to make sure// the door is locked" to bat-faced orchids, raising petals like light sails as if about to take flight, these poems make keen visual and psychological observations. The title Go Figure speaks to the book's focus on the unexpected, the strange, and the seemingly incredible so that: "We name things/ to know where we are. " Moving with the deliberate precision that is a hallmark of Armantrout's work, they limn and refract, questioning how we make sense of the world, and ultimately showing how our experience of reality is exquisitely enfolded in words. "It's true things fall apart." Armantrout writes. 'Still, by thinking/we heat ourselves up." /> />Sample Text /> />HYPER-VIGILANCE /> />Hilarious, /> />the way a crab's slender />eye-stalks />stand straight up /> />from its scuttling />carapace— /> />the way vigilance />takes many forms? /> /> * /> />That bird check-marks morning />once more /> />like someone who gets up />to make sure /> />the door is locked. /> /> * /> />I sound />like I know />what I'm talking about. /> />I sound like a comedian.

In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. Unravelling its origins, James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo spies on his celebrity friend for an online tabloid. Down to her last dollar, a Hollywood hanger-on steals designer handbags from her dying friend’s bungalow. Blinded by grief, an LA judge atones after condescending to a failed actress on a date. When hunger for power, fame, and love betrays the senses, the characters in these nine stories must reckon with false choices and their search for belonging with the wrong people. Small in Real Life offers an insider’s view of California and the golden promises of possibility and redemption that have long made the West glitter.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles. ” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s passionate voice has long been acknowledged as a vital force in American poetry. From urgent spiritual quest to biting political satire, from elegy to comedy, from celebration of the city street and the world “as a paradise might be / if we had eyes to see,” to the “crack in earth . .

An online colloquium was held in late 2022 to celebrate the centenary of Sir Leonard Woolley’s first season of excavations at AlMuqayyar, the Babylonian city of Ur. This book publishes 18 papers from the colloquium by international scholars, together with a foreword from Dr Laith Majid Hussain, as President of the State Board for Antiquities and Heritage, and a recently unearthed report of J.G. Taylor’s work at the site, written in 1858. The papers reevaluate Woolley’s work, revisit his archives with fresh eyes and apply 21stcentury techniques to enrich our knowledge of the 7,000 year old city. They also include results from renewed work at Ur, undertaken by joint Iraqi and international teams of archaeologists. The papers highlight the value of welldocumented old excavations and the exciting potential of collaborations to explore new research questions, under the leadership of the Iraqi State Board for Antiquities and Heritage.

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver and I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.Over the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. The paintings show lavish rooms, filled with fringed lamps, dusty chandeliers, vast mirrors and ornate furniture, juxtaposed with the incongruous signs of a film set: screens, leads, computers and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fabrication’, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.Alongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions – Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024–25) – showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments.In her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography and painting. She analyses how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography.In an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris.Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.

A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1327 is a biography of a little-known man living in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Britain. William’s precise birth and death dates are unrecorded, his place of origin has for a long time been unclear, and his parentage is still uncertain. Although somewhat wealthy and privileged, William does not represent either the high aristocracy or the ‘great and the good’ of his time, and a central theme of this book is how to write a biography of someone relatively anonymous in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of books about kings, queens and battles; this book offers a different perspective.Its origin lies in archaeological excavations between 1978 and 1982 at Edlingham, Northumberland. The first house here, which grew to be called a castle, was built in the years around 1300. It was abandoned before the 1660s after less than four centuries of habitation, and nearly three centuries before it was uncovered by excavation. This book is not an excavation report, however, nor an architectural survey, but an attempt to ‘excavate’ the buried and concealed life of the castle’s founder, and to understand the unusual building he created. It is a biographical approach to history framed by archaeological and landscape perspectives: the biography of one man, which illuminates the lives of those around him and serves as a biography of a place and landscape.William de Felton’s story can be told because he was unexpectedly well documented. His career as a middle-ranking servant in the royal households of Edward I and Edward II, combined with the bureaucratic habits of the king’s clerks, has bequeathed to historians two hundred documents that mention him. These documents are often individually banal, but taken together, and with other documentary evidence for William’s family, neighbours, friends and colleagues, they enable a reconstruction of his life. They show us William as husband and father, as a landowner, and as a traveller moving with the king’s armies and household from his native Shropshire, widely around England, into Wales, France, Flanders and Scotland, perhaps slightly contrary to the idea that medieval people travelled little. William began his career as an usher in the king’s bedchamber, and for many years was a soldier during Edward I’s ‘forever wars’, the early attempt to create by force a single nation on the British islands. He was an administrator or governor of occupied territories in Wales and Scotland, and later a local official in his adopted Northumberland. He was also a builder, notably for the king in Gascony and other places, but also in his own right, at Edlingham Castle, the centre-piece of this book, now an English Heritage public property.

This important memoir, translated into English for the author’s 100th birthday, tells the life story of Maj. Gen. (ret. ) Amos Horev, a visionary leader whose contributions helped shape Israel’s growth across many fields. Rooted in memories of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1920s and ‘30s, where he built foundational friendships with other future leaders, such as Yigael Yadin, Uzi Narkiss, and Yohay Ben-Nun, Horev tells the story of Israel through the personal lens of his own experiences. One of the first Palmach commanders and deputy to Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan during Israel’s War of Independence, he went on to shape the evolution of the Israel Defense Forces’ weaponry and logistics, later serving as president of the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology and chair of the board of Rafael, Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. In this autobiography, Retired Major General Amos Horev reveals the stories of the daily lives of the fighters and commanders in the Palmach—their failures, their successes, and most especially their motivation to fight to the end, even when the results were unknowable and the chances were slim. Through wars and missions, Amos remained a family man. He reveals another layer of his inner life when he speaks about Shoshana, his wife and the love of his life. Amos Horev’s life story, which he tells with candor and integrity, combines with the story of Israel, and the generation that broke the ground, for those who followed.