Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that rather than controlling the disreputable, jail disorients and degrades these people, indoctrinating new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issu...

This book is one mans story of engineering and mountaineering. It is an inspirational account of how one young man built his life from very modest beginningswith little money or education, joining the adult world as an apprentice engineer, going on to academic distinction and a great career as a director of a large manufacturing concern in South Africa. It is an account also of how that young man found himself and tested himself against some great challenges in the mountains of Ireland and...

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the...

The Bear Hunter is a unique story of football obsession. Author John Irwin vowed to track down each of the 86 players who featured in the club's nine successive league title triumphs between 1988 and 1997. His obsession took him around the world during seven years of adventures as he turned bear hunter to meet his heroes.

Many narrative accounts of men in combat during World War II have conveyed the horrors and emotions of warfare. However, not many reveal in such an intimate way the struggle of innocent youth to adapt to the primitive code of “kill or be killed,” to transform from lads into combat soldiers.Another River, Another Town is the story of John P. Irwin, a teenage tank gunner whose idealistic desire to achieve heroism is shattered by the incredibly different view of life the worl...

A study in how a poet’s corpus is remembered after he vanishes.Weldon Kees is one of those fascinating people of whom you’ve likely never heard. Most intriguingly, he disappeared without a trace on July 18, 1955. Police found his 1954 Plymouth Savoy abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge one day later. The keys were still in the ignition. Though Kees had alluded days prior to picking up and moving to Mexico, none of his poetry, art, or criticism has ...

This book examines the political factors in the economic relationship between the European Union and China that help to explain the apparent stalling of the EU-China strategic partnership in policy terms. Written by two specialists with long experience of EU-China relations, this new volume draws on the latest research on how each side has emerged from the economic crisis and argues that promising potential for EU-China cooperation is being repeatedly undermined by political obstacles on b...

This audiobook narrated by John Telfer gives the definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the MuqaddimaIbn Khaldun (1332–1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should ...

How the discovery of the Rosetta Stone led to new ways of thinking about language: "A brilliant new interpretation of major 19th-century American writers." —J. Hillis MillerThe discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century American writers and provided a focal point for their speculations on the relationships between sign, symbol, language, and meaning. Through fresh readings ...

A personal interpretation of one of America’s most important writers.“Fitzgerald’s work has always deeply moved me,” writes John T. Irwin. “And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions when I first read each of his novels; remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to something going on in my life at that moment. Be...

Honorable Mention, Literature, 2012 PROSE Awards, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers2012 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice MagazineIn one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio,” comparing—misspelling and all—the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to...

The noted literary critic delves into the psychology and significance of American hardboiled crime fiction and film noir of the 1930s and '40s.Early in the twentieth century, American crime novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler put forward a new kind of character: the "hard-boiled" detective, as exemplified by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Unlike the analytical detectives of nineteenth-century fiction, these new detectives encountered case...