Books by "Paul H. Scudder"

8 books found

Man in the Landscape

Man in the Landscape

by Paul Shepard

2010 · University of Georgia Press

A pioneering exploration of the roots of our attitudes toward nature, Paul Shepard's most seminal work is as challenging and provocative today as when it first appeared in 1967. Man in the Landscape was among the first books of a new genre that has elucidated the ideas, beliefs, and images that lie behind our modern destruction and conservation of the natural world. Departing from the traditional study of land use as a history of technology, this book explores the emergence of modern attitudes in literature, art, and architecture--their evolutionary past and their taproot in European and Mediterranean cultures. With humor and wit, Shepard considers the influence of Christianity on ideas of nature, the absence of an ethic of nature in modern philosophy, and the obsessive themes of dominance and control as elements of the modern mind. In his discussions of the exploration of the American West, the establishment of the first national parks, and the reactions of pioneers to their totally new habitat, he identifies the transport of traditional imagery into new places as a sort of cultural baggage.

SUBVERSIVE GENEALOGY

SUBVERSIVE GENEALOGY

by Michael Paul Rogin

2013 · Knopf

In this major reconsideration of Herman Melville’s life and work, Michael Paul Rogin shows that Melville’s novels are connected both to the important issues of his time and to the exploits of his patrician and politically prominent family—which, three generations after its Revolutionary War heroes, produced an alcoholic, a bankrupt, and a suicide. Rogin argues that a history of Melville’s fiction, and of the society represented in it, is also a history of the writer’s family. He describes how that family first engaged Melville in and then isolated him from American political and social life. Melville’s brother and father-in-law are shown to link Moby-Dick to the crisis over expansion and slavery. White-Jacket and Billy Budd, which concern shipboard conflicts between masters and seamen, are related to an execution at sea in which Melville’s cousin played a decisive part. The figure of Melville’s father haunts The Confidence Man, whose subject is the triumph of the marketplace and the absence of authority. A provocative study of one of our supreme literary artists.

The Power of the Land

The Power of the Land

by Paul Robertson

2018 · Routledge

Power of the Land is the first in-depth look at the past 120 years of struggle over the Oglala Lakota land base on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Listen to Your Day

Listen to Your Day

by Paul Angone

2023 · Baker Books

What are you supposed to do with your life? What deserves your limited reserve of energy, attention, and time? What's making you anxious or frustrated right now? What would make you happy and fulfilled? The world is shouting its answers to these questions, but the real answers are quieter--and right in front of you. They are in the details of your day, every day. But we usually look right past them. Or we are simply so distracted we've lost the ability to see and hear the life going on right in front of us. If we're not intentional about changing this trend, this "inattentional blindness" can rob us of years of joyful productivity. But when we learn to observe the details of our days, we discover new lenses through which to see and new practices of paying attention that add meaning to life. Stop drifting. Stop worrying. Stop living distracted. Walk purposefully through life with a firm grasp on what's important to you and what you're working toward--all by listening to the details of your day.