UH Press author, Victor Mair, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania has been featured in SAS Frontiers. Read the full interview https://www.sas.upenn.edu/series/frontiers/even-pace here.
Author: uhpressnews
Five Dollar Friday Sale on August 23 / Five Titles for $5 Each
Our next Five Dollar Friday Sale will take place August 23, from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. the next morning (HST). Check out these titles ahead to get ready for the $5/book offer, good only on our website, while supplies last:
- Sue Cowing’s Fire in the Sea: An Anthology of Poetry and Art
- Oishi Matashichi’s The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon and I
- Richard McMahon’s Adventuring in Hawai`i, Revised Edition
- Jenichiro Oyabe’s A Japanese Robinson Crusoe
- Scott Clark’s Japan, A View from the Bath
Latest in KLEAR Integrated Korean text series
This book accompanies KLEAR’s Integrated Korean text series. It contains nearly 1,000 activities on 160 of the most commonly used grammar patterns for beginning and intermediate levels, all sorted by alphabetical order, as well as topics for comprehensive grammar instruction using an interactive approach. Nearly 40 practical activities and lesson ideas for advanced levels are also included. These activities are sorted by skill orientation (e.g., speaking-oriented, reading-oriented, etc.), which will allow them to be used with any Korean-language textbook published in the U.S., Korea, or elsewhere.
A Resource for Korean Grammar Instruction is divided into two main parts: 1) activities by forms for beginning and intermediate levels; and 2) activities by skill for more advanced levels. The first part includes greetings and Hangul, sentence endings, clausal endings, other suffixes, particles, and more. The second covers vocabulary-oriented activities, speaking/listening activities, reading-oriented activities, and writing-oriented activities. Supplementary instructional materials such as Power Point presentations, video clips, photos and images, and sample quizzes are available free for download at www.kleartextbook.com under the Instructor section after a simple login. Instructors who teach Korean as a foreign language in colleges, secondary schools, and community schools and even as private tutors will welcome this easy-to-use book.
2013, 440 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8248-3816-4, Cloth $55.00
KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language
Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in Oceania
Tobacco kills 5 million people every year and that number is expected to double by the year 2020. Despite its enormous toll on human health, tobacco has been largely neglected by anthropologists. Drinking Smoke combines an exhaustive search of historical materials on the introduction and spread of tobacco in the Pacific with extensive anthropological accounts of the ways Islanders have incorporated this substance into their lives. In Drinking Smoke, the idea of a syndemic is applied to the current health crisis in the Pacific, where the number of deaths from coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease continues to rise, and the case is made that smoking tobacco in the form of industrially manufactured cigarettes is the keystone of the contemporary syndemic in Oceania.
Drinking Smoke is the first book-length examination of the damaging tobacco syndemic in a specific world region. It is a must-read for scholars and students of anthropology, Pacific studies, history, and economic globalization, as well as for public health practitioners and those working in allied health fields. More broadly the book will appeal to anyone concerned with disease interaction, the social context of disease production, and the full health consequences of the global promotional efforts of Big Tobacco.
2013, 312 pages, 21 illustrations, 4 maps; ISBN: 978-0-8248-3685-6, Cloth $54.00
The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan
Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre–World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan’s modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance.
This work corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). A study of impressive historical and disciplinary breadth, The Aesthetics of Strangeness also makes extensive use of primary sources, many previously overlooked in existing English scholarship. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy. By wedding art history to intellectual history, literature, aesthetics, and cultural practice, W. Puck Brecher strives for a broadly interdisciplinary perspective on this topic. The Aesthetics of Strangeness demystifies this emergent paradigm by illuminating the conditions and tensions under which certain rubrics of strangeness— ki and kyō particularly—were appointed as aesthetic criteria. Its revision of early modern Japanese culture constitutes an important contribution to the field.
2013, 272 pages, 26 illustrations; ISBN: 978-0-8248-3666-5, Cloth $42.00
The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle
André Bareau (1921–1993) was one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation. Dissatisfied with piecemeal and contradictory information on early Buddhist schools, he set out to construct a coherent and authoritative overview, which has remained the standard treatment in the field since its appearance in 1955. This book offers a close description and analysis of Bareau’s findings on the history, geographical whereabouts, and doctrinal positions of early schools of Buddhism. The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle will be used by students and scholars as a primary resource and starting point for any discussion on the history and doctrines of early Buddhism and Buddhist schools. This seminal work is translated by Sara Boin-Webb, who across a career of four decades translated into English some of the most important French-language works of Buddhist scholarship.
“Bareau’s Les sectes bouddhiques was—and remains—a highly influential contribution to the study of Indian Buddhism in general, and of the doctrinal debates of the various schools or sects of Indian Buddhism in particular. More than half a century after its original publication, Les sectes remains a standard reference work. . . . This book will stimulate research for years to come. . . . A reliable English translation of this work, then, is a welcome and timely contribution. It will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate students in Asian religions, Asian history, and philosophy. It will be required reading for graduate students in Asian religions.” —Shayne Clarke, McMaster University
Published in association with The Buddhist Society Trust
July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3566-8 / $65.00 (Cloth)
