Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 - Humanities — Language & Literature — Romance

Replete with poetry and prose quotes from the work of this 1980 Polish Nobelist, Franaszek's judiciously abridged, superbly translated biography of Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) reads like a fascinating historical novel. The translators contextualize the monumental biography (the original Polish edition, published in 2011, ran to almost 1,000 pages) with editorial notes, a chronology of Milosz's life in terms of "contemporaneous political and historical events," and their own translations of the poet's works. Introductory incisive analysis of Milosz's 1943 poem "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" demonstrates the translators' considerable talent. Milosz's works affirm the poet's task, to testify to what one has witnessed and experienced. The book examines Milosz's fluctuating psychological state, his unfortunate political allegiances (as cultural attache of the then-communist Polish government), his correspondence with English and Polish master poets (and world literati), his immigration to the US and appointment to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Nobel Prize. Milosz's life is emblematic of other lives in a 20th-century Central Europe: Poland was marked by war and communism and by the Solidarity uprising that culminated in the restoration of freedom. Detailed references translated from the original make this biography required reading.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Relying on an impressive amount of on-site research, this is the first book to compare the anti-colonial literature of Chechnya, Dagestan, and Georgia. Gould (Univ. of Bristol, UK) examines the aestheticization of violence in the literatures of the Caucasus from the 19th century to the Soviet period. Her analysis centers on what she terms transgressive sanctity, i.e., an aesthetic consciousness that arises in vacuums of legal authority when states impose power and law on unwilling populations. Gould argues that within the Chechen, Dagestani, Georgian, and Russophone modernities on which she focuses, transgressive sanctity is most fully realized in the figure of the abrek, an outcast-bandit who epitomizes the realities and paradoxes of the state of transgressive sanctity. Chapter 1, for instance, looks at the abrek in Soviet Chechen literature, demonstrating how colonial violence and insurgency shaped the literary modes of the region and served as a foundation for literary and cultural heroes of modernism. Chapter 4 moves from literature to the lived social realities of colonial and postcolonial violence--specifically, to the gendered spaces of transgressive societies and how female activism and insurgency are coded and aestheticized. Including a number of helpful images and tables, this is an excellent introduction to the literature and politics of the Caucasus.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.