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- Chautauquans Don't Want You to Buy This Book!
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Chautauqua
Jeffrey Simpson
Manufacturer: Harry N. Abrams
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Chautauqua Institution, 1874-1974 (Images of America: New York)
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The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 1874-1920 (Religion and American Culture)
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Chautauqua Lake Region (Images of America: New York)
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The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas
ASIN: 0810926083 |
Customer Reviews:
Chautauquans Don't Want You to Buy This Book!.......2000-08-02
An excellent, digestible description and history of the Chautauqua Institution. This book is filled with wonderful photos -- both current and archival -- and a succinct text describing the 126-year history of this remarkable cultural, recreational, educational and religious center. If you've experienced Chautauqua, it's a wonderful description of the ups and downs and ultimate success of this education-vacation community. If you've never been to this Western New York State landmark, read this book and start packing your bags.
Book Description
Thousands of men and a few women moved into the far western lands at the edge of the Great Lakes in the early eighteenth century. This is a tale of the time: an era marked by political intrigue, commercial exploitation, emerging technology, flourishing eroticism, and pursuit of power. The French had been on the lakes for a hundred and fifty years and the Dutch aristocrats still controlled the political power of the state. But a new world order emerged on the shores of the lakes. Men enjoyed many options, but women's options were limited by the law and customs.
Some women, however, achieved their aspirations within the sporting clubs that appeared in the late 17th century and flourished before being banned in 1844. These were the men and women who created the commerce, built the cities, and fostered the lifestyle that became America.
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When Stars And Stripes Met Hammer And Sickle: The Chautauqua Conferences on U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1985-1989
Ross MacKenzie
Manufacturer: University of South Carolina Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1570036357 |
Book Description
When Stars and Stripes Met Hammer and Sickle tells the story of face-to-face citizen diplomacy that brought together Americans and Soviets during the closing years of the cold war. Looking specifically at five conferences held between 1985 and 1989, Ross Mackenzie recounts the experiences of artists, diplomats, government officials, and interested citizens who joined together for a unique mix of political debates, artistic performances, open discussions, and socializing. Sponsored by the Chautauqua Institution, a center for arts, education, religion, and recreation in western New York, these conferences offer a snapshot of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union just before the collapse of the Soviet government in November 1989. The meetings also point to the promising future of people-to-people diplomacy. Mackenzie chronicles the history of the Chautauqua Institution since its founding in 1874 and its influence on American foreign policy! . He explains the traditional Chautauqua formula that provides citizens an opportunity to meet without great restraints on topics of discussion or interaction. Mackenzie suggests that these conferences, coming at the time of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, may have been both a measure of the reforms' success and a driving force in continuing their momentum.
Highlighting the imaginative, wide-ranging approach employed by Chautauqua, Mackenzie recounts the scope of topics discussed at the conferences, from nuclear weapons, women's issues, and global health care to American intervention in Latin America and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. He also identifies the cross section of people drawn to participate, from average citizens to individuals of international renown, including U.S. policymakers Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Nitze, violinist Eugene Fodor, poets Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, musicians Grover Washington Jr. and Tommy Cecil, and politicians Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro.
Average customer rating:
- Part history, part evaluation of the Circuit Chautauquas, the iterant branch of an adult education movement
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The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua in America (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture)
Charlotte M. Canning
Manufacturer: University Of Iowa Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1587295857 |
Book Description
Winner of the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre History
Between 1904 and the Great Depression, Circuit Chautauquas toured the rural United States, reflecting and reinforcing its citizens’ ideas, attitudes, and politics every summer through music (the Jubilee Singers, an African American group, were not always welcome in a time when millions of Americans belonged to the KKK), lectures (âCivic Revivalistâ Charles Zueblin speaking on âMilitancy and Moralsâ), elocutionary readers (Lucille Adams reading from Little Lord Fauntleroy), dramas (the Ben Greet Players’ cleaned-up version of She Stoops to Conquer), orations (William Jennings Bryan speaking about the dangers of greed), and special programs for children (parades and mock weddings).
âTheatre historians have largely ignored Circuit Chautauquas since they did not meet the conventional conditions of theatrical performance: they were not urban; they produced no innovative performance techniques, stage material, design effects, or dramatic literature. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Charlotte Canning establishes an analytical framework to reveal the Circuit Chautauquas as unique performances that both created and unified small-town America.
âOne of the last strongholds of the American traditions of rhetoric and oratory, the Circuits created complex intersections of community, American democracy, and performance. Canning does not celebrate the Circuit Chautauquas wholeheartedly, nor does she describe them with the same cynicism offered by Sinclair Lewis. She acknowledges their goals of community support, informed public thinking, and popular education but also focuses on the reactionary and regressive ideals they sometimes embraced. In the true interdisciplinary spirit of Circuit Chautauquas, she reveals the Circuit platforms as places where Americans performed what it meant to be American.
Customer Reviews:
Part history, part evaluation of the Circuit Chautauquas, the iterant branch of an adult education movement.......2007-06-09
Winner of the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre History, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance by Charlotte M. Canning (professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas, Austin) is part history, part evaluation of the Circuit Chautauquas, the iterant branch of an adult education movement created to spread culture and entertainment across America, particularly isolated rural areas. The Chautauquas flourished, despite some conflicts - their African-American members were in danger when they toured areas rife with KKK members and sympathizers - filling a much-needed role until the Great Depression, when the rise of radio and movies eclipsed them. Their performances included lectures, music, occasional political debate, and much more. Theatre historians have long neglected the Circuit Chautauquas because they didn't quite fit the mold of established theatre; Canning seeks to remedy this omission through an in-depth history examining not only the Circuit Chautauquas as performers, but also as facilitators of American community and democracy. Highly recommended.
Book Description
A close look at the traveling tent style entertainment that originated at Chautauqua Lake, New York.
Book Description
In The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas, James Schultz offers a unique pictorial study of a cultural movement that started in 1904 and spread across the country. For almost thirty years, tent shows known as "chautauquas" brought popular education and entertainment to small towns in America from coast to coast. With more than one hundred photographs and other illustrations from the era, the book presents a captivating overview of the tent chautauqua movement from its inception to its demise in 1932.
These traveling chautauquas-which were an outgrowth of the lyceum movement-evolved in the early part of the twentieth century. Keith Vawter, owner of the Chicago branch of the Redpath Lyceum, came up with an idea that would bring to rural America the same quality of lectures and other forms of entertainment that were available through the lyceum. His concept was a circuit of traveling tents that moved from town to town. Vawter named his traveling circuits "chautauquas," modeling them after the Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State, an intellectual community with summerlong programs of lectures, seminars, and workshops. Tent chautauquas offered a variety of cultural events by politicians, writers, and theologians, filling a void in the lives of rural residents who did not have access to the array of talent available to city dwellers.
The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas contains many previously unpublished photographs that reflect the styles and customs of a bygone era, as well as photos and anecdotes about many people of prominence who toured as speakers or entertainers. These included individuals such as President Warren G. Harding, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, journalist and historian Ida Tarbell, poet Carl Sandburg, and many others.
Schultz utilizes the existing literature on chautauquas, but he contributes much new information from the files of his father and uncle, both of whom were involved in the management of the Redpath Chautauquas, as well as interviews he conducted with individuals who remember attending chautauqua performances.
Customer Reviews:
Enchanting!.......2003-07-03
This book is absolutely enchanting. The descriptions are wonderful, bringing great images into my head of how things must have been like. Honestly it's quite the real life description through part of America's history. J.R. Schultz does justice to the Chautauquas. Certainly a wonderful addition to any bookshelf. Great cover art as well!
Average customer rating:
- mixed
- A great read
- The Guy Can Write
- Got insomnia? Here is the cure.
- Wish I were back at the bookstore about to blow $14 on this book
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Wish You Were Here
Stewart O'Nan
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Speed Queen
ASIN: 0802117155 |
Amazon.com
A deep, poignant study of a family fighting its inner demons awaits in Stewart O'Nan's Wish You Were Here. A year after the death of her husband, Emily Maxwell gathers her immediate family together at their summer home on Lake Chautauqua in western New York for a final sendoff and to dole out keepsakes before the new owners move in. Joining Emily is her daughter, Meg, fresh from rehab and upset over her imminent divorce, and Meg's children: the emotionally unstable Justin, and Sarah, a teenage beauty learning to use her charms. Ken, Emily's fortyish slacker son, and his wife, Lisa, also bunk down for the week, bringing along their two kids: the troubled Sam, and Ella, a plain, smart girl who finds herself with a crush on her cousin, Sarah.
O'Nan has a gift for voicing the inner fears that motivate and stifle us, and his characters move and act as members of a polite society--a family even. Yet each is distinctly alone, with voices and turmoil raging inside. The tension between the characters is keenly drawn, and O'Nan perceptively captures the snippets of thought and memory that follow us around. Ken notes "he assumed more than he knew, not only about the world--whose workings would remain closed, forever a mystery--but even those closest to him." Emily, while preparing dinner, finds her late husband's bottle of scotch, and imbibes:
She went to the window over the sink and held it up to the light, long now and mote-struck, casting shadows under the chestnut, firing an amber glow in her hand.... She looked around the kitchen again as if she'd forgotten something but couldn't find what it was.
Wish You Were Here is an excellent character study of a family grudgingly plodding forward while believing the best chance for happiness passed by sometime ago. --Michael Ferch
Book Description
Award-winning writer Stewart O'Nan has been acclaimed by critics as one of today's most accomplished novelists and hailed by The New York Times as "a master of voices and the place they resonate from, of human rhythms and the universal rhythms they cut across." Now, with Wish You Were Here, he reaches a new level of achievement, weaving together the lives and desires of three generations of an American family gathered together for one final summer week at their summer cottage. A year after the death of her husband, Henry, Emily Maxwell summons her family to their vacation house on Lake Chautauqua, in western New York, one last time before selling the place. Joining her is her sister-in-law Arlene, a retired schoolteacher who silently mourns the passing of the lake house from her family's hands and is still wounded from a love lost long ago. Emily's firebrand daughter, Meg, a recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, brings her children from Detroit -- the blossoming Sarah and the timid Justin. Emily's son, Ken, a struggling photographer who quit his job and mortgaged his future to pursue his art, brings his wife, Lisa, who is secretly heartened to be visiting the house for the last time -- and not-so-secretly cool to her prickly mother-in-law -- and their children, the bookish Ella and the troubled Sam. With honesty and generosity, O'Nan inhabits each character during the course of their week together, illuminating the many lives of the Maxwell family as memories of past summers resurface, old rivalries flare up, and love is rekindled and born anew. Poignant and resonant, Wish You Were Here is a magical book whose beauties are as moving as a summer storm and as brilliant as the glint of sun on water.
Customer Reviews:
mixed.......2007-09-07
i loved this while i was reading it. his writing is great, the dialogue perfect. he captures those unspoken dramas that define the way a family funtions. you relate to it and feel the pressure of the passing of time, so slow, especially on the rainy days. you feel that claustrophobia. my only disappointment was by the ending. i was waiting for some small change - the book jacket promises a rekindling of love - and that never happens.
A great read.......2006-09-25
This book follows the week in a the life of a family, who are at their cottage on Lake Chautauqua, NY for the last time. The patriarch of the family died the previous winter after a long illness and the matriarch decided to sell the camp--and no one stopped her (not even her sister-in-law, whose family owned the camp). O'Nan takes us day by long day through the family vacation--brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and mothers and mothers-in-law and estranged husbands and dead husbands. The whole lot of it.
You know how it is. You've been trapped into these yearly family things that everyone dreads and yet trudges to nonetheless. You know the lure of nostalgia, the childish desire to have everything stay as it once was, to never change. And you know how when you are back as a group with your siblings, you all fall into those familiar roles again.
With this book you walk through those sad pages of your life when things are coming to an end, changing. When you realize that you have not trapped your childhood or your children's childhood in amber. People die. Things change. Bridges are erected which obscure a once lovely view.
What's brilliant about this book is that you are completely sucked into these seemingly mundane days (oh! When it rains and you're all crammed inside the camp. The strange sulfur smell of the water. Taking long car trips to tourist destinations when all you want to do is be alone with your book) and you actually feel the claustrophobia of the situation. And you feel too the sad hope of some of the people that this week would never end and for others that it would hurry up and end.
Nostalgia. We live for it. We live with it. Some of us live nostalgically each day, wishing to have the light on the floor back from the morning, much in the same way does the son, Ken--always looking to find the perfect shot, the right moment to capture before they all slip away.
The Guy Can Write.......2006-08-11
This is the third and by far the longest O'Nan book I've read. As with the first two, this book is written beautifully. O'Nan definately has chops as a writer and each sentence is crafted with competancy. This being said, Wish You Were Here leaves something to be desired. In this case depth and satisfaction, which seems an odd thing to say about a book of this length. All the characters have interesting aspects to their lives that could have been fleshed out to a more satisfying conclusion. But O'Nan chooses to leave all issues unresolved. This may be because he seeks realism in his work and the truth is that a lot of life is unresolved. So if a reader is looking for escapism or (Geez, I hate this word but here goes) closure, he would be wise to look elsewhere. If the reader want a slice of life that rings very true and is well delivered, than this book may be a worthwhile venture.
Got insomnia? Here is the cure........2006-06-06
Worst book I've read in a very long time. There is no story. Don't wait for it, as I did, slogging through 500 pages. If you randomly chose three generations of people and put them in a cabin for a week and then read their diaries, it would be more interesting and probably more cohesive than this prescription-strength sleeping pill. I'm just glad these people sold their cottage so I won't run into any of them at Chautauqua!
Wish I were back at the bookstore about to blow $14 on this book.......2006-06-05
This is the book that makes you wonder why zero stars isn't an option.
Endless and needless battles with ants in the mailbox. Chapter after chapter, unacted upon longings of one cousin for her female cousin. Continuous attempts to decide what kind of set up would make a good picture. A could-be murder thrown in for absolutely no reason. Exhausting descriptions of everything from loading a dishwasher to how to fold toilet paper so one assures he's wiped well.
What does this all have to do with this book? Absolutely nothing except without it, the story would have taken about 50 pages rather than 500 plus.
This book had every right to be a great novel. It's set in a beautiful location, there's a great idea in the one of a widow and her family going to visit their lake cottage for the final time. Yet, the characters aren't developed, don't grow from page one to 500 one iota and the reader wonders why, if the family hates one another so much, they've vacationed together for 20 years, let alone want to keep the cottage in their family for future use.
Emily, the widow, her sister-in-law Arlene, who I wonder why doesn't have control of the cottage in the first place, since it's been in her family and Emily just married into it, and Emily's children, Ken and Meg, Ken's wife and four grandkids go to Chautauqua one last time to divide all the loot in the cottage... don't worry, before the 500-plus pages are over you'll know every last trinket in the place.
Meg, going through divorce and a former boozer now pot-head, is apparently the only person with the spine to ask about keeping the cottage everyone else seems to want to keep. She folds when mom offers to pick up the tab for her bills for her and Meg decides that's good enough, she'll tell the folks about it -- over the phone -- after she gets home to Detroit. She goes back to her bag of pot. Ken, who either lacks the talent or energy to take a picture, spends most of the book looking through a lens to get a good shot. Ken's wife, who the author can't decide whether to call Lise or Lisa, spends most of the book talking to herself or under her breath and competing for Ken's attention from the camera and his sister. All the kids are treated like dirt. One's a thief, one seems to be a lesbian, one is a wuss and the other will soon be a tramp. Rufus, the dog, who is probably the most redeeming character of the whole tale, is also treated like garbage.
In the beginning, we load up our cars and head to the Lake. In the middle, we eat, get the runs and visit some landmarks and fight with ants. In the end, we load up the car and head home.
This book is terrible. I finished it because I thought something had to be resolved. It wasn't.
Book Description
The period from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s is fondly remembered as the heyday of the Chautauqua Lake region in southwestern New York State. It was a wondrous era, when railroads, steamboats, and trolleys transported local residents as well as wealthy and socially prominent families from Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, and St. Louis to their summertime destinations around Chautauqua Lake. ÝÝShowcased in Chautauqua Lake Region are not only adjacent lakeside communities, industries, and occupations of the residents but also the exceptional natural beauty of the lake itself, its importance to early navigation, its recreational attributes, and its overall allure as a tourist mecca. This ìpocket museumî focuses on the myriad attractions that once dotted the lakeís forty-two-mile shoreline: hotels, parks, camps, picnic groves, rowing clubs, boat liveries, fish hatcheries, icehouses, railroad and trolley depots, and steamboat landings. ÝÝ
Average customer rating:
- A treasure trove of wearable art/pieced clothing techniques!
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Wearable Art for Real People
Mary Mashuta
Manufacturer: C&T Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Textile Arts
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ASIN: 0914881248 |
Customer Reviews:
A treasure trove of wearable art/pieced clothing techniques!.......2001-07-07
I love the idea of "wearable art" and one-of-a-kind fashion, and Mary Mashuta's book really fits into that niche.
Mashuta's book is a compendium of instructions and design ideas for creating clothing using the patchwork and piecing techniques normally associated with quilting. Her designs and methods (as photographed in the book) produce clothing a little funkier and "ethnic" than much of what I've seen; usually when quilting techniques are adapted to clothing, the results have a kind of "Little House on the Prairie" look to them, in my opinion.
Mashuta generally relies on simple geometric shapes and works her art in the folding, piecing and decorative stitching. Many of the clothing designs she has worked up for this book seem to be borrowed from classic Asian styles.
Although I like a lot of what's offered in this book, much of it is fairly complex; there are not a lot of smaller projects featured here. Theoretically, a crafter could adapt the techniques to smaller projects, but the novice might have trouble envisioning how to do this.
I do like the clothing pictured in the book, but many of the colors have gray or brown undertones and don't really excite the reader like some other more vividly photographed needlework books. While I find myself coming back to this book time and again for ideas (and I will continue to), it's not one of my favorites. I'd definitely recommend this for the serious crafter or creative sewer; I would not recomment this book for someone with little needlework experience.
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