Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"I think that that is what the teachers should be saying and doing. They should be spelling it out. They should be telling the parents, “If you want me to teach, fight for my wages, and fight for my time. Fight for the facilities, and fight for the children to have instruments to play in band and things like that, on school time, with school money.” You know, we want to give these children an education that really fits them to have a happy life, not fits them to be a repressed individual at the service of the state…I think that something similar has happened with nurses – and nurses are fighting to take care of patients…They’re not only fighting that they’re overworked and underpaid. They’re fighting so that they can take the proper care of the patients. You know, one of the nurses was complaining to me that his boss on the ward says that, “You spend too much time with the patients. If you have to go bandage a leg, just bandage a leg, but then you sit and talk with them, and that’s no good!” So, I think there’s a real crisis – this is in general – between us carers and those who exploit us. On the one hand, we want to care. But on the other hand, we don’t want that wish to care to be used against us as workers. And we have always to decide, as carers, as teachers, as nurses, as mothers, as neighbors, we have to decide how to defend our caring but not allow ourselves to be exploited because we have this “weakness,” and in fact, this vulnerability is the right word. We have to say, “You have to pay us to do the right thing.” And we don’t take the little bit that [either] we want to do the right thing, or we want to take the money. We want both. That’s really crucial, and it took a lot of years, I think, to be absolutely clear, to be able to say that in that succinct way because it’s very hard to figure out, if you are a carer, if your work is the health and well-being of other people, how to be dedicated to it but not exploited, not allow yourself to be exploited by it."

"identity politics: I have been exploited and therefore I have a right to exploit her, her, him, and him. That's identity politics. I have ambition and I have a right to fulfill my ambition at her expense, her expense, her expense and her expense, because I have been exploited. And when we finish with Zionism, which indeed we will, then we will also have finished with the most crass form of identity politics, the one which allows those who have suffered - or in this case the descendants of the sufferers to claim the right to exploit, kill and maim without limit"

"It is quite important that we look at our habits and see that they conform to our principles, not the other way around."

"(AG: you have said you can’t confront the American state spontaneously.) SJ: You always spontaneously react against the American state. You know, it is one of the most brutal ever in history. But on the other hand, you must organize against it. Spontaneity is not enough. Spontaneity is the basis on which you organize. And the question that C. L. R. James posed all those years ago is still our question: how do you organize in a way that does not prevent the spontaneity and the experience and the outpouring of all that you feel and think? You know, organization has tended to be a kind of repression, in spite of the fact that you’re going for liberation. And how do you form an organization that is not a repression, that is a discipline that demands accountability, but does not repress either your experience or your ideas or your spontaneous responses? That’s what we’ve been addressing for 40 years. This month is the 40th anniversary of the Wages for Housework Campaign, so I’ve spent 40 years of my life doing this. I’ve learned an enormous amount from others and with others."

"women’s struggles are labor politics, but they’re unwaged labor politics. And they’re not less important or more important but integral to the entire picture. There is waged work in the society, and there is unwaged work in the society, and they’re both absolutely crucial to the accumulation of capital and to its destruction."

"It’s time to acknowledge James’s path-breaking analysis: from 1972 she reinterpreted the capitalist economy to show that it rests on the usually invisible unwaged caring work of women."

"The August sun beat down, baking, broiling, burning."

"… a beside the sparkling Rio Bajo Chiquero? Not everyone agrees that a ’s chief function is to conserve , species, ecosystems, and natural beauty, The possibilities made me cringe."

"I developed from being a lister of birds and es to an investigator of ecosystems, and as a natural outgrowth, becoming a and protector of wildlife and ."

"During my morning trek, two of the striking differences between and s became evident. Any 5 s around my cabin in the , or in New England woods, may have 10 to 12 kinds of trees growing; yet, here in the same-sized area, an average of 200 species can be found!"

"Dr was, in her words, a part-time . She died 1 July 2011, and her last name calls to , a celebration of independence. A wildlife ecologist, writer and photographer, she built her own 12x12 cabin on after her divorce in 1964. She chronicled her life and research in more than a dozen books, including the Woodswoman series. ... Her work remains relatively unknown in the male-dominated landscape, but I believe a copy of Woodswoman belongs next to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in a library. If you’re looking for a real declaration of independence, and a deeper social experiment, try a woman living alone in the for decades."

"Her reach as an environmentalist extended to Guatemala, where she had discovered the flightless bird known as the at while leading nature tours in 1960. When LaBastille returned five years later to study the rare bird, its population had declined by 50%. She wrote her doctoral dissertation for Cornell on the plight of the grebe, or “poc” as the bird was known locally, and spent 24 years campaigning to save it. She persuaded the Guatemalan government to make the grebe’s habitat a wildlife refuge, launched educational programs and wrote about the doomed bird in her 1990 book “Mama Poc,” the nickname local residents gave her."

"The history of the Church is full of examples, to prove that no austerity of life, no detachment from worldly goods, is a safeguard against spiritual pride."

"As I became more tuned into trees, I began to admire the enormous near the path to the . I even oriented the entrance of the outhouse so that I could gaze at this tall, furrowed tree while sitting there. It was much better than reading ."

"In spite of the obstacles a few female artists persisted and gave us some wonderful scenes depicting beauty, , and primitive western life. Among these we might mention (1880's), (1800's), Mary Elizabeth Achey (1860–1885), and (1885–?)."

"‘It is a truth universally admitted that we all speak badly of others, even of those of whom we may in fact be quite fond.’ You have to warm to a historian who is prepared to embed such a sentiment in the midst of a learned treatise about the ."

"Miner is a writer of reach, audacity, range, uniquely important to understanding our time... She gives us the beat of everyday urban life""

"There are engagingly troublesome undercurrents to much of Stansky’s writing. Again and again he portrays formidably endowed characters struggling to encapsulate and communicate what they believed to be the feelings of those less privileged than themselves."

"I am not saying that working-class men started that war. But a number of them were complicit in fighting it. The rhetoric of Vietnam, particularly in the last five years, has made all of the soldiers heroes. Not just survivors, but heroes. And I don't think that's true, and that's one of the things that has led us into further aggression in the Middle East and in Central America. So there is some urgency in confronting this...To say that working-class men during that war were heroes and to exonerate them is the worst kind of castration. It's taking all their power and all their culpability away from them. In the book I am trying to look at working-class protest against the war and support of the war. One of the things that really bothers me is that often working-class lives are presented as having no choices."

"I feel as if I've been trespassing my whole life in one way or another: Literally trespassing, as someone who has lived abroad a lot and traveled widely; but trespassing morally, in the sense that I've made some unconventional choices in my life and, although I certainly am not a practicing Catholic anymore, I still have echoes of a Catholic conscience that tell me that I'm trespassing. I'm also trespassing in the sense of being from the working class and moving into a middle-class environment; and trespassing in the sense of transgressing literary conventions because that book plays with a lot of different forms."

"I have come to depend upon Valerie Miner as an uncommonly honest novelist, humorous, acute, and kind."

"I care a lot about accessible prose. People often fail to see the subtlety in a sentence that has been honed, worked, and reworked, unless it's written by Ernest Hemingway and has a penis in it."

"I didn't actually intend to write a murder mystery when I wrote Murder in the English Department. That's just what happened when these people got together. Every book is, in some sense, a mystery."

"We also should develop an international consciousness of our work as writers - that's crucial to our own individual welfare and to the kind of imaginative collectivity that I mentioned."

"I'm very much an Irish Republican, in the sense that I believe that the troops should be out of the north and that the north should be part of Eire."

"One of the reasons I became a writer was to try to develop some kind of empathy for my fellow human beings. If I'm always writing about the same kinds of people, I'm not going to get very far."

"to have a steady diet of American writers is like eating Rice Krispies for 365 days; it is boring. I find international literature appealing because, as a writer, I'm curious about place and find it provocative to see what people do with place. I'm very interested in rhythms in language, in seeing and hearing on the page how people write English differently. And, of course, it's fascinating to see how translators translate into English differently."

"for me, being out as a lesbian has to do with honesty and the vitality I get from honesty. It isn't a moral act or a question of conscience so much as it's a way of engaging more fully in the world by being who I am. In some sense, coming out as a lesbian writer is a process of discovery, a journey, just as coming out as a writer from a working-class family or coming out as an American writer [she laughs]. And it's something that continually surprises me with new dimensions."

"the literature that we read in the late sixties--I graduated from university in 1969--was really British literature by middle-class or upper-class white men. My people, working-class people, were not represented in the material I was reading."

"I think this American reflex judgment that if you write political fiction you are writing didactic fiction is funny because I see my fiction as the opposite. I see myself as somebody who is learning as I write, motivated, mostly, by questions. For me the process of writing a novel is to be thinking about the questions."

"As a writer, I still strongly identify as a worker, partially as a consequence of working with those other people [the co-editors of her first two books] and partially as a result of my class background. I see my work emerging from some kind of imaginative collectivity, not from solitary genesis."

"I still want to change the world, and if my political principles have remained steady, the belief in my own powers has shifted. Now I can say that the goal of my stories is understanding. As I grow less prescriptive, I hope to become more receptive."

"My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction. (2021)"

"As a feminist, I want to involve readers in the story and give them time to pause, reflect, argue, and engage."

"I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn."

"History shows that often artists first envision the change feminist activists seek to bring about."

"I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”"

"Literature is the story of our many and diverse lives—in fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Unfortunately, women’s books are much less likely to get published then men’s books. They are much less likely to be reviewed then men’s books."

"... In such strange homes as the and the , or the deserts of Utah and southern California, we find the oddest desert plants, forced to curious expedients in order to sustain life amidst almost perpetual heat and , but often displaying blossoms of such brilliance and delicacy that they might well be envied by their more fortunate sisters, flourishing beside shady waterfalls, in a "happy valley" like , or a splendid mountain garden, such as spreads in many-colored parterres of bloom around the feet of . On the wind-swept plains hundreds of flowers are to be found; many kinds of hardy plants brighten the salty margins of the sea cliffs, or bloom at the edge of the snow on rocky mountain peaks, while quantities of humble, everyday flowers border our country roadsides or tint the hills and meadows with lavish color."

"Our are less common with us than the seems to be throughout northern and western Europe. The note of our birds is less peculiar, and therefore it does not seem to have attracted much popular attention. Many intelligent people are acquainted neither the appearance nor the notes of the two species common in the northeastern States. It is therefore not remarkable that our folk-lore should be almost destitute of the wealth of significance attached to the European cuckoo as a fortune-teller, a weather-prophet, a magical creature which can change into a hawk, an immortal and omniscient being."

"It was a time when fashion was permitted to walk hand in hand with piety. All the fashionable accomplishments were taught by experts at . Fanny's contralto voice was well trained. She acquired enough Italian to read ',' a little Latin, even a little . Her Parisian accent soon became the envy of the other English girls ..."

"Briggle. — To be in an uneasy mental condition, to shift the attention rapidly from one thing to another. “Don’t briggle so.” In common use in Ohio. —Fanny D. Bergen, Cambridge, Mass."

"... this story of the Kampong, Fairchild's home at the edge of the Florida tropics, is ... concerned with ... the introduction and cultivation of the many tropical and exotic fruits which he, as plant explorer extraordinary, had uncovered in his travels around the world. ... It is a readable book, full of reminiscencses and personalities, both plant and man. ... ... Fairchild has the rare faculty of making his readers share his experiences. The numerous photographs add to the book, giving form to the fruits with which he was worked, and the men—, , , and , to name a few—with whom he has been associated."

"... Our popular name of , doubtless arises from the giant size of some of these plants, and I am told that in Japan this prefix sometimes designates an unusually large species. For instance, a monstrous thistle is called devil-thistle. Also a large variety of the particular rhomboidal-shaped Chinese nuts called are popularly known in Japan as devil-hishi. However, with the Japanese as with us, devil may mean "armed," or uncanny in appearance, as the "devil-lotus," one with very prickly leaves. Our well-known , when cultivated in northern Ohio, is somewhat generally known as devil's tongue, which must seem a most fitting name to any one who has imprudently filled the tips of his fingers with the insinuating barbed bristles."

"... the months that followed 's must have been dreary enough. Fortunately, his new book—the one thing that had made the last year bearable—still provided some distraction for his thoughts. had just been published by . There were reviews to be read, copies must be sent to old friends. He had taken great pains with the looks of his "bantling" and was satisfied."

"Waite’s profound research into the nature and cause of the of the was spectacular and had far-reaching results. He had an incubator full of the pear blight organism, Bacillus amylovorus, and could produce the blight at will by dipping a needle into the culture and inserting it into the growing tip of a pear branch. He believed that bees carried the blight from infected flowers to healthy ones. Doctor Maxwell, a little country doctor of , challenged Waite to prove this on his trees. The results were disastrous! A short time after Waite inoculated the flowers on a few trees, Doctor Maxwell suddenly realized that the bees had spread the blight all over his orchard. He sent a frantic telegram to Washington, but there was little that could be done, for the disease had made such headway that Waite could not stop it. Waite next went South and there made another far-reaching discovery. In an immense orchard of s, the trees mysteriously failed to bear fruit. Waite managed to solve the problem, and returned to Washington in a great state of excitement. His discovery was that the Bartlett pear flower is practically sterile to its own pollen. Hence he found that the only fruit was on trees along the outer edge of the big orchard. He interpreted this phenomenon as indicating that the bees from near-by orchards of other varieties had brought foreign pollen and pollinated the first trees they came to. Basing his experiments on this assumption he proved that it was correct. It was a very real discovery, a precursor of what has now become a generally accepted principle of horticulture, the principle of mixed plantings."

"There were strange contrasts in the little microcosm which then constituted the . Some of the men seemed to be relics of a former era, still unaware of the tremendous strides which had taken place in the use of the microscope. In vivid contrast to these fossils, were such men as , whose laboratory adjoined mine up under the old mansard roof. Late one afternoon, long after most of the Department had gone home, I heard Theobold Smith’s light step behind me and his enthusiastic voice calling, “Fairchild, would you like to see the cause of ?” After months of work, he had just discovered the parasite in a drop of steer’s blood which he had taken from a cattle tick. It was a momentous discovery, the first of its kind. I had heard much about the terrific losses of cattle on the plains. Whenever herds of domestic cattle were driven from Texas to the slaughter houses in Chicago and Kansas City, they died by the hundreds if their paths happened to cross a trail made by the longhorn Texas cattle of the plains. Apparently the native Texas cattle were not susceptible to the fever themselves, but were passing it on somehow to their less fortunate brethren."

"As I sit under a giant tree on my terrace, the setting sun casts long shadows on the grass, and every now and then a yellow leaf falls to the ground. I see in memory the little red figs lying scattered around under a tree at the entrance to a planter’s house far up on the slopes of the , in the island of , not far from the village of Karang Pandan. Seventeen years ago, Marian and I spent a week-end in a little hotel there, and from the verandah we watched the rain storms come and go, while in the distance the smoking peaks of three volcanoes broke the horizon. Karang Pandan was a quiet, solitary place which the had chosen for his summer palace. Although the palace was closed, we could see the Sultan’s favorite tree in the patio, with every bunch of fruits in a little wicker basket that had been woven about it to keep away the es."

"In the field of medical science, the advent of the and have discredited the “” methods of a generation ago which lacked the factor of controls. The treated patient got well, but where was the untreated one? Maybe that case recovered also. And how about the hereditary set-up of resistance? The value of identical twins as offering material for control in medical experimentation is just beginning to be appreciated."

"I cannot help looking back to those early days spent in with a longing which amounts to nostalgia, for the place which seemed a fairyland to a youth in his twenties has acquired a halo to the man in his seventies. To a young man interested in nature it was then about the loveliest spot on the entire globe—a fairyland in which the quiet-voiced Javanese came and went softly. You did not hear their bare feet on the roadways; their costumes were the colors of autumn leaves that faded into the landscape; their meals of rice and fish and many kinds of vegetables were eaten noiselessly from wooden bowls, without a clatter of china; their thatched houses of bamboo seemed like playthings scattered picturesquely under the and trees in the tiny s; and the voices of children playing with crickets on the clean-swept dooryards mingled with the cooing of the in bamboo cages which hung from the overarching tips of bamboo poles beside the ."