Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I. In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the urban- and freedom-oriented impulse of the progressive architecture of the time. Leslie Topp considers the paradoxical position of designs that promoted an illusion of freedom even as they exercised careful social and spatial control over patients. In addition to discussing the physical and social aspects of these institutions, Topp shows how the commissioned buildings were symptomatic of larger cultural changes and of the modern asylum’s straining against its ideological anchorage in a premodern past of “unenlightened” restraint on human liberty. Working at the intersection of the history of architecture and the history of psychiatry, Freedom and the Cage broadens our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of modern architecture’s engagement with the state, with social and medical projects, and with mental health, psychiatry, and psychology.

A small-town shopkeeper in the Orange Free State points a revolver at the South African Prime Minister. He is detained and questioned, but his eccentric explanations fail to provide the police with the neat motive they are searching for and he is judged insane. Yet Ebon Prinsloo's gesture of violence is for him a kind of awakening - an awakening from the fantasies with which he has protected himself from a parochial community, a constricting marriage, indeed from the limitations of life itself. The inarticulate dissatisfactions he feels inside his ' cage of freedom' are typical of his society, and so too is the violence with which he tries to extricate himself. We explore the confused mind and conscience of Ebon Prinsloo. We share his commercial ambitions, his domestic difficulties, his day-dreams, his painful gropings towards thought, above all the crucially disturbing influence of the urbane Professor of Anthropology working on a nearby prehistoric site, whose patronising intrusion into his home does much to disturb his peace, and balance, of mind. To only one person, the Professor's wife, is the irony of Ebon Prinsloo's fate apparent: only she can see that the bewildered little shopkeeper is in fact a herald of the possible chaos to come. The story of Ebon Prinsloo and his neighbours is told with the same compassion and intensity that marked the author's last novel, The Grass Won't Grow Till Spring.

Do you know that it is possible to experience spiritual freedom even if you have been incarcerated for 20 or more years? Do you know that there is a relationship between spiritual freedom and a positive communication environment for inmates, where communication is usually guarded? Dr. Brenda S. Jackson explores the reality of spiritual freedom that exists for those in captivity. Despite common expressions of distrust, violence, and hostile communication in prison environments, Dr. Jackson provides a refreshing look into the lives of those who experience true freedom through trust, peace, and harmonious communications in contrast to their surroundings. If you or someone you love is incarcerated, this book will encourage you to embrace the same truth that the Apostle Paul of the bible experienced first hand. It is possible to experience Freedom in a Cage!

"The book is a comprehensive examination of John Cage's seminal Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It places the piece into its many contexts, examining its relationship with Cage's compositional practice of indeterminacy more generally, the importance of Cage's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, on the development of his structural thought, and the impact of Cage's (mis)understanding of jazz. It discusses, on the basis of Cage's sketches and manuscripts, the compositional process at play in the piece. It details the circumstances of the piece's early performances-often described as catastrophes-its recording and promotion, and the part it played in Cage's (successful) hunt for a publisher. It examines in detail the various ways in which Cage's pianist of choice, David Tudor, approached the piece, differing according to whether it was to be performed with an orchestra, alongside Cage delivering the lecture, 'Indeterminacy', or as a piano solo to accompany Merce Cunningham's choreography Antic Meet. It demonstrates the ways in which, despite indeterminacy, the instrumental parts of the piece are amenable to analytical interpretation, especially through a method which exposes the way in which those parts form a sort of network of statistical commonality and difference, analysing, too, the pianist's part, the Solo for Piano, on a similar basis, discussing throughout the practical consequences of Cage's notations for a performer. It shows the way in which the piece played a central role, first, in the construction of who Cage was and what sort of composer he was within the new musical world but, second, how it came to be an important example for professional philosophers in discussing what the limits of the musical work are"--

At the turn of the fourteenth century in Scotland, young Archie Forbes becomes involved with both William Wallace and Robert the Bruce in the struggle for Scottish independence from English rule.

"How Coppola Became Cage chronicles Nicolas Cage's early career and rise to fame, examining the formative performances that made him an icon of independent cinema in the 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing on more than 100 new interviews with Cage's collaborators-including filmmakers David Lynch, John Patrick Shanley, Mike Figgis, Martha Coolidge, and Amy Heckerling-this book offers a revealing portrait of Cage's origin story as a member of the Coppola family, his early roles in low-budget teen films, and his rise to stardom with memorable performances in cult films like Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, and Wild at Heart. The book examines how Cage drew on influences as eclectic as silent cinema and German Expressionism while displaying an intense commitment to his performances both on- and off-screen. The book demystifies the actor's onscreen eccentricities and argues that his commercial failures are as interesting as his successes. How Coppola Became Cage meticulously traces Cage's career from 1981, when he was a young drama student at Beverly Hills High, to 1995, when he gave an Oscar-winning performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas."--