Highlighting one of the Peabody Museum's most important archaeological expeditions—the excavation of the Swarts Ranch Ruin in southwestern New Mexico by Harriet and Burton Cosgrove in the mid-1920s—Steven LeBlanc's book features rare, never-before-published examples of Mimbres painted pottery, considered by many scholars to be the most unique of all the ancient art traditions of North America. Made between A.D. 1000 and 1150, these pottery bowls and jars depict birds, fish, insects, and mammals that the Mimbres encountered in their daily lives, portray mythical beings, and show humans participating in both ritual and everyday activities. LeBlanc traces the origins of the Mimbres people and what became of them, and he explores our present understanding of what the images mean and what scholars have learned about the Mimbres people in the 75 years since the Cosgroves' expedition.

This is a story about one man's forty-year struggle to leave what he thought would be a temporary job in Banking to follow his lifelong dream of becoming an artist. Away from the bank, he took what time he could afford to work toward that goal. After some oil painting lessons, his skills improved. Working in his garage usually at night, he started giving away and selling some of his paintings to friends. Since Banking and Art are quite opposite, he felt as though he was leading a sort of double life. After his skills improved, he attempted to find ways to leave banking, including a wild and crazy decision to open a gallery in Carmel, California. Still living his double life, he hoped the gallery would eventually replace his bank job. It did not. When a benefactor offered to back him financially, he happily left banking, only to reluctantly return to banking when his benefactor could not continue funding. Back to his double life again, he continued painting and sold his work in several galleries. This story takes the reader on many rocky paths, some of which were dead ends, ultimately to one as a full time Artist. When Illness and death took his wife and daughter, his faith was sorely tested, however he never gave up painting. After remarrying, he and his wife returned to the Monterey Bay where the dream is still alive.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer brings together two of Wright Morris's best-known novels, The Works of Love (1951) and The Huge Season (1954).

At eighteen years old, with no high school diploma, a growing rap sheet, and a failed relationship with his estranged father, Timothy J. Hillegonds took a one-way flight from Chicago to Colorado in hopes of leaving his mounting rage and frustration behind. His plan was simple: snowboard, hang out, live an uncomplicated life. The Distance Between chronicles how Hillegonds’s plan went awry after he immediately jumped head first into a turbulent relationship with April, a Denny’s coworker and single mother. At once passionate and volatile, their relationship was fueled by vodka, crystal methamphetamine, and poverty—and it sometimes became violent. Mere months after moving to the mountains, when the stakes felt like they couldn’t be higher, Hillegonds learned April was pregnant with his child. More than just a harrowing story of addiction and abuse or a simple mea culpa, The Distance Between is a finely wrought exploration of, and reckoning with, absent fathers, fatherhood, violence, adolescent rage, white male privilege, and Hillegonds’s own toxic masculinity. With nuance and urgency, The Distance Between takes readers through the grit of life on the margins while grappling with the problematic nature of one man’s existence.

Since 1991, the edited book series Studies in Perception and Action has appeared in conjunction with the biennial International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA), a conference that provides an opportunity for individuals who share interests in ecological psychology to come together to present current research, exchange ideas, and engage in conversation on theoretical and methodological concerns. The Studies in Perception and Action series is a way to preserve the dialogues between conference attendees and researchers displaying their latest work. This volume, the eighth in the series, presents the conversations held at the 13th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2005. Studies in Perception and Action VIII includes broad coverage of the most current advances in research on perceiving and acting, including contributions from researchers in Australia, China, Japan, Europe, and North America. It addresses cutting-edge research in dynamics and human movement, recent progress in ecological approaches to perceiving and acting, and substantially extends our knowledge of just how rich a source of information the world is across a wide range of modalities. This volume will appeal to individuals who follow the research literature in ecological psychology, as well as those interested in perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, and social processes.