More Than Things

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More Than Things

Margaret Randall

344 pages
33 b&w photos

Paperback

October 2013

978-0-8032-4590-7

$40.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

October 2013

978-0-8032-4933-2

$40.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

October 2013

978-0-8032-4697-3

$40.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

More Than Things is a collection of essays on a variety of political, cultural, and literary issues, all linked by Margaret Randall’s attention to power: its use, misuse, and impact on how we live our lives. There are texts on sex, fashion, food, LGBT rights, automobiles, forgiving, women’s self-image, writing, books, and more. Two of the essays provide glimpses into present-day Cuba and Tunisia. She reflects on her family; her romantic partners; and the revolutionaries, writers, artists, and activists she has known personally and admired: Roque Dalton, Meridel LeSueur, and Haydée Santamaría.

Randall’s writings move in unexpected directions, evoked by the “things” and ideas in her life: objects picked up around the world, her children’s names, family heirlooms, artistic practices, dreams, poems, and memories. Elegantly weaving together the personal and the political, More Than Things is a tour de force by one of America’s most formidable and elegiac writers and political activists.

Author Bio

Margaret Randall is a writer and photographer. She has written dozens of books of memoir, poetry, oral history, and essays, in addition to translations, edited anthologies, and photography books. Her most recent works include To Change the World: My Years in Cuba, First Laugh: Essays 2000–2009 (Nebraska, 2011), Che on My Mind, and The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones.

Praise

“Margaret Randall is one of our cherished veteran mavericks and an intellectual of global consequence. With astonishing courage and self-criticality Randall has sought ‘to restore language twisted by our sociopolitical systems’ in order to provide for us ‘a dignity that documents and empowers.’ . . . More Than Things recounts a commitment to art and to the examined life as a quest for knowledge produced from the shockwaves of history.”—Roberto Tejada, author of Full Foreground and National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment


“With this amazing collection of memory and celebration, we can all benefit from Margaret Randall’s brilliant, courageous, and redefining life of activism and keen observation. Everyone interested in our ongoing journey for women’s rights, peace and poetry, justice and freedom, dignity and human rights for all will rush to read and gift this important, galvanizing book.”—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower and the Eleanor Roosevelt volumes


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Magical Seam
Shaping My Words
Things
Roque Dalton: Myth, Man, Martyr, and Poet Who Defined an Era
Closing the Gap
What's in a Name?
New Map of Wonder to Explore
Horizon
Sex
Wheels
Our Table
What Am I Going to Wear?
Do You Really Believe All That?
The Courage It Takes
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Lord Power
There's Plenty of Time for That Later
What Are They Afraid Of?
Too Late Because
Keeping Us Safe
Passports and Me
Forgiver's Dilemma
Going Places
Cuban Postcards
Tunisian Postcards
Goose Quill to Thought-Capture, Stopping at Books
Coyote Grin
“Star Built Memory,” Last Words of Meridel LeSueur
Not for Myself
Notes

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