Through vivid accounts of successful innovators ranging from glass artist Dale Chihuly to physicist Richard Feynman to the country/rock trio the Dixie Chicks, Berns reveals the inner workings of the iconoclast’s mind with remarkable clarity. Each engaging chapter goes on to describe practical actions we can each take to understand and unleash our own potential to think differently—such as seeking out new environments, novel experiences, and first-time acquaintances.

Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge. Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth century backwoods, The Iconoclast’s Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.

Shinzo Abe entered politics burdened by high expectations: that he would change Japan. In 2007, seemingly overwhelmed, he resigned after only a year as prime minister. Yet, following five years of reinvention, he masterfully regained the premiership in 2012, and now dominates Japanese democracy as no leader has done before. Abe has inspired fierce loyalty among his followers, cowing Japan's left with his ambitious economic program and support for the security and armed forces. He has staked a leadership role for Japan in a region being rapidly transformed by the rise of China and India, while carefully preserving an ironclad relationship with Trump's America. The Iconoclast tells the story of Abe's meteoric rise and stunning fall, his remarkable comeback, and his unlikely emergence as a global statesman laying the groundwork for Japan's survival in a turbulent century.

A visual sociology of statues and commemoration sites in Cyprus. The book combines photography and written text to analyze the role of memorials and commemoration sites in the construction of antagonistic nationalism. Taking Cypriot memorializations as a case study, the book shows how these memorials often support, but sometimes also undermine, the discursive-material assemblage of nationalism.

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

"In this modern edition, the long-separated Cambridgeshire and Suffolk entries are published together for the first time, emphasising Dowsing's extensive coverage of the region. A detailed commentary accompanies the Journal, based on an examination of each of the churches he visited. Full use has been made of contemporary records (including those of the Cambridge colleges) to fill out the details of Dowsing's diary entries; maps and photographs graphically illustrate the range and scale of his activities.".

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the finest book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers illuminates both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs, his happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt, and his complicated but stimulating friendship with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies, Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech, playing a prominent role in the Scope's Monkey Trial, battling against press censorship, and exposing pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes. Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany, previously unseen, on exclusive interviews with Mencken's friends, and on his love letters and FBI files, here is the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men. This biography, the best ever on the sage of Baltimore, is exhaustive but never exhausting, and offers readers more than moderate intelligence and an awfully good time. --Martin Nolan, Boston Globe