Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

Throughout her life and work, Marian Wright Edelman has been at the heart of this cantury's most dramatic civil rights and child advocacy struggles. In this stirring, heartfelt memoir she pays tribute to the extrordinary mentors who helped light her way including Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, and William Slaone Coffin. She celebrates the lives of her parents and the great Black Women of Bennetsville, South Carolina- Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who gave her love and guidance in her youth, as well as the many teachers and figures who inspired her education at...

Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including "The American Political Tradition," he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America marked him as one of the nation s most important and...

Howard Wesley Johnson has been associated with MIT for more than forty years and been a major influence on the modernization and expansion of many of its programs. He will be most remembered as a management educator and as MIT's president during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s. The title of his memoirs reflects his central, usually lonely position in those days, trying to hold together an institution often torn apart by the turmoil of the times.Johnson was more successful at navigating the minefields on campus than were many other college and university presidents, perhaps because...

In the broadest sense, this intellectual biography is designed to give insight into the reasons why Western values and institutions (especially in education) failed to take root in the Chinese environment. Three interrelated themes are treated by Professor Duiker: the evolution of the Chinese educational system from the beginning of the 20th century to World War II; the process by which a Chinese intellectual absorbed Western values and attitudes while retaining significant elements of his traditional Confucian world view; the goals of the humanist movement in early republican China and...

President of the University of Washington from 1958 to 1973, a time of tremendous change, Charles Odegaard has written an absorbing memoir of his personal and institutional background and his development as a scholar and university administrator. President Richard L. McCormick and Professor of Biomedical Ethics Keith R. Benson further discuss Odegaard's lasting contributions to the University of Washington.

Beginning with his own undergraduate experience, Odegaard came to recognize the importance of the humanities as the vital center of the university tradition. Throughout his career...

Against the background of what it was like to work and teach in...

Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities." More than simply a portrait of the Headmaster of Deerfield Academy, it is a...