Books published by University of Georgia Press

An exploration of perfection. Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection's exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

The first biography of one of the Civil War's most famous disabled veterans and most prominent public figures in the Gilded Age. An examination of the dynamics of disability, the culture and politics of the Gilded Age, and the aftereffects of the Civil War.

When John Toner, a retired Cleveland judge, decided in 1990 to spend a month with his son in war-torn Sri Lanka, he was as much a stranger to his seventh child as to the hardships of life in a third world country. This is a chronicle of the month they spent together in the poorest of conditions.

An insightful collection of observations on various American funerary traditions. Each story illuminates details in another until something larger is revealed: a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.

A collection of ten essays that focuses on how southerners have marketed themselves to outsiders. It views a region often at odds with itself on matters like race and religion, and identifies spaces, services, and products that construct various Souths that exaggerate, refute, or self-consciously safeguard elements of southernness.

Provides a comparative analysis of diverse postwar families and examines the lives and case records of men and women who applied to adopt or provide pre-adoptive foster care in the 1940s and 1950s. The book considers an array of individuals who found themselves on the margins of a social world that privileged family membership.

Roman Catholics constitute the most populous religious denomination in the US. With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, they attained a political prominence to match their rapidly ascending socioeconomic and cultural profile. This book traces the role of American Catholics in presidential policies and politics from 1960 until 2004.

Pugh explores Capote through a cinematic lens, skillfully weaving the most relevant elements of Capote's biography with insightful critical analysis of the films, screenplays, and adaptations of his works that composed his fraught relationship with the Hollywood machine.

A collection of fifteen original essays that touches on a variety of topics related to the genesis of Brecht's works and their impact on contemporary literature, theatre, and film. Discussed are Brecht's confrontation with Marxism and its political manifestations; the influence of his work on film and theatre; and the uses his literary descendants have made of his political commitment.

Focuses on a Muslim legal science known in Arabic as usul al-fiqh. Whereas the kindred science of fiqh is concerned with the articulation of actual rules of law, this science attempts to elaborate the theoretical and methodological foundations of the law. It outlines the features of Muslim juristic thought.

Through quirky plots, one-of-kind characters, and more than a few twists, the stories in Big Bend examine gentle-hearted men and their relationships. From made-in-heaven meetings to troublesome liaisons, Roorbach's characters experience romance in unexpected, sometimes disastrous ways.

This portfolio of eighty-three photographs provides a stunning celebration of African American achievement in the twentieth century. Carl Van Vechten took these photographs over the course of three decades. Included are images of such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, and James Baldwin.

The author of this book recalls his boyhood during the 1950s in the small hometown of Wade, North Carolina, where whites and blacks lived and worked within each other's shadows.