Word: pisans
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Longitude, Sobel's previous nonfiction narrative, was a concise and intellectually tense retelling of the beginning of modern navigation. It was also one of the surprise publishing successes of 1995. Her new book adds a little-known personal dimension to the life of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Pisan mathematician and astronomer who was tried, convicted and humbled for challenging church dogma that placed the earth at the center of the universe...
Charles Glass, an American journalist with Lebanese roots, watched the U.S. Navy off Beirut in 1983 and concluded that, like the Genoese and Pisan fleets aiding the Crusaders eight centuries earlier, it would soon sail home in ignorance and frustration. Lebanon and neighboring Syria, Israel, Jordan and Iraq, he argues, are "tribes with flags" rather than nations. Try as big powers might to control them with armies, navies and imported ideologies, the ties of "family, village, tribe and sect" have been much tougher...
EZRA POUND IN ITALY: FROM THE PISAN CANTOS...
This book arrives like a packet of snapshots long lost in the mail. In 1968, some four years before his death, Poet Ezra Pound agreed to accompany an Italian photographer on a tour of the locales that had inspired him during the writing of the Pisan Cantos 23 years earlier. The freedom to roam was ironic, for when Pound had composed these poems he had not been free to travel anywhere. He was incarcerated in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center in Pisa, charged with treason for making speeches over Rome radio in support of Mussolini's regime...
Next there are the accompanying excerpts and snippets from the Pisan Can tos, reproduced in Pound's handwriting. Good poetry should stand on its own feet, but Pound's presents a special case. Although as a young man he campaigned tirelessly for the sharpest possible image expressed in the fewest possible words, his later poems grew increasingly allusive, personal and cryptic. Images were still present but encoded. Seeing what Pound saw before it filtered through his mind helps break that code. Sometimes the pictures simply amplify the words. Two pages of dark, roiling skyscape follow lines on Pisan...