Luba

Presents an illustrated biography of the Jewish heroine, Luba Tryszynska, who saved the lives of more than fifty Jewish children in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the winter of 1944/45.

by Gilbert Hernandez In his first graphic novel in two years, Hernandez's The Book of Ofelia begins with Luba, Ofelia and company trying to acclimate to life in America. When Ofelia decides to chronicle her life with Luba in a tell-all book, she discovers inspiration in Luba's young children - the one-armed Casimira, Socorro with the photographic memory, the loner Joselito and the silent Conchita. See Latino soap opera and soft-core porn, with touches of magic-realism, all in one!

Gilbert Hernandez’s sprawling family saga focuses on the United States, where newly immigrated Luba and her sisters, body-builder Petra and therapist/film star Fritz, find their families’ and friends’ lives becoming more and more intertwined. As the three sisters have “memories of sweet youth,” the next generation finds the spotlight: Luba’s adult daughter Doralís emcees the proceedings in her role as mischievous host of a children’s TV show, while Petra’s little girl, Venus, has adventures with her aunt Fritz and her best friend Yoshio. At her mother’s urging, Venus also writes missives to her fierce, one-armed cousin Casimira, who’s back in Palomar. In these stories ― never before collected together ― Venus tells it like it is!

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Surveys the history, culture, and contemporary life of the Luba people of Zaire.

For use in schools and libraries only. In this variation on the story of The Fisherman And His Wife, a young Ukrainian girl must repeatedly return to the wren she has rescued to relay her parents' increasingly greedy demands.

In Ofelia, the sisters, the kids, and the cousins are all settled comfortably in California after leaving Palomar in Luba and Her Family. Luba and her cousin Ofelia’s relationship has always been fraught, but when Ofelia threatens to write a book about Luba, past memories, secrets, resentments, and pain resurface. Meanwhile, Luba’s children―genius Socorro, recently out-and-proud Doralis, and prickly Maricela―show that a talent for trouble may be hereditary. Luba’s sisters, Fritz and Petra, swap lovers (as usual), but . . . are Fritz and family friend Pipo sittin’ in a tree? These vividly drawn characters are charged with Hernandez’s trademark complexity; they live, love, age, fight― and die―in this sweeping, multi-generational saga.

Memory and history are always in tension, as people selectively choose memories to make histories that "prove" the legitimacy of their claims to power, prestige, and prerogative. If many African groups have created visual arts to assist in this process, Luba peoples of southeastern Zaire have done so brilliantly, with a stunning array of mnemonic devices ranging from memory boards to beaded emblems, wooden figures to body arts, ornamented staffs and axes to divination devices. The sculpted narratives of these objects and art forms are esoteric, and must be "read" by "men of memory" who have learned their precious skills through initiation to the Mbudye Society. Luba kings, royal titleholders, and outlying chiefs turn to them to interpret the mapped details of origin myths, protocol and prohibitions of the royal court, and other deeply encoded information. The Luba kingdoms are among the most important in central Africa, whose refined royal arts have influenced people hundreds of miles beyond their own Heartland. Luba have an ancient heritage as well, that archaeologists trace back over one thousand years. Although Luba arts are well known for their astounding beauty, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History is the first study of their intellectual complexity, aesthetic impact, and social contexts.

With profound implications for our most foundational assumptions about gender, Gender Mosaic explains why there is no such thing as a male or female brain. For generations, we've been taught that women and men differ in profound and important ways. Women are more sensitive and emotional, whereas men are more aggressive and sexual, because this or that region in the brains of women is smaller or larger than in men, or because they have more or less of this or that hormone. This story seems to provide us with a neat biological explanation for much of what we encounter in day-to-day life. But is it true? According to neuroscientist Daphna Joel, it's not. And in Gender Mosaic, she sets forth a bold and compelling argument that debunks the notion of female and male brains. Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, including the groundbreaking results of her own studies, Dr. Joel explains that every human brain is a unique mixture -- or mosaic -- of "male" and "female" features, and that these mosaics don't map neatly into two categories. With urgent practical implications for the way we understand ourselves and the world around us, Gender Mosaic is a fascinating look at the science of gender, sex and the brain, and at how freeing ourselves from the gender binary can help us all reach our full human potential.

Around Christmas of 1882, while peering through a microscope at starfish larvae in which he had inserted tiny thorns, Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff had a brilliant insight: what if the mobile cells he saw gathering around the thorns were nothing but a healing force in action? Metchnikoff's daring theory of immunity—that voracious cells he called phagocytes formed the first line of defense against invading bacteria—would eventually earn the scientist a Nobel Prize, shared with his archrival, as well as the unofficial moniker "Father of Natural Immunity." But first he had to win over skeptics, especially those who called his theory "an oriental fairy tale." Using previously inaccessible archival materials, author Luba Vikhanski chronicles Metchnikoff's remarkable life and discoveries in the first moder n biography of this hero of medicine. Metchnikoff was a towering figure in the scientific community of the early twentieth century, a tireless humanitarian who, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, also strived to curb the spread of cholera, syphilis, and other deadly diseases. In his later years, he startled the world with controversial theories on longevity, launching a global craze for yogurt, and pioneered research into gut microbes and aging. Though Metchnikoff was largely forgotten for nearly a hundred years, Vikhanski documents a remarkable revival of interest in his ideas on immunity and on the gut flora in the science of the twenty-first century.