Exile Space: Encountering Ancient and Modern America in Memoir with Essay and Fiction - Softcover

Pasztory, Esther

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1882190823 ISBN 13: 9781882190829

Publisher: Polar Bear & Company, 2018

Synopsis

Exile Space: Encountering Ancient and Modern America in Memoir with Essay and Fiction has three main sections:

1. "Multiple Horizons: Tales From the Life of a Refugee" is the often humorous account of a Hungarian refugee trying to assimilate into American life and in the process discovering the Ancient American cultures of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca.

2. "Stone Age Civilization in the New World" is a controversial memoir about Ancient America as it compares to Europe, as an overview written in the freedom of retirement. It is written as advice to the BBC, which had recently interviewed her for a program called Civilizations.

3. The Maya Vase is a novel of fantasy in the reconstruction of ancient Maya life as seen through the eyes of a graduate student as the author once was, with comparisons to modern American life.

About this title

About the Author

Esther Pasztory is Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor emerita of pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She has published extensively in the field of pre-Columbian art, including the first art historical manuscripts on Teotihuacán and the Aztecs. Born in Hungary, she emigrated to the United States in 1956, after the anti-Communist revolution. She attended Vassar College and Barnard Collage where she received a BA in art history. With her dissertation at Columbia, entitled The Murals of Tepantitla, Teotihuacán, she received her PhD in 1971. Esther now lives in San Francisco, California.

Review

"This three-part memoir allows us to peek into the personal life experiences of a remarkable thinker and writer, and everyone who reads it will ultimately benefit in one way or another. The benefits, moreover, will be positive and uplifting, for the book is not only downright funny in places, but Esther makes it clear that she has no regrets about the rupture that changed her life forever. Her curiosity about the world, her sense of adventure, her ease at entering into someone else's world . . . all combine to edify and enchant the reader. Enjoy." --Cecelia F. Klein, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, UCLA

"Is there such a thing as an archeology of the mind, where fiction, memoir and scholarship live without contradiction? The heroine of The Maya Vase is able like a shaman to travel between Tikal and a twenty-first-century archeology department . . . You'll be absorbed in the parallel subtext that weaves like an Amerindian textile, warp and woof intentionally thinly veiled." --George Nelson Preston, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Art, CCNY/CUNY, Academico, Pierre Verger Chair, Academia Brasileira de Arte, Rio de Janeiro

Edition details

• Publisher: Polar Bear & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1882190823
• ISBN 13: 9781882190829
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 366