Michael Shapiro

In My Wife the Metaphysician, or Lady Murasaki's Revenge, Michael Shapiro devises a storied diary that views the world through the eyes of an inimitable woman whose being and essence are determined by her superlative and penetrating intellect. Inspired by the great Japanese literature by upper-class women writers of the mid-Heian period, eighty-four masterfully woven sections alternate prose, poetry, social commentary and haiku-like vignettes to tell a fascinating tale of betrayal, revenge and undying love. Cruelly and unjustly exiled, Lady Murasaki, accompanied by her consort, Prince Towa no Ai, is the virtuoso author of learned discourses on the Western literary heritage, especially the Divine Comedy and Proven al poetry. The narrator's skein moves the characters along a topography that has them migrating asynchronously between contemporary California and interwar Tokyo, Budapest and Moscow, ancient Israel and the medieval Romance world, Freiburg and New York, rural Alabama and Vermont. Characters and chronologies are scrambled and reconstituted, real and imaginary events and places commingled, as Lady Murasaki brings her vast knowledge of art and literature to bear on explorations of medieval and Renaissance literature and the labyrinthine fictions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Her dialogues engage interlocutors that run the gamut from Satan and Pontius Pilate to Dante himself, as well as a giant humanoid cat. Through it all and to the end, including her final attainment of retributive justice, Lady Murasaki is wedded to Prince Towa no Ai, and it is their real-life love story that animates everything.

In A Sense of Place, journalist/travel writer Michael Shapiro goes on a pilgrimage to visit the world's great travel writers on their home turf to get their views on their careers, the writer's craft, and most importantly, why they chose to live where they do and what that place means to them. The book chronicles a young writer’s conversations with his heroes, writers he's read for years who inspired him both to pack his bags to travel and to pick up a pen and write. Michael skillfully coaxes a collective portrait through his interviews, allowing the authors to speak intimately about the writer's life, and how place influences their work and perceptions. In each chapter Michael sets the scene by describing the writer's surroundings, placing the reader squarely in the locale, whether it be Simon Winchester's Massachusetts, Redmond O'Hanlon's London, or Frances Mayes's Tuscany. He then lets the writer speak about life and the world, and through quiet probing draws out fascinating commentary from these remarkable people. For Michael it’s a dream come true, to meet his mentors; for readers, it's an engaging window onto the twin landscapes of great travel writers and the world in which they live.

In A Sense of Place, journalist/travel writer Michael Shapiro goes on a pilgrimage to visit the world's great travel writers on their home turf to get their views on their careers, the writer's craft, and most importantly, why they chose to live where they do and what that place means to them. The book chronicles a young writer's conversations with his heroes, writers he's read for years who inspired him both to pack his bags to travel and to pick up a pen and write. Michael skillfully coaxes a collective portrait through his interviews, allowing the authors to speak intimately about the writer's life, and how place influences their work and perceptions. In each chapter Michael sets the scene by describing the writer's surroundings, placing the reader squarely in the locale, whether it be Simon Winchester's Massachusetts, Redmond O'Hanlon's London, or Frances Mayes's Tuscany. He then lets the writer speak about life and the world, and through quiet probing draws out fascinating commentary from these remarkable people. For Michael it's a dream come true, to meet his mentors; for readers, it's an engaging window onto the twin landscapes of great travel writers and the world in which they live.

In an era when headlines often seem dominated by horrific stories about abused children, Solomon's Sword weaves together the elements of two painful custody battles into a memorable book that no reader who cares about children will be able to put aside. In examining collisions between children, parents, and the law, Shapiro meets judges, lawyers, social workers, clergy, and therapists who must advocate a course of action in thousands of cases each year across America. Reading about these dedicated people, professionals in the vanguard of new approaches to the problem of mistreated children, will leave readers hopeful that we are finally learning how to ameliorate this enduring national disgrace. Solomon's Sword sheds new light on a dire social problem in a powerful book that will influence public policy for years to come.

The theory of holomorphic functions of several complex variables emerged from the attempt to generalize the theory in one variable to the multidimensional situation. Research in this area has led to the discovery of many sophisticated facts, structures, ideas, relations, and applications. This deepening of knowledge, however, has also revealed more and more paradoxical differences between the structures of the two theories. The authors of this Research Note were driven by the quest to construct a theory in several complex variables that has the same structure as the one-variable theory. That is, they sought a reproducing kernel for the whole class that is universal and from same class. Integral Theorems for Functions and Differential Forms in Cm documents their success. Their highly original approach allowed them to obtain new results and refine some well-known results from the classical theory of several complex variables. The 'hyperholomorphic" theory they developed proved to be a kind of direct sum of function theories for two Dirac-type operators of Clifford analysis considered in the same domain. In addition to new results and methods, this work presents a first-look at a brand new setting, based upon the natural language of differential forms, for complex analysis. Integral Theorems for Functions and Differential Forms in Cm reveals a deep link between the fields of several complex variables theory and Clifford analysis. It will have a strong influence on researchers in both areas, and undoubtedly will change the general viewpoint on the methods and ideas of several complex variables theory.

This volume is a collection of research and expository papers on different aspects of complex analysis, including relations to operator theory and hypercomplex analysis. Articles cover subjects such as the Schrodinger equation, subelliptic operators, Lie algebras and superalgebras, Toeplitz and Hankel operators, reproducing kernels and Qp spaces.

Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguise--man-playing-woman-playing-man--in all its theatrical and social complexity.Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England.The popularity of the "female page" is examined as a playful literary and theatrical way of confronting, avoiding, or merely exploiting issues such as the place of women in a patriarchal culture and the representation of women on stage. Looking beyond and behind the stage for the cultural anxieties that found their way into Shakespearean drama, Shapiro considers such cases as cross-dressing women in London being punished as prostitutes and the alleged homoerotic practices of the apprentices who played female roles in adult companies. Shapiro also traces other Elizabethan dramatists' varied uses of the cross-dressing motif, especially as they were influenced by Shakespeare's innovations."Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them." --ChoiceMichael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.

This book provides a new mathematical theory for the treatment of an ample series of spatial problems of electrodynamics, particle physics, quantum mechanics and elasticity theory. This technique proves to be as powerful for solving the spatial problems of mathematical physics as complex analysis is for solving planar problems.The main analytic tool of the book, a non-harmonic version of hypercomplex analysis recently developed by the authors, is presented in detail. There are given applications of this theory to the boundary value problems of electrodynamics and elasticity theory as well as to the problem of quark confinement. A new approach to the linearization of special classes of the self-duality equation is also considered. Detailed proofs are given throughout. The book contains an extensive bibliography on closely related topics.This book will be of particular interest to academic and professional specialists and students in mathematics and physics who are interested in integral representations for partial differential equations. The book is self-contained and could be used as a main reference for special course seminars on the subject.