Paradise Revisited Has Arrived!

My dear professor's book is at BarnesandNoble.com and Bookshop.com

PARADISE REVISITED IS 532 PAGES WITH 147 ILLUSTRATIONS (most color, some historical black and white images and early engravings).

Your support in launching this book will be IMMENSELY appreciated!

Here’s the skinny:

• IF YOU HAVE ORDERED A LIMITED EDITION, DO *NOT* ORDER AGAIN. SPECIAL COPIES ARE IN PRESS AND WILL COME SOON.

• Amazon will have the book eventually (they are slow). They don’t have it up right now.

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BarnesandNoble.com has the book right now. The bookstores are in the pipeline, but if you prefer, you can call your local B&N and have them order it for you for pickup. That saves on shipping, and it alerts the store to the presence of the book so are more likely to stock it in the store.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paradise-revisited-paul-geyer-zolbrod-ph-d/1149107407?ean=9780578771311

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BOOKSHOP.COM also has the book – and at a 7% discount. The very, very cool thing about Bookshop.com is that when you buy from them, part of their profit goes to a LOCAL BOOKSTORE THAT YOU CHOOSE. Amazon is wiping out local bookstores the same way they are wiping out independent-publishing authors and small presses. This site is REALLY working for mom and pop bookstores/coffee houses that are so wonderful in small communities.

BOOKSHOP.COM is now a heavily preferred online seller as they give part of their profits to LOCAL BOOKSTORES to help them stay in business. The buyer gets to choose the bookstore.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/paradise-revisited-lines-from-john-milton-s-paradise-lost-and-the-navajo-creation-story-geyer-zolbrod-ph-d/859b8f937337b21f?ean=9780578771311&next=t

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Note: the metadata (author bios, names, etc.) went flying out of Ingram as a total mess. We’re getting it straightened out, but here’s Paul Zolbrod’s BRILLIANT bio with many things in it I never knew as his student.

Paul Zolbrod’s Bio

Paul mid-life at an art gallery. Image by Bill Owen.

Scholar, playwright, and translator Paul G. Zolbrod was born in Pittsburgh in 1932. Following services in the Korean War, he matriculated at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he was graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English. He spent 1958 as a Fulbright Fellow in France, then returned to the University of Pittsburgh as an Andrew Mellon Fellow and earned a doctorate in late Medieval and early Renaissance English literature. Over the next decades, he would receive two research fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Paul joined the faculty of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1964 and would teach there for thirty years, eventually becoming Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English and the head of his department. He special passion was Paradise Lost, and it would run like a bright thread through the tapestry of literature he wove for his students.

Yet there would be even more. In 1967, still early in his career, he made a visit to the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, and there a question formed in his mind that is answered by this book: he wanted to know if the Native American oral literature he was hearing reached the archetypal depths plumbed by the great epics laid down in writing. Homer’s Odyssey was, after all, first a tale told by a poet, not a book to read.

In 1984, after more than a decade and a half of research, Paul Zolbrod’s Diné Bahane‘: The Navajo Creation Story went to press and gained the status of an anthropological classic instantly. It has been in print for more than four decades and has been a University of New Mexico Press Top Ten best seller every single year of its long shelf life.

It would not be Paul Zolbrod’s last adventure with Navajo culture. In 1996, accompanied by his anthropologist wife, Dr. Joanne McCloskey, he joined Navajo language teacher Roseann Willink, a professor at the University of New Mexico, in creating Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing for the University of New Mexico Press. It explored, among other things, Navajo weaving as storytelling, in the same way that Navajo desert pictographs, ceremony, ritual, and dance tell the story of the people. Zolbrod and Willink were joined by dozens of Navajo weavers and cultural analysts.

In 1994, Paul Zolbrod retired from Allegheny College, yet never lost contact with the place that would always feel like home. He would go on to teach for another two decades at Diné College in Crownpoint, New Mexico, and at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where he taught Mythologies of the Native Americas, a doctoral-level course in the current mythologies of the Alaskan, Athabaskan and Native American tribes and those of pre-Colombian Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations.

At age 90, Paul began to explore the idea of comparing the Navajo creation story with John Milton’s Paradise Lost largely for one reason: to establish the status of Native American oral literature as being on an equal footing with any of the great epics produced by cultures with alphabetic writing. It is the first such comparison ever made, and it is also the only one that challenges the assumption that alphabetic history and literature must be superior to the works that are passed on by ceremonial enactment, petroglyph, pictograph, chant, oral recitation and weavings. This, the final work of Dr. Zolbrod, offers the world profound evidence of the mythic equality and epic depth of oral literature and, as he writes in his Conclusion, provides a healthier way to perceive and relate to the ecosystem that the Navajo experience as sentient and sacred. It also demonstrates a way to interact with women that honors their equality and full worth.

We welcome you to the immense adventure it is to read this work, to learn both myths, and to explore their critical similarities and differences. It is a delightful journey.

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Thank you for supporting us. We have six more books in the pipeline, and we are jazzed.