Georgie: Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time? Fuckhead: [weeping] No wonder everybody calls me “Fuck-Head.” Georgie: It’s a name that’s going to stick. Fuckhead: I realize that. Georgie: “Fuck-Head” is gonna ride you to your grave. Fuckhead: I already said so, I agreed with you in advance. ~ from Jesus’ Son, dir. Alison Maclean (1999) What is a fuckhead? David Rawson’s Fuckhead is a surreal exploration of the literature, film, nature and expectations of disability, and of fuckheads in literature and film. Part lyric essay, part fictional memoir, Rawson’s work tells the story of an unnamed narrator whose familial relationships are defined by his VATER syndrome. Abused by his mother and stripped of a voice by his brother’s need to be Tom Cruise via Rain Man, he sets out into a universe of literary tropes. "I have always been of the mind that the novelist is allowed access to all experiences, as long as he ultimately has something to say. Plutarch and Samuel Johnson are typing somewhere in the desert of the next world, composing the ultimate collection of biographical criticism, explaining how David Lynch’s entire filmography owes a debt to his club feet. But I and the friends who bought my novel agree the author is dead." The work is particularly interested in the relationship between Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and what the narrator argues is Denis Johnson’s reimagining of that work in the short story “Emergency” (in Johnson’s Jesus’ Son). But in accumulating characters with disabilities as widely diverse as Darth Vader, Benjy of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and the TV sitcom Community’s Abed Nadir, Rawson articulates the assumptions and cliches faced by persons with disabilities, all the while creating a new family with his unlikely gathering of “fuckheads.”

Fuckhead

Literature & Fiction

Rawson, David

History & Criticism

Punctum Books

Prelude to Genocide: Arusha, Rwanda, and the Failure of Diplomacy (Stud in Conflict, Justice, & Soc Change)

As the initial US observer, David Rawson participated in 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania. Later, he served as US ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make them hold. Despite the intervention of concerned states in establishing a peace process and the presence of an international mission, UNAMIR, the promise of the Arusha Peace Accords could not be realized. Instead, the downing of Rwandan president Habyarimana’s plane in April 1994 rekindled the civil war and opened the door to genocide. In Prelude to Genocide, Rawson draws on declassified documents and his own experiences to seek out what went wrong. How did the course of political negotiations in Arusha and party wrangling in Kigali, Rwanda, bring to naught a concentrated international effort to establish peace? And what lessons are there for other international humanitarian interventions? The result is a commanding blend of diplomatic history and analysis that is a milestone read on the Rwandan crisis and on what happens when conflict resolution and diplomacy fall short. Published in partnership with the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Ohio University Press

As the initial US observer, David Rawson participated in the 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania. Later, he served as US ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make them hold. Despite the intervention of concerned states in establishing a peace process and the presence of an international mission, UNAMIR, the promise of the Arusha Peace Accords could not be realized. Instead, the downing of Rwandan president Habyarimana’s plane in April 1994 rekindled the civil war and opened the door to genocide. In Prelude to Genocide, Rawson draws on declassified documents and his own experiences to seek out what went wrong. How did the course of political negotiations in Arusha and party wrangling in Kigali, Rwanda, bring to naught a concentrated international effort to establish peace? And what lessons are there for other international humanitarian interventions? The result is a commanding blend of diplomatic history and analysis that is a milestone read on the Rwandan crisis and on what happens when conflict resolution and diplomacy fall short. Published in partnership with the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series

Murder on Mount Desert

Jimmy Hoitt, a young police officer on Mount Desert Island, investigates a murder that leads him to believe that someone he has known all his life may be involved and will try to kill him to stop the investigation

Contemporary

UNKNO

Jimmy Hoitt, a young police officer on Mount Desert Island, investigates a murder that leads him to believe that someone he has known all his life may be involved and will try to kill him to stop the investigation

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci

Comics & Graphic Novels

McGreal, Pat

Graphic Novels

Vertigo

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Books by Rawson, David