June 2004, Issue #62

Charles Reid’s Watercolor Secrets by Charles Reid (North Light Books) In Charles Reid’s Watercolor Secrets, professional artist Charles Reid offers readers an inside glimpse into his sketchbooks, sharing actual pages along with critiques and insights he has gleaned through years of practice. With each entry, readers learn how to improve their own watercolor technique. From the book they discover how to:

Simplify shadow shapes
Create form using silhouettes
Use edges to create a crisp or soft effect
Prepare supplies to paint outdoors
Balance use of detail by focusing on the essentials
Quickly capture the essence of the environment

Five detailed step-by-step demonstrations guide readers in creating watercolor masterpieces of their own. With Reid's concise and encouraging explanations, readers may feel as if they have found their own personal teacher.

Charles Reid is my painting teacher. Last year he showed me the small sketchbook he always trawls with, filled with little paintings. The looseness and spontaneity of those paintings were a revelation to me – not just because they were so beautiful but because within those small studies lay the secret to getting over the curse of having to make a "great painting" every time we put brush to paper. I recommend these "little paintings" to everyone. – Gene Wilder, actor

The breathtaking, little watercolor sketches are accompanied by concise commentary and advice from the artist that explains the process behind his work. Reid makes painting easy by keeping it simple. Charles Reid’s Watercolor Secrets is an education in basic art principles and an exciting glimpse into the mind of a master painter. Artists and art lovers alike will find inspiration in this book.

Arts & Photography

The Texas Post Office Murals: Art for the People by Philip Parisi (Joe and Betty Moore Texas Art Series: Texas A&M University Press)

In post offices and federal buildings scattered around the state of Texas visitors are often greeted by a surprising sight: magnificent mural art on the lobby walls.

In the midst of the Great Depression, a program was born that would not only give work to artists but also bring beauty and optimism to a people worn down by hardship and discouragement. This New Deal program commissioned competing artists to create post office murals – the people's art – to celebrate the lives, history, hopes, and dreams of ordinary Americans. In Texas alone, artists produced 106 artworks (several now lost) for sixty-nine post offices and federal buildings around the state. Created by some of the most promising artists of the day, these murals sparkled with scenes of Texas history, folklore, heroes, common people, wildlife, and landscapes.

Murals were created from San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas to Big Spring, Baytown, and Hamilton. The artists included Tom Lea, Jerry Bywaters, Peter Hurd, Otis Dozier, Alexandre Hogue, and Xavier Gonzalez. The images showed people at work and featured industries specific to the region, often coupled with symbols of progress such as machinery and modern transportation. Murals depicted cowboys and stampedes, folk heroes from Sam Bass to Davy Crockett and revered Indian chief Quanah Parker, and community symbols such as Eastland's lizard mascot, Ol’ Rip.

In The Texas Post Office Murals Philip Parisi offers a comprehensive view of these stunning and historic works of art – with 104 of the 127 images in full color. Parisi, freelance writer and instructor at Utah Sate University, tells the story of how they came to be, how the communities influenced and accepted them, and what efforts have been made to restore and preserve them.

Texas post office murals first captured my attention in 1989 while I was working as an editor for the Texas Historical Commission. I was researching another topic and accidentally discovered a collection of 35mm color slides stored in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. Despite the small size and somewhat blurry resolution of the slide images copies of copies – the scenes' energy and vigor impressed me. The earthy style depicted Texas history and culture simply and directly. Several slides featured montages that combined scenes of daily life, work, and local industries such as oil, mining, fishing, and lumber ma nufacturing. Who painted these pictures and why? Where were the original artworks located? – excerpt from the book

Anyone who has ever questioned the public patronage of the visual arts should be given a copy of this wonderful book. – Bloomsbury Review

The themes, images, and artists of the Texas Post Office murals now have a masterful reference work thanks to Philip Paris].... [He] tells numerous fascinating stories about their creation. – Clyde A. Milner II

This book, in effect, brings the murals down from the walls, making them available for the first time all in one place. The images created a kaleidoscope of Texas' past. Readers will enjoy this handsome The Texas Post Office Murals in their own living rooms or with them on the road as a comprehensive guide to the people’s art in the Lone Star State.

Arts & Photography

Franz Marc by Marc Rosenthal (Prestel USA) Franz Marc is part of a line of artists, stretching from van Gogh to Rothko, who treat style as philosophy and art as ecstasy. Their impact on subsequent artists is not so much formal as by example.
Now available in paperback, Franz Marc is an overview of a brief but brilliant career of one of the pioneers of abstractionism focusing on the symbolic poignancy of Marc’s paintings and his underlying vision of a world populated largely by animals. Marc painted intensely, madly, as if he had to get a lot of work done fast, as if he knew he only had a little time.

Before his tragic death at Verdun in 1916, Marc, a casualty of World War I, made an enormous contribution to German Expressionist painting. A co-founder with Wassily Kandinsky of the Blue Rider Group, Marc and his fellow artists sought to make sense of the destruction around them through symbolism and abstraction.

The curator of America’s first exhibition of Marc’s paintings, Marc Rosenthal, in his 44-page essay, offers penetrating insight into the artist and his transcendent paintings, in which feelings of despair and exaltation are brought to life through images of animals, landscapes, and pure abstraction. Seventy-one full-color plates demonstrate the brilliant tones and bold style that characterize Marc’s work. The accompanying text provides an important biographical perspective and critical appraisal of one of the most cogent voices amid the chaos of early twentieth century Europe.

Franz Marc is a trip through a Marc gallery in heaven with a great guide. This book presents an overview of Marc’s career, giving particular emphasis to the symbolic and iconographic content of his work, and revealing the substance underlying the artist’s vision of the world populated almost entirely by animals, symbolizing the spiritual essence in nature now lost to mankind. This is an excellent reference for students of modern art.

Arts / Home & Garden

The Outdoor Room by Jamie Durie, with photography by Simon Kenny (Allen & Unwin)

With an emphasis on the practical as well as the beautiful, including easy tips on how to recreate his ideas, international landscape and gardening guru Jamie Durie, host of the television series Backyard Blitz, shows how to blend the boundaries between indoor and outdoor to make the most of one's living space – in The Outdoor Room. Dune presents inspiration in the form of 200 color photographs of outdoor rooms he has designed, in addition to 30 floor plans. Durie says, "the abundance of gorgeous outdoor rooms is intended to spark the imagination." Durie includes a range of practical ideas and solutions covering all aspects of designing outdoor spaces such as walls, floors, lighting and water features throughout. With each outdoor room, Durie explains why he choose to combine the various basic life elements of plants, light, water and air in order to bring a touch of nature into the urban environment. Also sprinkled throughout The Outdoor Room are special "eco-tips;" to make the space more environmentally friendly.

The Outdoor Room includes outdoor spaces designed for retreat and refuge as well as others designed to entertain with lots of seating options (think built-in benches to save space as well as custom-made tables that can be stored flush against the wall), open areas for entertaining (think sunken dining areas next to raised flowerbeds) with outdoor kitchens and fireplaces. Tips are also included for creating complete and partial ceilings to allow outdoor living despite rain, hail or humidity. Durie also provides ideas for incorporating a home office into an outdoor space and ways to design outdoor spaces with kids and pets in mind, especially when adding pools or outdoor showers.

Durie insists, “No matter how large or small your exterior space, there's something in here for you.”

Durie’s creative approach employs such materials as cor-ten (bendable sheets of metal), driftwood, timber and foliage to shape a space; he suggests making a path out of stepping stones to make people take "extra care" with their steps and "consequently a little more time to soak up the surroundings."

In The Outdoor Room, Australia's home improvement heartthrob provides simple and effective tips to spark horticultural creativity. Elegant and practical, the book will help readers make the most of small gardening spaces and make larger spaces worlds unto themselves.

Arts & Photography

Professional Digital Imaging for Wedding and Portrait Photographers by Patrick Rice (Amherst Media), written by a professional photographer who has received numerous industry awards, is designed to help others of his ilk build their business and enhance their creativity with the latest techniques for digital photographers.

How can photographers ensure correct and consistent color?
What printer type will best suit a photographer's production schedule?
What papers and inks will ensure acceptable longevity of the print?

These and other questions are answered in Professional Digital Imaging for Wedding and Portrait Photographers. Adobe Photoshop and its usefulness to professional photographers is discussed, but other popular software programs such as Corel Painter, Nik Color, Efex Pro, and Bryce are covered as well.

Features included are:

Getting started in digital photography – what professionals need to know to make a smooth transition
What to look for in a digital camera, from general camera functions to specific features.
Professional techniques for digital portrait and wedding photography, including lighting and metering
Developing an efficient and productive digital workflow
Editing and outputting digital images
Proofing ideas for effectively presenting digital images to clients
Marketing techniques for increasing visibility in the marketplace and winning new clients

Nearly 20 photographers and their digital photographs and techniques are featured in Professional Digital Imaging for Wedding and Portrait Photographers, providing inside information on everything from equipment selection and tips for creating top-notch studio and location portraiture to output and marketing techniques – Penny Adams, Bernard Gratz, Michelle Perkins, Michael Ayers, Jeff Hawkins, Barbara Rice, Mike Bell, Kathleen Hawkins, Jeff Smith, Mark Bohland, Travis Hill, Chad Tsoufiou, Ron Burgess, Ken Holida, Robert Williams, Micheal Dwyer, Jacob Jakuszeit, Tony Zimcosky, Rick Ferro, Robert Kunesh, Scott Gloger, and Deborah Lynn Ferro.

Featuring techniques from over twenty top wedding and portrait photographers, Professional Digital Imaging for Wedding and Portrait Photographers provides the information professionals need to select digital equipment, deal with a new type of workflow, fine-tune images in Photoshop, and market images in a readable format.

Arts & Photography

Photography Handbook by Terence Wright (Media Practice Series: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group) is an introduction to the principles of photographic practice and theory and offers guidelines for the study of photographic media. Beginning with a history of photography, Terence Wright, reader in Critical, Historical and Theoretical Studies in Visual Art at the University of Ulster, examines the medium's characteristics, scope and limitations.

This revised and updated edition explores the history of lens-based image-making. This second edition includes a new chapter on the ethics of photojournalism, an expanded chapter on digital photography, and a new section on research in photography. There are new case studies including, for example, a study of the war photographer James Nachtwey; photographic representations of Marilyn Monroe and Adolf Hitler; and the "Bert is Evil" website. Each chapter now ends with a helpful summary of its key points.
The Photography Handbook introduces practical photography as a series of processes from pre-production through to post-production and editing. And it discusses the photographic industry and details many of the jobs available within the profession. Updated for the new edition, the Photography Handbook includes:

An introduction to the conceptual skills necessary for photography
How to set up as freelance photographer
How to research and carry out a photography project
Case studies from newspapers, magazines and picture agencies
Interviews with editors, photographers, artists and picture editors

The Photography Handbook equips readers with the language necessary to understand photography and helps them to develop visual awareness and visual literacy.

Arts & Photography

Captive Beauty: Zoo Portraits by Frank Noelker, with a foreword by Jane Goodall and an introduction by Nigel Rothfels (University of Illinois Press)

Frank Noelker's work makes a powerful statement. It is both beautiful and profoundly disturbing. For here he has captured, in this series of portraits, the very essence of the problem of zoos.... [Captive Beauty] is not intended as an indictment against all zoos, but rather as a plea for greater understanding of the animal beings within them....

Mostly we cannot put zoo animals back in the wild, although some captive breeding programs do just that. But most zoo inmates will live out their lives in captivity. It is up to us to provide them with the best possible habitats – appropriate social groups and an enriched environment. They must serve as ambassadors for their often beleaguered relatives in the wild so that we shall be moved to help the species and the forests, savannas, wetlands, and other habitats where they live.

Let us hope that the day will come when the steel-barred cage, the concrete island, and bare, sterile enclosures of all sorts will be no more. Frank’s work, with its implicit plea for our sympathy and understanding, will play a part in making this happen. – Jane Goodall, National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education, and Conservation, from the foreword

The animals in Frank Noelker’s photographs ask us to see them in their lived environments. They challenge us to think about why we go to zoos and why we think such places should exist or not. The answers to those questions are individual and complex – but asking them is the most critical part of being the humans at the zoo. – from the introduction by Nigel Rothfels, director of the Edison Initiative at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

The fifty color photographs in Captive Beauty are not simple, uncomplicated shots of animals in zoo settings; there is an ambivalence in them that only gradually envelops the viewer. Their sad, stark beauty confronts viewers, challenging them to consider the nature, purpose, and effects of zoos.

Biographies & Memoirs

A Passion for Freedom: My Encounters With Extraordinary People by Leonard R. Sussman (Prometheus Books)

A fascinating life makes for fascinating reading – the adventures of press-freedom advocate and globe-trotter Leonard R. Sussman testify to this claim. Having traveled to fifty-nine countries over several decades, Sussman has made his life the epitome of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship, understanding the role and the responsibility of the press in the formulation of a free, democratic world order.

Effortlessly moving from domestic and European think-tank forums on democracy to work in the field monitoring first-time elections in developing countries, he recounts in A Passion for Freedom his travels and contributions to the fight to build a global society tolerant of diverse viewpoints, revealing to us some of the thinkers and agents who have inspired him along his "walk in the midway."

In the first part we learn of Sussman's family and life at home, from which stem some of his earliest influences – his father, who "felt elitist but reveled in being a regular guy" with family connections to the infamous Tammany Hall, and his eventual sister-in-law, politically oriented poet Muriel Rukeyser, who frequently clashed with her conservative family. Chapters are devoted to small-town publishers Edith and Armstrong Hunter and their family, as well as a discourse on the strife in the Middle East from the perspective of Reform Judaism. The second, larger part details the author's contact with other freedom fighters across the globe: Luis Munoz Marin, social revolutionary in Puerto Rico; Andrei Amalrik, Soviet dissident who died tragically young; South African parliamentarian Helen Suzman, a longtime opponent of apartheid; Aristedes Katoppo, an Indonesian newspaper editor exiled and later editorially "beheaded" for publicizing issues the government disapproved of; the Rubins, a husband-and-wife radio team fighting censorship in dictatorial Paraguay; Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav anticommunist who suffered years of imprisonment; philosopher-activist Sidney Hoo; Ludmilla Thorne, a courageous journalist who risked her life in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion; and many others politicians, activists, and intellectuals.

Also included is a never-before-published 1987 interview with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, in which Rustin compares the NAACP's Roy Wilkins with Martin Luther King.

And there are chapters on political philosophers such as Alexander Bickel, Charles Frankel, and Edward Shils.

As the executive director of Freedom House for twenty-one years and now its Senior Scholar of International Communications, Leonard R. Sussman has had the extraordinary opportunity of both leading and serving an organization that has been at the center of the struggle for freedom for more than sixty years. Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and other visionary Americans, both Democratic and Republican, Freedom House has championed worthy causes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the new democracies that have emerged around the world since the 1990s.

In this engrossing memoir of his adventures with courageous men and women in fifty-nine countries, Sussman pays tribute to those mostly unsung heroes who contributed to freedom and humanistic ideals and in some cases paid the heavy price of imprisonment, torture, or death. Full of intriguing insights and vignettes, A Passion for Freedom is a fascinating record of people, ideas, and history in the making.

Biographies & Memoirs

Faith of Our Sons: A Father’s Wartime Diary by Frank Schaeffer (Carroll & Graf Publishers)

In 1998, novelist Frank Schaeffer's eighteen-year-old son, John, joined the Marines straight out of prep school. Their ensuing journey, recounted in Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, struck a chord among the many Americans with a family member in the military, inspired personal communications from three American presidents, and propelled the book onto Oprah, 20/20 and the New York Times extended bestseller's list. In Faith of Our Sons, Frank Schaeffer picks up his family's ongoing story as Corporal John Schaeffer is deployed to the Middle East on the day Gulf War II begins. Schaeffer's moving account of the universal experience of losing a child – either temporarily or permanently – to war and his attendant emotions from pride to panic to rage and back again is punctuated throughout by the voices of the many others in Frank's situation, thousands of other parents and children, who continue to pour their hearts out to the Schaeffers from those waiting anxiously for loved ones to come home to those who know they never will.

John called. He said he will be deployed! I’m elated for my boy because he sounds so happy. I’m elated in the same way one is elated by looking over a cliff. Adrenaline and terror also surge. We are about to go to war in Iraq and are aalready at war in Afganistan. John could have sat out the action at a desk. I asked him if he volunteered for this mission. “Yes I did, but don’t tell anyone.” “You mean Mom?” “Yes. She’ll be really upset if she knows I volunteered.” So begins the chapter.

What the Schaeffers have done here is extraordinary! Yes, this is an absolutely riveting chronicle of one man's transformation into a United States Marine, but it is also a nakedly honest, funny and profoundly moving exploration of... the very nature of love itself and the ties that hind us all. This is timely, compelling and important book! – Andre Dubois III, author of House of Sand and Fog

Dramatic and laugh-out loud funny, beautifully written and deftly constructed, deeply affecting in its honest portrayal of the authors' passions: a stunning achievement. – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Unforgettably moving, beautifully written and truly provocative, Faith of Our Sons tells us the story of a war through the lives of those among us waiting at home, praying for the safety of their husbands and wives, their sons and daughters. Especially it is the account of the powerful emotions attendant on sending a child off to war.

Biographies & Memoirs

Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy edited by William Lewis Burke & Belinda F. Gergel, with an introduction by Randall L. Kennedy (University of South Carolina Press) chronicles the life and accomplishments of the attorney who led the struggle for desegregation in South Carolina, served as a primary legal advocate in the national civil rights movement, and became South Carolina's first African American U.S. District Court judge.

In Matthew J. Perry, scholars of the civil rights era, fellow civil rights activists, jurists, attorneys, a governor, and an award-winning photojournalist join together to produce a multilayered biography of Matthew J. Perry. Collectively they bring to light the remarkable achievements of a man well known in his home state but sometimes obscured on the national stage by the shadows of Thurgood Marshall, J. Waties Waring, and Charles Hamilton Houston.

This volume, edited by W. Lewis Burke, professor of law at the University of South Carolina, and Belinda F. Gergel, former chair of the department of history and political science at Columbia College, tells the story of Perry's life. The book includes his humble beginnings in Columbia, his service to the nation during wartime, his remarkable career as a creator of positive social change, and, finally, his achievements as a respected member of the federal judiciary. The contributors describe Perry’s courage, skills as an orator, quick legal mind, and genteel nature. They set his story in the turbulent civil-rights-era South, revealing how broad social, historical, and legal issues affected Perry’s life and shaped the trajectory of his activist and professional life.

If the civil rights struggle were a war, Matthew Perry would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. He wasn't a billable hours lawyer. He wasn't even a trial lawyer that got paid when he won. He was a trial lawyer who seldom got compensated, was ridiculed, insulted, abused, and jailed for what the legal profession takes for granted. But he persisted and won. Leading the struggle, working around the clock with warmth, dignity, and good humor, he now presides with experienced judgment. – The Honorable Ernest F. Hollings, U.S. Senate

[Matthew J. Perry is] an extraordinary testament to an extraordinary man. The editors have compiled a compelling and comprehensive look at the contributions of Matthew Perry. I was so inspired by his work that my first legislative act in Congress was to designate a federal courthouse in his honor. This book chronicles why Perry is so worthy of this recognition. I hope it serves to inspire the next generation, as this humble man has inspired me. – The Honorable James E. Clyburn, U.S. Congress

This impressive volume pays exuberant and well-deserved attention to the outstanding achievements of Matthew J. Perry. It makes an important contribution to the history of the legal profession in the South and deepens our understanding of the heroic struggles of the black bar to achieve freedom of opportunity for all. The singular life of this great jurist demonstrates how an individual can make the world a better place. – Darlene Clark Hine, Michigan State University

This fine book makes an important contribution to the public's understanding of American, southern, and South Carolina history—and American legal history—particularly from the 1940s to the present. Its value is enhanced by its timeliness and the reality that the era of the Civil Rights Movement is rapidly fading from public memory. – Michael Kent Curtis, Wake Forest Law School

The volume underscores how Perry enabled his home state to escape from Jim Crow's clutches with much less turmoil than many of its neighbors. Published in concert with the dedication of the Matthew J. Perry, Jr. United States Courthouse in Columbia, South Carolina, Matthew J. Perry portrays an esteemed juror whose grace and resiliency led South Carolina into the twentieth century.

Biographies & Memoirs

In the Pirate's Den: My Life As a Secret Agent for Castro by Jorge Masetti (Encounter Books)

In 1964, at age seven, Jorge Masetti was informed by a Cuban colonel that his father had died gloriously leading a guerrilla band in Argentina. By the age of 16, Masetti had left Havana to follow in his father's footsteps, fighting as an urban revolutionary in Buenos Aires. At the age of eighteen, Masetti had been selected by Fidel Castro's spymasters to study "conspiratorial methods" that would allow him to work in Havana's growing international underground. After graduation he joined the notorious Americas Department, entering "the pirate's den" where he worked as a secret agent for Castro for the next twenty years.

Taking readers inside the war room of the Cuban revolution, In the Pirate's Den tells a dramatic story of international intrigue: smuggling diamonds and ivory from Africa to help support the Havana government, counterfeiting U.S. dollars, trafficking in narcotics. Masetti describes his work as an agent in Europe and throughout Latin America, and his activities in Angola, Nicaragua and other war zones. He was happily married to the daughter of Antonio de la Guardia, a major figure in the Cuban government, whose twin brother, Patricio, was a general in the Cuban army.

Things changed suddenly in 1989 when Masetti returned from a mission in Africa to find that Castro's secret police had arrested both Antonio and Patricio de la Guardia along with General Arnaldo Ochoa, Cuba's most famous and respected soldier – all of whom were thought to be fomenting a Cuban perestroika. Masetti describes the Kafkaesque workings of the tribunal that resulted in the execution of his father-in-law and General Ochoa, and ultimately made him see the brutal reality of the revolutionary movement to which he had devoted half a lifetime.

Masetti's first-hand account at times seems to have come from a Le Carre novel, but In the Pirate's Den is true. In addition to shedding light on the machinations of the Castro government, it is also the story of a crisis in a revolutionary faith. Masetti life changed overnight when the executions occurred: "To die in Argentina or Nicaragua, or Columbia, or somewhere else, had been part of the game. But then death made its appearance in Cuba itself and everything I believed in began to crumble."

In 1990, still pretending to support the Castro regime, Masetti left Havana for a posting in Mexico City and then managed to escape to Spain where he began to reexamine his life and experiences. He now lives with his family in Paris.

This memoir offers tantalizing glimpses into the murky guerrilla demimonde of the 1970s and 80s, when revolutionary ideals not infrequently mingled with criminality. – Los Angeles Times

In the Pirate's Den is the result of painful introspection, a page-turning chronicle of a remarkable journey into and out of the Cuban revolution.

Biographies & Memoirs

Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic by Paul Mommaers, with Elisabeth M. Dutton, with a foreword by Veerle Fraeters (Peeters)

Hadewijch, c.1210-1260, commands increasing attention internationally. As an author, she is extremely creative and artistic. As a beguine (member of an ascetic and philanthropic community of women not under vows founded chiefly in the Netherlands in the 13th century), she belongs to a revolutionary women's movement formed by "religious women" who, conscious of their gender, did not wish to enter into either marriage or a convent. Spiritually and materially independent, these first beguines come into conflict with social order, and endure the reaction of clerics, religious and secular authorities, and those in orders. As a mystic, Hadewijch illuminates both the glorious aspects of the love-relationship with God and its painful aspect: with the enjoyment of love goes an increasingly intense desire; in unity, the alterity of the Beloved becomes all the stronger. Consequently, union with God is not a spiritual elevation by which a person is released from his or her being human: the authentic mystical being-one consists rather of the interplay between "resting" in God and "working" in this world. "You must live as a human being!" is the kernel of Hadewijch's life and teaching.

In 1980 Hadewijch was introduced into the English speaking world when the author's complete works were translated in The Classics of Western Spirituality series. The preface to this translation was written by Paul Mommaers, professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and a member of the Ruusbroec Society. Mommaers was, and is, the expert par excellence on the vernacular mystical texts that were written in the duchy of Brabant in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Hadewijch is a translation of his study on Hadewijch that was originally published in Dutch in 1989.

Since the English translation of Hadewijch's Opera omnia was published in 1980, English-language Hadewijch scholarship has gradually been developing, notably in the fields of gender studies and theology. Since the emergence, in the 1970s, of feminist historiography, the thirteenth-century religious women have been an attractive object of study for feminist and gender historians. The lives of these religious women, often written by male clerics, form an inexhaustible source for the study of relative values within the binary oppositions which characterize the late-medieval religious world: the official authority from the institutional church versus the authority on the basis of divine grace of women and lay people; the discursive word of the schooled versus the imaginative language of visionaries; the intellectual contemplation of God in the spirit versus the visitations of God in the ecstatic (female) body. Hadewijch's work is increasingly researched in the context of such gender studies.

Hadewijch is one of the earliest Low Country authors writing in the vernacular. Her use of her native language is remarkable. She minted for herself a vernacular variant of three genres which up to that moment had only a Latin tradition in Dutch-speaking regions – religious letter, vision, and religious poem. She did this with an unusual mastery of her native language and the genre, assimilating in her texts both biblical tradition and profane courtly literature: Mommaers points out particularly how she draws her concepts of desire from these two sources, patterning her unending desire for God against the endlessly unfulfilled desire of the troubadours.

While Dutch research had previously focused mainly on the literary aspects of Hadewijch's texts, Mommaers radically contextualizes his study within the frame of Hadewijch's leadership of beguines. The literary qualities of Hadewijch's text are not ignored, but readers are brought to consider the texts in the light of their original function – namely, as mystical pedagogical material, conceived by a supremely talented literary magistra for a small circle of women for whose spiritual development she was responsible.

The approach of Hadewijch's texts from the angle of the author's leadership leads Mommaers to the question of the source and the legitimacy of this leadership. This question is pressing, because the unregulated way of life of the early beguines was mistrusted by the church, and because the medieval woman had no right to preach or teach publicly. Today, the topic of authority is at the heart of gender historiography, but Mommaers was the first in Hadewijch studies to explicitly thematize it. Because almost nothing is known about the historical Hadewijch, he approaches this subject indirectly, via the many vitae of her religious contemporaries of the same region.

The last part of Hadewijch sheds light on Hadewijch's mystical teaching. Just as in the first part of the book, Hadewijch the writer is firmly anchored in the historical movement of the beguines, in later sections Hadewijch the mystic is firmly embedded in the textual tradition. Mommaers shows how the early thirteenth-century love mysticism of Hadewijch is rooted in the texts of the twelfth-century Cistercians Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry, who use the love-dialogue of the Song of Songs as the metaphorical framework for the interior religious experience.

This growing Anglo-American interest in Hadewijch cannot be better supported than by the publication of Mommaers' monograph in English, as the book offers the reader a clear insight into the different aspects of Hadewijch's multi-faceted personality: writer – beguine – mystic. Hadewijch is an indispensable study available to scholars worldwide in an English language edition.

Biographies & Memoirs / Sailing / Politics

Small Boat to Freedom: A Journey of Conscience to a New Life in America by John Vigor (The Lyons Press)

What do people do when the politics of the country they love become too much to bear?

For John Vigor, his wife, June, and their seventeen-year-old son, the decision was wrenching but clear: they would leave everything behind and sail for America.

Small Boat to Freedom is the story of that journey.

Vigor had it all, a loving family, a secure and well-deserved reputation as a syndicated South African newspaper columnist, and a lovely home in one of South Africa’s most beautiful cities, Durban. He was fifty, a native of England (until age 13) and a former South African sailing champion, had been a popular newspaper columnist for eighteen years, and a journalist for thirty years, working for anti-apartheid newspapers, raising a family of three sons with his wife, June, also a journalist.

But an apartheid-regime clampdown on freedom of expression forced Vigor to make the wrenching decision to abandon his idyllic life – and financial security. The Vigors prepare to go, losing most of their savings, using the scant remainder to purchase a boat for the dangerous voyage. They leave South Africa on a thirty-one-foot sloop for a precarious voyage to a new but uncertain life in America, past the treacherous Cape of Storms, around the Cape of Good Hope, and across the South Atlantic to Florida.
Small Boat to Freedom is an emotional and colorful account of two journeys – one of conscience, the other of courage – each inspired by the author’s strength and that of his family.

A beautifully written and intimate story. – Bernadette Bernon, former editor, Cruising World magazine

An absorbing chronicle of how the Vigor family tests its resolve and skills in an serious ocean cruise to escape from their homeland, all the while remaining painfully aware of the not insignificant fact that they have no jobs awaiting them when they reach their destination in America. – Ocean Navigator

Although it seems odd that a long-time writer would wait 15 years to write about such a momentus life change, Small Boat to Freedom is moving. 9/11 seems to have reawakened the feelings that motivated Vigor to leave his home, and the result is compelling and readable.

Business & Investing / Computers & Internet / Web Development

Make Your Small Business Website Work: Easy Answers to Content, Navigation, and Design by John Heartfield (Rockport Publishers, Inc.)

The guest is a jewel resting on the cushion of hospitality: – Nero Wolfe

Although it may seem like everyone has a website these days, it just seems like it. Small companies with and without websites struggle with two main design issues: What should be on my website and how do I organize and build a website that will be effective for my business?

Make Your Small Business Website Work provides answers to these questions and specifically addresses the fact that although a website is not for every company, it can be a cost-effective tool for small companies who do not have a big marketing budget or distribution network. This book, written by John Heartfield, helps small companies sculpt their content and build navigation systems that meet their specific needs and maximize the site’s potential. Heartfield, international consultant, formerly, professor at both the Stern School of Business, NYU, and the Interactive Telecommunication Program, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, provides professional advice on how to build a website and integrate it into the business.

Make Your Small Business Website Work features extensive information on presenting the core messages of the business. It covers topics such as designing an effective homepage, how to create navigation systems that won't frustrate visitors and how small business sites differ from other websites.

Featured firms include: Apt5a Design Group, Inc., DataArt, Foscarini Murano SRL, FreshDirect, interactivetools.com, inc., Kimili, Henry Kuo, New World Restaurant Group, Inc., Noble Desktop, LLC, Palo Alto Software, Inc., PixelPharmacy, Roxen Internet Software AB, Rullkotter AGD {Werbung + Design), Scholz & Volkmer gmbH and others.

In a very real sense, any business on the Web is a small business. No matter how famous the brand or how varied their selection, people won't tolerate bad service when they can quickly leave the site and find what they want at another that is more accommodating.

Creating great website navigation for small business should be an easy task, that is, the website has to be easy to use. However, when employees set out to accomplish this goal, they may find that the path to organizing and presenting the content is scattered with pitfalls.

Make Your Small Business Website Work is comprehensive, geared toward small-business owners, their employees, and designed for small companies in any industry. The book offers real websites and straightforward advice on how to construct the type of clear, simple, and consistent website that's good for business. Although the focus of the book is websites for small business, the tips offered here will help anyone who wants to build a website that is functional – not frustrating – for visitors.

Business & Investing

Effective Business Presentations by Judy Jones Tisdale (NetEffect Series: Pearson Prentice Hall) offers strategies and tools to plan, develop, and deliver dynamic business presentations. Equally important, it provides tactics to analyze performance for effectiveness. This practical book includes the following key topics: audience analysis, message development, delivery techniques, strategic PowerPoint use, anxiety management, question-andanswer sessions, and team presentations.

Individuals who haven't presented before or who present infrequently will find the organization of the book offers structure in planning and building presentations. It also provides details for honing delivery skills and creating visuals to be as effective as possible in promoting a message. Experienced presenters may desire to reassess or refine the way that they generate and deliver presentations; these readers can review the chapters in the order they're presented or go straight to the chapters relevant to the areas on which they want to work. They can selectively skim various chapters at any stage of their presentation development to find useful tips and tools to assist them in developing their presentation methods.

Effective Business Presentations devotes a chapter to each of the key elements of dynamic presentations:

Chapter 1, Developing Presentations and Presenters – Introduces the concepts to be covered.
Chapter 2, Getting Started – Addresses the following pre-presentation planning strategics: presentation purpose, audience analysis principles, and presenter considerations. The chapter covers the importance of clarity in each presentation's purpose and desired outcome to best achieve desired goals. And it explains how presenters can identify audience characteristics to customize a presentation. Additionally, presenters can inventory their current presentation skills to recognize their strengths and identify the areas that they wish to improve.
Chapter 3, Developing an Effective Message – Demonstrates how presenters might organize typical presentations to accomplish a particular purpose. The chapter examines rhetorical strategies to develop several presentation patterns and problem-solving messages.
Chapter 4, Delivering with Impact – Gives readers strategies to present themselves effectively to audiences. Describes and analyzes various delivery techniques to help presenters enhance credibility during a presentation. Encourages presenters to understand their own communication style, as they learn how and when to use other communication styles. This chapter focuses on the following delivery areas: speaking voice, nonverbal communication cues, and presentation notes.
Chapter 5, Using PowerPoint Wisely – The PowerPoint program can be an important presentation tool; however, this tool should support the presenter's message – not become the presentation itself. This chapter addresses effective slide design techniques, organized information structure, and slide enhancements.
Chapter 6, Using Other Visuals – Addresses how presenters can support their messages using visuals other than PowerPoint. Although it's almost expected for most presentations, PowerPoint isn't the only visuals tool available. The chapter addresses the following alternative visuals and examines the effectiveness of each in various presentation situations: overhead transparencies, flip charts and whiteboards, and handouts.
Chapter 7, Overcoming Presentation Anxieties – Offers ways for readers to minimize or control presentation jitters. The chapter defines types of presentation anxieties so that speakers can learn how to diagnose their nervousness and make plans to compensate for it. Additionally, the chapter addresses several methods for presenters to use in combating presentation anxiety.
Chapter 8, Handling Q&A – Gives readers a context to help them prepare for question-and-answer sessions. The chapter explains how to prepare for questions, how to anticipate specific types of questions, how to address questions during the Q&A, and how to present confidently during the session.
Chapter 9, Presenting as a Team – Addresses team presentation strategies, explaining techniques in developing stronger teams and then delivering the presentation.

[Effective Business Presentations] ... does a solid job encouraging [readers] to practice extensively – including videotaping ... this gets them used to working through rough material and makes them more comfortable working toward a polished presentation ... does an excellent job laying out planning and delivery information for team presentations. – Aaron Coldweber

Effective Business Presentations is a resource for presenters to learn how to identify strengths and challenges and then develop action plans at each presentation stage in order to hone the skills necessary to accomplish presentation goals. Whether readers have presented many times or are new to making presentations, this book will provide new and useful information.

Business & Investing / Management & Leadership

Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development by Henry Mintzberg (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.)

The trouble with "management" education, says author Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, is that it is business education, and leaves a distorted impression of management; most programs overplay the science in the form of analysis and technique, and downplay experience and insight. In Managers Not MBAs, Mintzberg offers a new definition of management as a blend of craft (experience), art (insight), and science (analysis). An education that overemphasizes science encourages a style of managing the author calls "calculating," or if the graduates believe themselves to be artists, the related style, "heroic." According to the book, neither heroes nor technocrats in positions of influence are useful – what's really needed are balanced, dedicated people who practice a style that can be called "engaging." Such people believe their purpose is to leave behind stronger organizations, not just higher share prices. Managers Not MBAs explains in detail how to cultivate such managers, and how they can transform the business world and, ultimately, society.

Managers Not MBAs presents the kind of bold thinking readers have come to expect from the man the Financial Times named one of the top 10 management thinkers in the world, and who Fast Company called "one of the most original minds in management" and "one of the world's most influential teachers of business strategy." Already controversial before its publication, Managers Not MBAs goes beyond mere critique to offer proven, detailed proposals for change. In the second half of his book, Mintzberg describes in detail the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPM), initiated at McGill University in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan. In this sweeping critique of how managers are educated and how, as a consequence, management is practiced, Mintzberg offers thoughtful and controversial ideas for reforming both. This approach to management education, highly successful for the last eight years – is an alternative to the MBA program, that helps managers learn from their own experience.

Business & Investing / Economics

East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance: Response in a Rapidly Changing Region edited by Zafar Adeel (United Nations University Press)

The East Asian region has seen considerable growth in its economy, industrial base, and population in the last two decades. All three of these factors are often linked to over-exploitation and degradation of environmental resources. East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance provides an overview of governance policy with regards to environmental challenges in the region.

Three sectors were selected for deeper analysis: pesticide managers, water quality and resources management; and air pollution managment. These sectors are also closely linked to the economic and industrial growth of the region. Five countries are selected as representatives of this region: China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand. This selection includes representation of highly-industrialized, industralizing, and developing economies. This grouping also provides a mix of political and historical backgrounds that are diverse enough to provide a glimpse of the “typical” East Asian governance mechanisms.

East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance was edited by Zafar Adeel Assistant Director, Program Development, United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment, and Health, Ontario, Canada. The United Nations University (UNU) has always considered the East Asian region as a priority area for its activities. This emphasis is partly driven by the UNU's location in Japan, but it is also based on the consideration that most nations in this region are developing countries. With the UNU's mandate to build networks of researchers and scholars and to develop the capacity of individuals and institutions to undertake research, the focus is always on developing countries. Environmental governance in this region has also received due attention from the UNU: in fact, the UNU has since 1996 undertaken a programme both to monitor the environmental quality in the region and to outline prescriptions for environmental policies. This programme has been possible largely due to diligent collaboration of a network of researchers, professionals, and scholars working in the region. East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance presents a compilation of papers on environmental governance contributed by the members of this network.

An equitable emphasis on the three selected sectors is intended by using case studies from the five selected countries. The authors of the case studies have linked the problems and issues to the governance structures in their respective countries. Often, the history of the development of these structures is also discussed, which provides insights into the shortcomings and limitations of the political processes involved. The role of various stakeholders, including government, the general public, NGOs, and industries, is described to complete the picture. The authors have also attempted to outline prescriptions for each sector in their respective country.

East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance comprises four sections, with one section dedicated to each of the three sectors. The first section examines the management of pesticides in the agricultural sector of Malaysia (Abdullah and Sinnakkannu), China (Hao and Yeru). and Thailand (Tabucanon). This sector is the most complex in terms of the number of players involved and the myriad of legislative enactments. It is interesting to observe the complex interrelationship between various laws and rules. while keeping in sight the limitations to their implementation on the ground. The second section focuses on water resource management in Malaysia and Thailand. Tabucanon, in her second contribution to this book, indicates that Thailand's perspective is driven by urban utilization of water and pollution issues. In contrast, Ahmad and Ali contend that Malaysia's water utilization patterns are largely driven by agricultural usage. While there are some similarities in the legislative framework of these two countries, inherently different approaches are adopted towards solving water management problems. The third section compares the air pollution issues and governance mechanisms in Korea (Lee and Adeel) and Japan (Yamauchi). The nature of the problems is somewhat similar, in part because of similar levels of industrial and economic development. The approaches to environmental governance are also somewhat similar in the two countries, with almost parallel development of environmental legislation.

The fourth section provides an overarching analysis of the governance structures in the region. An in-depth discussion of linkages of environmental protection and sustainable development to economic growth is undertaken. Paoletto and Termorshuizen outline a number of options for environmental governance through a comparison between approaches undertaken by the OECD countries, the USA, and the East Asian region. The final chapter (Adeel and Nakamoto) summarizes the findings of the earlier sections through a comparative evaluation. A synthesis of prescriptions for effective environmental governance is also provided.

The findings from East Asian Experience in Environmental Governance, and the case studies contained herein, can help in developing a fundamental understanding about environmental governance in terms of what works and what does not in this region. Clearly, only effective and meaningful environmental governance can ensure long-term sustainability of the remarkable industrial and economic growth observed in this region.

Even more importantly, it would ensure that our children and grandchildren can inherit a region that is prosperous yet rich in culture, environmental resources, and natural beauty.

Business & Investing

Remember Who You Are: Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind by Daisy Wademan in collaboration with Professors from Harvard Business School (Harvard Business School Press)

Whether it’s about our personal life or business life, at each fork in the road we agonize over the choices we face and how the decisions we make will impact the future. Knowing who to ask for guidance and support is often the hardest choice of all.

In business, leadership requires many attributes besides intelligence and business savvy – courage, character, compassion, and respect are just a few. New managers learn concrete skills in the classroom or on the job, but where do they hone the equally important human values that will guide them through a career that is both successful and meaningful?

In Remember Who You Are, Daisy Wademan gathers lessons on balancing the personal and professional responsibilities of leadership, taking readers inside one of the business world's most prestigious training grounds, as fifteen faculty members of Harvard Business School impart invaluable, and often surprising, lessons on life and leadership in the form of personal stories. These professors, business experts who collectively have coached thousands of students and executives, offer frank thoughts and concrete advice on taking risks, staying grounded, making mistakes, and more.

From the revelations on luck and obligation brought by a terrifying mountain accident to a widowed mother's lesson of respect for people rather than job titles – these unforgettable stories and reflections, shared by renowned contributors from Rosabeth Moss Kanter to Harvard Business School’s Dean Kim Clark, remind us that great leadership is not only about the mind, but the heart. Contributors include: Jai Jaikumar, Jeffrey F. Rayport, Richard S. Tedlow, Thomas K McCraw, Stephen P. Kaufman, David E. Bell, Nancy F. Koehn, H. Kent Bowen, Frances X. Frei, Timothy Butler, Thomas J. DeLong, Henry B. Reiling, and Nitin Nohria.

When my mother said, "Remember who you are" she meant: I believe in you, and want you to live up to the promise that is yours, to the opportunities out there for you, and the hope that is in you to make a difference in the world. – Dean Kim Clark

Just as the corporate world is undergoing a period of intense self-examination, with professionals at all levels looking for inspiration in what has been an especially challenging workplace, Remember Who You Are offers readers the guidance they need to answers some of life's most important questions. Addressing the moral, ethical, and personal dilemmas professionals face as they climb the ladder to success at work and in their personal lives, the book will help aspiring leaders everywhere use their time and talents in ways that truly matter.

Cooking, Food & Wine

Roma: Authentic Recipes from In and Around the Eternal City by Julia della Croce, with photography by Paolo Destefanis (Chronicle Books)

Noted cookbook author and authority on Italian cooking, Julia della Croce reveals the diverse foodways of Rome and its five provinces.The region of Latium, and Rome, its capital city, are rich with culinary traditions. Today's dishes, passed down from generation to generation, reflect a gastronomical heritage that traces its beginnings to the ancient Greeks, with their knowledge of farming and affinity with the sea, and the Etruscans, experts in making wine and olive oil. Roma offers a fascinating introduction to the bold flavors of Roman cooking and the unique cuisines that surround it.

Della Croce ventures from coast to countryside and shares over 60 cherished recipes. From the fresh seafood in the coastal province of Latina; to the rustic aged meats and sturdy cooking of the most northerly province of Rieti; to the simple, seasonal dishes of Viterbo known for its aromatic olive oils; to the handmade pastas and rich, savory meat sauces of the landlocked Frosinone province; and finally to the lusty cooking of Rome itself, this collection captures the authentic tastes of this region's legendary food.

For example, readers learn how to share in Viterbo's love for olive oil by drizzling fresh vegetables in an aromatic dressing; use a flavorful pancetta to prepare Rieti's rustic specialty, Spaghetti with Tomato and Bacon; saute fresh sea bass or sole in a pungent caper sauce to make a coastal Latina favorite; or toss handmade pasta in a rich, savory meat sauce to recreate a Frosinone province culinary trademark. Some other dishes include Risotto with Pureed Asparagus and Smoked Provola and della Croce’s own Fish Fillets in Caper Sauce alla romana are both particularly pleasing. The author also includes rarely seen recipes, such as the homey Pasta and Chickpeas or an especially fun Pizza di Pasqua, or sweet Easter bread.

And della Croce also lists her favorite places to stay, fun and historical local festivals, and where to find authentic regional Italian cooking and wine classes for those planning a Roman adventure.

An extraordinary journey into Roman cuisine and culture that demonstrates through irresistibly mouthwatering recipes and seductive photography that the two things are inseparable and consequential. Grazie Julia and Paolo! – Antonio Monda, La Repubblica

All roads may lead to Rome, but Julia della Croce will lead you right to the kitchen to try these authentic recipes from the Eternal City and the region of Lazio. – Mary Ann Esposito, host of public television's Ciao Italia

Julia della Croce has written one of the best books on Roman cooking since Marcus Apicius in the 1st century A.D. His books are out of print, and hers isn't full of foolery about whole roasted peacocks and soused flamingo brains. – Bill Marsano, United Airlines' Hemispheres magazine

The dishes in Roma are so accessible that even novice cooks will prepare them with relative ease. And the photography of Paolo Destafanis shines. But with the wideranging list of della Croce's favorite places to stay, fun and historical festivals, and wine classes, which round out this cookbook, readers will be tempted to phone the travel agent.

Cooking, Food & Wine

Sacred Food: Cooking for Spiritual Nourishment by Elisabeth Luard (Chicago Review Press)

From Sunday night family dinners to elaborate ritual feasts, food plays a vital role in any celebration. In fact, food truly is what brings people together.

Sacred Food by award-winning food writer Elisabeth Luard explores how the world's sacred dishes comfort and heal. Luard also illuminates the importance of past and present spiritual food traditions to better understand how and why we celebrate with food.

Luard, who has earned a string of prizes for her unique, intelligent and engaging food writing, explains, "In order to best unravel why and what we cook when we need to nourish the soul, I have looked at the spirit rather than the substance. The instinct that propels a Muslim to mark the birth of a baby or mourn the death of a loved one is in no way different from the sentiment that draws joy or sorrow from the devout Christian or the worshiper of the animist gods of the ancients." Luard reveals why some cultures bob for apples at Halloween, bury eggs in bread loaves at Easter or eat sweet things while courting. Special attention is given to foods that have universal significance, such as seeds, eggs, fruit, honey and grain.

Sacred Food offers insights that go beyond recipes, exploring the dishes that are traditionally served at significant moments in human life – birth, puberty, courtship, betrothal and marriage, death, burial, and remembrance – and explaining how and why we celebrate with food. More than 40 award-winning recipes include:

Kerala Coconut Curry to share at an Indian-inspired wedding feast
Mushroom piroshki from Slovakia to welcome a newborn baby Cassava with chili and peanuts from Africa to mark a girl's coming-of-age
Panettone for Christmas, an Italian tradition
Chinese dumplings to ring in the New Year
Chicken soup with kreplach for the last day of the feast of Sukkot
English soul cakes, a buttery gingerbread for Halloween
Mexican mole for the Day of the Dead
Saffron Salep Ice Cream made with rosewater and powdered orchid root to celebrate No Rooz or New Year in the Middle East
Cristollen, a German Christmas cake for the holidays

Excerpt from Sacred Food, Introduction

Our ancestors saw the propitiation of the gods as a serious business: it was all that stood between the cave mouth and wild wood. In modern times, when so many of the festivals that marked the changing year have turned into municipal events, the primitive purpose of the celebration—the passing of winter storms, the return of the sun—may be airbrushed out, but the shadow remains, a ghost at the table. Although the gods of nature have mostly lost their place at the feast, the founding fathers of organized religions—whether Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jew, or the humanist belief systems of the East—had the good sense not to ignore them completely. Certainly, the priests of the new order preached against the old—but they made sure their festivals did not change out of all recognition, remaining rooted in what had gone before. It is to this adaptability that the festivals owe their strength in the face of those who look for a rational explanation, their survival against all odds.…

Certain foods have universal significance but without requiring explanation from professors of ethnology. Seeds, nuts, fruit, eggs, and grains, signify renewal; new life from old. Blood, shed or shared, is a metaphor for sacrifice. Sweetness, sugar and honey, makes the heart glad. Wine and strong drink, together with some hallucinogenic substances extracted or obtained by one means or another, are useful to the priesthood, since they allow men to believe they are gods. These foods—presented and prepared in a million different ways, or absent and marked by regret at their absence—are to be found at the heart of all our rituals.

Splendidly written, lavishly illustrated. – Gourmet

A reminder of the spiritual dimension in the everyday – specifically, the cross cultural communion through foods we all share. – The New York Times
It will astound and astonish you. – The Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey

The ceremonies and dishes are lavishly illustrated in Sacred Food with color photographs bringing to life a wealth of recipes and cultures including those of Mexico, Japan, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, North America, the Middle East, Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain. The book explores the role of food rituals around the globe and examines the culinary instincts that unite and divide cultures by combining history and ethnography with stories and lore from world cultures.

Cooking, Food & Wine / Biographies & Memoirs

Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef by Ian Kelly (Walker and Company) is a biography with recipes.

A unique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a culinary tour of the palaces of Britain and Europe in the ultimate age of gastronomic indulgence, when, for the first time, chefs became celebrities and the modern restaurant was born.

Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Careme's meteoric rise from a child abandoned on the streets of revolutionary Paris to international celebrity and provides a below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous periods in European history – First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace – when emperors, kings, and princes wielded Careme's gastronomy as a diplomatic tool.

In Cooking for Kings, author and actor Kelly traces Careme's extraordinary life, ending with his premature death from carbon-monoxide poisoning (a common side-effect of cooking over charcoal in poorly ventilated kitchens). Careme was much more than the inventor of the chef's hat, the vol-au-vent, and the souffle. He had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the foibles and the favorite dishes of the Romanovs, the Rothschilds, and Rossini. He worked for the gourmet-king George IV in the Viennese court, and even made Napoleon's wedding cake. But Careme's reputation rested ultimately on a novel idea that changed cooking forever: by marrying food and glamour in his books – which transported readers to the tables of the famous households for whom he cooked – he was the first chef to become rich and famous by publishing cookbooks.

Careme's recipes still grace the tables of restaurants the world over. Now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the kings and queens for whom he worked, they are featured throughout this biography.

Antonin Careme, the chef of chefs, was a legend in his own time and as artful a publicist as any of today's celebrity cooks. His story is a natural for an epic tale and Ian Kelly brings Careme's restless spirit back to life along with a tableau of la grande cuisine two hundred years ago. – Anne Willan, founder of Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne

Ian Kelly has done a wonderful job, not only of depicting Careme's culinary genius beautifully but of introducing us to his extraordinary personal life as well. I enjoyed reading this book immensely and recommend it to culinary historians and food buffs everywhere. – Daniel Boulud, chef-owner of Daniel, Bistro Moderne, and Cafe Boulud

Ian Kelly's valuable and pleasurable addition to the literature of food combines an eye for the richness of historic detail with a solid sense of culinary crafts. While stimulating our palates, it breathes life into a critical period in the building of modern Europe. – Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, Salt, and Choice Cuts

Gosford Park meets Kitchen Confidential in Cooking for Kings, the first English-language biography of the original celebrity chef. Kelly brings to life the comedy and tragedy of the eighteenth-century professional kitchen which turns out to be not so very different from today.

Education

Children Don't Come with an Instruction Manual: A Teacher's Guide to Problems That Affect Learners by Wendy L. Moss (Teachers College Press)

Teachers are increasingly called upon to guide children toward emotional health, socially skill, and academic success. Wendy L. Moss, clinical psychologist and certified school psychologist, has designed Children Don't Come with an Instruction Manual to help educators recognize and deal with a variety of academic and nonacademic issues that can hamper a child's classroom performance.

The book addresses the diverse situations the teacher may encounter – from learning disabilities, to a child dealing with trauma, to working with gifted students. The book aids teachers in considering the individual needs and strengths of atypical children, to improve the input to educational specialists who may develop an educational program specific to the child, and to make the first observations and refer the child to trained professionals who are best able to help the child with psychological and medical needs.

Included are:

Definitions and descriptions of underlying problems and disorders.
Interpretations of childhood symptoms, such as fear, emotional outbursts, hyperactivity, withdrawal, and inappropriate behaviors.
Appropriate intervention points for children having difficulties, and guidance on how to recognize the need for professional assistance.
A chapter is devoted to understanding children's reactions to violence, whether witnessed or experienced directly.

Case summaries demonstrate the behaviors discussed and the most positive steps taken by teachers to improve lives. In the final chapter, Moss presents information gathered from students, former students, parents, and experienced teachers as to how they were best helped or were able to help children with learning difficulties, emotional problems, giftedness, and ADHD.

Outstanding! Dr. Moss's clear identification, explanation, and suggested solutions of the broad range of difficulties affecting students in the classroom make this reference guide a must have for all teachers. – Irene M. Lober, Professor Emerita, SUNY-New Paltz

Children's behavior can often be baffling to even experienced teachers. Dr. Moss's book provides a concise and comprehensive guide to understanding, assessing, and responding to the many possible causes of classroom behavior. An indispensable resource that teachers will turn to again and again. – Noemi Balinth, Clinical Psychologist, Past President of the New York State Psychological Association

This extremely useful tool has empowered me to observe and assist students directly in a more meaningful way. I now have the opportunity to pass along a higher level of information about students to the school-based support team. – Leslie Solomon, 1st Grade Teacher, New York City

Thoroughly researched, Children Don't Come with an Instruction Manual is a concise and clear manual that is easily understood by those who do not have a complete education in psychology, psychiatry, or neurology.

Education / Teaching

Curriculum: An Integrative Introduction (Third Edition) by Evelyn J. Sowell (Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall)

Curriculum is a topic about which educators as well as laypersons have knowledge – because we all attended school. For most of us, everything in and around schools seems somehow related to curriculum. In Curriculum, curriculum refers to what is taught in schools, a deliberately open definition that promotes consideration of curricula serving different purposes and contexts.

Written for teachers and nonteaching school staff, Curriculum seeks to bridge curriculum theory and practice by presenting information in practical settings. It's one thing to read and comprehend how curriculum processes work at the level of book knowledge, and quite another to put these processes into practice. This text seeks to show how practice informs theory, and how use of theory helps individuals engage in curriculum tasks appropriately.

One major theme is that the curriculum processes (i.e., development, implementation/ enactment, and evaluation) involve decision making by people who are guided by their beliefs and values about what students should learn. Furthermore, because the processes are sociopolitical, the beliefs and values incorporated in any particular curriculum may or may not be held by those who use them in classrooms. Both developers and users must arrive at decisions after careful thought, because living with the consequences of decisions made by default or in haste is difficult.

A second major theme is that curricular change occurs only after individuals have made internal transitions. That is, people must "end the old" before they can "begin the new." Transitions take time, understanding, and support on the part of all of the people involved. The text discusses the change processes involved when initiating curriculum revisions or when using "new" curricula in classrooms.

This third edition provides new content and new features:

Instructional level curricula developed by schools or departments are the focus of the development processes.
The revised Bloom's taxonomy is used in discussions of cognitive learning outcomes.
Information about technology in curriculum (e.g., WebQuests) has been updated.
Information about state and national standards as curriculum content sources has been updated and related to the revised Bloom's taxonomy.
The discussion of curriculum evaluation has been updated and focused on the application of Sanders-Davidson's School Evaluation Model.
One specific goal given at the beginning of each chapter helps to focus attention on major points.
For Additional Information is a new section at the end of each chapter. These sections list suggested readings and Web resources about selected chapter topics.

The text provides the following features:

Action Points in every chapter invite readers to participate in the construction of their own curriculum knowledge. Readers who are involved in curriculum processes as they study this text are assisted with their own projects through work on the final Action Point in each chapter.
Exhibits of instructional curriculum assist developers in planning their own curriculum.

Organization of the book:

Part I introduces outcomes and experiences approaches to curriculum processes. Outcomes approaches, which prevail at most public district or school decision-making levels, result in subject-based curricula. Experiences approaches can be found in schools, classrooms, and other educational institutions (e.g., scouts, art museums) where learner- or society-based curricula are the norm.

Part II discusses the bases for curriculum, including the following content sources: knowledge and subject matter, society and culture, and learners. The intent of these chapters is to help readers consider and clarify their values about the relative contributions of these sources to school curricula.

Part III discusses and illustrates instructional curriculum development, use, and evaluation. This part details the cyclic nature of curriculum processes. Typically, a curriculum targeted for revision is incompatible with state guidelines, district or school needs, or the desires of the community. After it is revised, the curriculum is used in classrooms where its effects on students and the school community are evaluated, beginning the cycle anew.

Connections between the bases for curriculum and the development-useevaluation processes are elaborated within this text. Connections such as these provide a rationale for the book's title.

In summary, curriculum theory and practice are combined in this clearly written, comprehensive, integrative introduction. Written with a broadbased approach to curriculum, Curriculum includes processes of curriculum development, use, and evaluation. The book, aimed at educators and school administrators, including principals, governing board members, and curriculum specialists, provides a hands-on approach to needs assessment usable in any district, shows how to implement a curriculum in school classrooms, and provides readable, down-to-earth information about curriculum evaluation. – Anna Washington, MAT, MEd

Education / Teaching / Reading

Reading with Meaning: Strategies for College Reading (6th Edition) by Dorothy Grant Hennings (Pearson Prentice Hall) offers users an opportunity to improve their reading skills, as well as strategies important for success in any arena. It provides culturally significant, engaging selections from literature, popular books, and magazines that readers typically encounter daily.

Reading with Meaning, written by Dorothy Grant Hennings, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Kean University, builds word power by teaching vocabulary skills, and provides information about such basic strategies as grasping the main idea of paragraphs and the thesis of an article, using clue words to anticipate meaning, thinking critically, studying for tests, and interpreting charts and graphs. Readings cover a range of topics, including history, psychology, economics, sociology, career planning, biology, geology, business, and literature, including poetry.

The book prepares students to read the kinds of materials they will use in college courses – college texts, supporting books, journals and news articles. It takes an interactive-constructive view of reading and emphasizes an active response through collaboration and writing. Students learn specific strategies for making meaning with text, including previewing and brainstorming, purpose-setting, distinguishing main from supporting ideas, using clue words to track ideas, visualizing via webbing, charting and diagramming, using one's inner voice and thinking critically. In Reading with Meaning, vocabulary is developed as an integral component of the reading process and the main idea gets extended coverage across three chapters.

Reading with Meaning offers an interactive, language-arts approach to college reading that helps students develop specific comprehension strategies important for success in college. The book provides culturally significant, interesting selections from textbooks, popular books, and magazines typical of what students need to read throughout their college years. This new two-color edition features an expanded coverage of main idea as well as a focus on building students' word power through new and enhanced pedagogy.

Appropriate for courses in Developmental Reading, College Reading, or College Reading and Study Skills, Reading with Meaning is an excellent resource for those involved in Continuing Education or ESL classes, and a useful tool for anyone interested in improving their reading and comprehension skills.

Engineering / Science / Robotics / Society

Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids by Sidney Perkowitz (Joseph Henry Press) At what point in the bionic transformation process do people become more machine than human?
Do they lose basic human rights if they're more than a certain percentage machine?
Can they vote, marry, have children?
If it takes a $1 million dollar chip to become healthier or smarter, are the rich going to be getting the coolest augmentations while everyone else is just left to go it au natural?
These are just a few of the issues that author and scientist Sidney Perkowitz explores in his new book, Digital People.

In most discussions about robots and where technology is taking us, people don't talk about the future of bionic humans, says Perkowitz, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm not saying that tomorrow you're going to see the Six-Million Dollar Man or Jake 2.0 at the cubicle next to you, but we do need to think about the implications of this sort of technology because this is where we're headed.

Even now you'd be surprised how many people could be defined as partly artificial or ‘bionic,’ he adds. Eight to 10 percent of the U.S. population – approximately 25 million people – have some sort of artificial part. And as our population ages that percentage is going to grow. Bionic additions fall under two categories: 1) Functional prosthetic devices and implants, such as artificial limbs, replacement knees and hips, and vascular stents, which aid the flow of blood in blocked arteries; and 2) Cosmetic or vanity bionic implants, like hair plugs, false teeth, artificial eyes and breast implants.

Perkowitz provides the real history of artificial beings, exploring and explaining research being conducted around the world, from Cog and Kismet at MIT to the singing, dancing, and soccer-playing robots at the ROBODEX 2003 exposition in Yokohama, Japan. After presenting the history, he raises the ethical questions surrounding where technology is taking us.

Digital People is a comprehensive yet compact survey of robotics and bionics. Rather than intoning the usual litany of robots, Perkowitz sensibly organizes his book function by function... He offers an entertaining potted history of bionics beginning with the Hindu queen Vishpla (circle 2000 B.C.), who replaced a leg lost in battle with an iron one. – New York Times Book Review, May 16, 2004

We are in the early stages of merging with our technology, while at the same time, our machines are becoming more like us. Perkowitz tells this compelling story from its roots in Aristotle to our future in superintelligent robots. He makes the case for this inevitable result: we are all becoming cyborgs. – Ray Kurzweil, inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines

From pacemakers and prosthetic limbs to breast implants and artificial eyes, the history of artificial life is fascinating and informative. In the end, Digital People is a spellbinding, if somewhat technical, look at what Perkowitz calls the "next level of humanity" and what it all means for our vision of ourselves as human beings.

Health, Mind & Body

The Complete Doctors Healthy Back Bible: A Practical Manual for Understanding, Preventing and Treating Back Pain by Stephen C. Reed & Penny Kendall-Reed with Michael Ford & Charles Gregory (Robert Rose)

Back pain is a common and perplexing problem. Acute back pain is a leading cause of disability, while chronic back pain can be incapacitating. Nearly 80% of adults experience low back pain during their lifetime. This condition until recently has been poorly understood and inadequately managed. Current research, however, has identified pathways and causes for low back pain. Imaging and other testing have improved treatment and there have been tremendous advances in minimally invasive interventions and surgery. Fortunately, most back problems are resolved quickly, but for the new sufferer, for the person facing recurring bouts, and for the person with chronic pain, this fact offers little comfort. Readers in pain need to understand the cause of their pain, when symptoms indicate a serious problem, and how to proceed.

The Complete Doctors Healthy Back Bible summarizes current information on low back pain, both acute and chronic. It also explains the diagnostic tests now available and most importantly, when they are actually useful. Authors Stephen C. Reed, an orthopedic surgeon, and Penny Kendall-Reed, a naturopathic doctor begin by presenting a Quick Reference Guide, charting the symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of usual back conditions, followed by sections devoted to expansive answers to the most common questions:

Should I see a doctor?
Who treats backs?
How is back pain diagnosed?
What causes back pain?

Full coverage of traditional and complementary therapies, with supporting research, is included. Special sections on chronic pain and surgical intervention are also covered.

Reed and Kendall-Reed also offer insight into the condition and suggests diagnosis and appropriate intervention among the many treatment options available.

The book includes:

Illustrated back posture, stretching, strengthening & cardiovascular exercises
Guide to pain relieving medications, herbs & natural supplements
Comprehensive account of treatment options from physical therapy to spinal surgery

For the millions of Americans consulting their doctors for back pain each year, The Complete Doctors Healthy Back Bible offers help in a practical treatment manual. Its accessible format and simplified medical illustrations, accompanied by easy-to-understand explanations of anatomy, make it very usable. A glossary helps readers orient themselves to the terms used and "back fact" sidebars offer additional insights. The book is a useful reference for anyone wishing to alleviate discomfort and maintain a healthy back.

History

There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence by David Cunningham (University of California Press)

Using over twelve thousand previously classified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, David Cunningham uncovers the riveting inside story

of the FBI's attempts to neutralize political targets on both the Right and the Left during the 1960s. Examining the FBI's infamous counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) against supected Communists, Civil Rights and Black Power advocates, Klan adherents, and antiwar activists, Cunningham, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, questions whether such actions were aberrations or instead are evidence of the Bureau's ongoing mission to restrict citizens' rights to engage in legal forms of political dissent. The question becomes an urgent one at this time of heightened concern about domestic security, with the FBI's license to spy on U.S. citizens expanded to a historic degree, and Cunningham offers insights vital to a meaningful assessment of the current situation.

There's Something Happening Here looks inside the FBI's COINTELPROs against White Hate groups and the New Left to explore how agents dealt with the hundreds of individuals and organizations labeled as subversive threats. Rather than simply attributing these activities to the idiosyncratic concerns of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, Cunningham focuses on the complex organizational dynamics that generated literally thousands of COINTELPRO actions. His account shows how – and why – the inner workings of the program led to outcomes that often seemed to lack any overriding logic; it also measures the impact the Bureau's massive campaign of repression had on its targets.

To some observers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's actions during the 1960s – most prominently its counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) against suspected Communists, civil rights and black power advocates, Klan adherents, and antiwar activists – were an aberration, justified by the exceptional political and cultural volatility of the era. For them, the nation was fortunate to have escaped such a period relatively unscathed, and now the FBI should once again be entrusted to use its powers to protect and preserve our national security. To other analysts, COINTELPRO was but one instance in the FBI's century-long history of trampling on citizens' civil liberties ostensibly to ensure a nation free of subversive elements. For this second group, rather than a response to a unique crisis or even a product of the idiosyncratic Hoover, a leader who for decades had masterfully evaded accountability for the Bureau's actions, COINTELPRO reflected the actions of an organization whose appetite for intrusion in citizens' lives was – in the words of one recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report – " insatiable."

The primary goal of There's Something Happening Here is not to advance either of these positions, though Cunningham holds that the reality is closer to the second. More important in his view is understanding the origins, functions, and inner workings of the COINTEL programs themselves. What has become exceedingly clear in the months following September 11, 2001, is that we cannot afford to treat FBI intelligence and counterintelligence activities – and COINTELPRO in particular – as purely historical artifacts.

Indeed, COINTELPRO provides an exceptionally clear window into the internal processes and motivations of the FBI. To appreciate the gravity of the almost total lifting of restrictions on FBI intelligence activities with the passage of the USA PATRIOT and Homeland Security Acts requires an understanding of why these restrictions were first put in place a quarter century ago. While Attorney General John Ashcroft and others in the Bush administration largely succeeded in their attempts to expand the powers of the intelligence establishment, there has been no shortage of commentators – in the Nation, The New York and Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and other publications – who have pointed to the FBI's "bad old days" as a cautionary tale. Rarely commented upon, however, is the fact that almost no one outside the Bureau has any sense of how COINTELPRO was organized and how, with mixed success, it was able to carry out its strongly politicized mission. Understanding the processes through which these programs were developed and carried out, as well as the inner workings of the Bureau itself, is key to comprehending the FBI's fragile orientation to civil liberties generally.

Cunningham examines COINTELPRO in detail to show how particular aspects of the FBI's organizational structure enabled and constrained its intelligence and counterintelligence missions. By situating this particular program within the long history of the FBI and focusing on the flow of information between the Bureau's elite (housed at national headquarters in Washington, DC) and the thousands of agents placed throughout the country (constituting "the field"), we can more clearly understand how targets were selected, tactics developed, and repressive activities carried out. This perspective allows us to clearly assess the impact and enduring significance of COINTELPRO and also provides a base from which we can understand and evaluate the implications of ongoing counter-terrorism activities initiated by the FBI and other members of the intelligence community.

There's Something Happening Here is rooted in the tumultuous political activities of the 1960s, but unlike most accounts of that era, Cunningham’s is not a result of any direct connection to the period; to the contrary, he was born in 1970. Cunningham’s goal in writing the book was to develop a framework within which to understand such processes generally, as well as to better comprehend the particular dynamic between the FBI and the New Left and Ku Klux Klan. Speaking with many of COINTELPRO's targets, he found that one seeming constant was a general awareness of covert disruptive activity by the police and FBI at the time, combined with an inability to penetrate the secretive world of the intelligence community in order to fully understand the shape of such repressive efforts. As Stephen Stills sang in the opening lyrics of the 1967 Buffalo Springfield song "For What It's Worth": There's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear. Even today, twenty-five years after congressional hearings into FBI counterintelligence activities and the subsequent release of previously secret FBI documents to the public, the logic and impact of COINTELPRO remain indistinct.

David Cunningham's calm, dispassionate, and authoritative study of the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO activities of the 1960s gives us much to think about. Putting these programs into historical context and an original theoretical framework, he reminds us that the violation of American constitutional principles cannot be a useful tool in any alleged effort to preserve the American way of life. This is equally true in today's turbulent times as during previous crises. – Sanford J. Ungar, president of Goucher College and author of FBI: An Uncensored Look behind the Walls

For years political scientists and social movement scholars have theorized and sought, in various ways, to measure ‘political repression.’ Despite these efforts, the actual social and organizational dynamics that shape repression have largely remained a black box. By fashioning a rich, systematic account of the origins and operation of the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO... , Cunningham has gone a long way toward redressing this problem. – Doug McAdam, coauthor of Dynamics of Contention

Cunningham's timely, thoughtful, and thoroughly researched history of the FBI's purposeful repression of dissident movements under the COINTELPRO's New Left and White Hate programs raises disturbing questions about the FBI's conduct of 'terrorist' investigations dating from the 1970s and intensified in the aftermath of September 11 – Athan Theoharis, author of Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years

The lessons of this era have considerable relevance today, and in There's Something Happening Here Cunningham extends his analysis to the FBI's often controversial recent actions to map the influence of the COINTELPRO legacy on contemporary debates over national security and civil liberties. This one is a must-read for those who were there as well as those who are too young to remember.

History / Criminology / Politics

These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War edited by Peter Brock, with a foreword by Robert Gaucher (University of Toronto Press)

In many modern wars, there have been those who have chosen not to fight. Be it for religious or moral reasons, some men and women have found no justification for breaking their conscientious objection to violence. In many cases, this objection has lead to severe punishment at the hands of their own governments, usually lengthy prison terms. Peter Brock brings the voices of imprisoned conscientious objectors to the fore in These Strange Criminals.

Brock, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, brings together in this anthology thirty prison memoirs by conscientious objectors to military service, drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and centering on their jail experiences during the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War. Voices from history – like those of Stephen Hobhouse, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, Ian Hamilton, Alfred Hassler, and Donald Wetzel – come alive, detailing the impact of prison life and offering unique perspectives on wartime government policies of conscription and imprisonment. Sometimes intensely moving, and often inspiring, these memoirs show that in some cases, individual conscientious objectors – many well-educated and politically aware – sought to reform the penal system from within either by publicizing its dysfunction or through further resistance to authority.

Brock, tells us that his intent is to contribute to the ethnographic study of the prison and prison(er) culture, and to add the distinctive perspective of this category of prisoners to the literary genre of prison writing. These Strange Criminals mirrors the range of styles and formats that characterize this genre through the centuries. In memoirs, letters home, political tracts and pamphlets, readers encounter a plethora of traditional voices. These include the astonishment and horror of the innocent and naive's first encounter with penal justice (Wigham); the moral denunciation of the reformer (Hobhouse); and the 'How to Resist' strategies of the prisoner activist (Miller). While these narratives are generally defiant, the 'bitter humour' of Hamilton epitomizes the defiant contempt of the carnivalesque style of prison writing. These resisters write from the heart and accost the prison, 'the insolence of its sadistic staff' (Hamilton), and the 'endless round of petty routine, overlaying the ever present fear and hostility' (Hassler) that constitute its regimes.

These accounts provide an opportunity to study the ethnography of the prison from a unique set of lenses, that of prisoners of conscience, who successfully overturned the debilitating stigma of criminalization, and were able to resist the consequent transformation of their social identity into that of the socially discredited criminal and convict. Unlike common 'criminals,' they are able to take the moral and intellectual high ground, from which they cast moral condemnation upon their captors and the prison institution. The absence of guilt or remorse is obvious: 'Four years of my life for refusing to kill?' (Osborne), 'I was rather proud of my status' (Brock). Outside community and political support served to further legitimate their stance and strengthen their resolve to resist.

With These Strange Criminals, Peter Brock has put together a fascinating anthology of prison memoirs authored by conscientious objectors to war. Brock is a pre-eminent historian of pacifism as an ideology and as a movement in the modern Western world. The memoirs he has selected here demonstrate his rich and nuanced understanding of the topic. – Frances Early, Department of History, Mount Saint Vincent University

These memoirs are noteworthy as expressions of the human spirit in times of stress and struggle. Peter Brock is one of the premier scholars in the world of peace history and he has made a significant contribution to the field with this collection. The memoirs reveal the dehumanizing prison conditions in different countries and illuminate the responses of imprisoned conscientious objectors. – James C. Juhnke, Department of History, Bethel College

The thought-provoking pieces in These Strange Criminals make an essential contribution to our understanding of criminology and the history of pacifism, and represent a valuable addition to prison literature.

The prison emerges, its characteristic features highlighted by their numbing repetition, and the spirit and resistance of the authors shines through as testimony to their significance as moral and political commentators of their eras. The historical organization and contextualization of the narratives, and the representative scope of this selection allow Brock to capture the heartbeat of the universal prison experience: the essential loss of freedom and self-determination to the dominating and immutable power of the prison. The broad range of writers selected and their order of presentation combine to produce an integrated exploration of political dissent and its penal suppression in the twentieth century.

History / War / WWII

World War II Day by Day by Dorling Kindersley Publishing, with consultants Michael Armitage, Lord Lewin, John Stanier, Terry Charman, Peter Kornicki, John Pimlott & G. T. Tiedeman (DK Publishing, Inc.)

Born to, freedom, and believing in freedom, Americans are willing lo fight to maintain freedom... we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt's sentiments symbolize the attitude of those who lived through World War II and the enormous sacrifices they made. World War II Day by Day tells the story, not simply of the heroes and their bravery, but also of the villains and their victims as well as the ordinary, stoic women and men who worked to aid the war effort.

The full, declassified story of the great conflict presented in this book reveals what actually happened, rather than what was reported at the time and allows readers to:

Learn about the motivations of traitors and collaborators, the secret war waged by spymasters and code breakers, and the courageous stories of partisans and resistance fighters.
Follow the conflict as it unfolds in timelines to discover the key figures of the Allied and Axis powers in a comprehensive, illustrated Who's Who.
Examine the developments in literature, painting, popular music, and films such as Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver that were vital in boosting morale and providing much-needed forms of escape.
Relive the atmosphere of wartime propaganda and rationing with posters, cartoons, and advertisements of the time.

In World War II Day by Day readers have access to information previously top secret and can enter both the Oval Office and the General's Headquarters. From the miseries of rationing and wage freezes to the romance of Hollywood movies and the jubilation of VJ-Day, readers are close to what happened:

1939 – "Blitzkrieg " as German troops invade Poland • War engulfs Europe for a second time in 25 years

1940 – "Little ships" rescue allied troops at Dunkirk • Mussolini takes Italy into war • France falls • RAF claims victory in the "Battle of Britain"

1941 – Nazis order “final solution" for Jews • Germans invade Russia • Japanese planes destroy U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor

1942 – U.S. Navy takes offensive after defeat of fleet in the Battle of Midway • Allies step up air campaign in Europe

1943 – Stalingrad: first Germans surrender • Warsaw ghetto destroyed after uprising against Nazis • RAF firestorm bombs raze Hamburg to the ground

1944 – Massive infantry landings signal start of D-Day • Paris is liberated • U.S. crushes Japan in "greatest ever sea battle"

1945 – Russians free Auschwitz death camp • Stars and Stripes raised on Iwo Jima • Noose tightens around Berlin • Hitler commits suicide • Mussolini is captured and killed • Dancing in the streets on VE-day • Atomic bombs devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki • Japan surrenders • Allied peoples all over the world celebrate VJ-day
World War II Day by Day is

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We Review the Best of the Latest Books

June 2004, Issue #62