SirReadaLot.org
We Review the Best of the Latest Books
ISSN 1934-6557
August 2004, Issue #64
Guide to Contents
Adventures,
Fashion, Male Nudes,
Graphic Design, Drawing,
Watercolors, Business,
Southern Cooking,
Early Childhood Development
Adventures & Thrillers
The Reckoning by Jeff Long (Atria Books) is an
adventure thriller by Jeff Long, a veteran climber and traveler in
the Himalayas, journalist, historian, and elections supervisor for
Bosnia's first democratic election, and the author of six novels,
including Year Zero, The Descent and Empire of Bones.
We’re off and running when thirty-two-year-old photojournalist
Molly Drake, armed with only a camera and iron determination,
arrives in modern-day Cambodia to cover the U.S. military search for
the remains of an American pilot shot down during the Vietnam War.
In this eerie wasteland pockmarked with human bones and live land
mines, the people hold more secrets than the landscape, from aging
archaeologist Duncan O'Brian to John Kleat, a caustic vet hunting
for his long lost brother. When bones unexpectedly turn up,
Drake photographs them, capturing a flight helmet buried
among Khmer Rouge victims and breaking her agreement with the
army not to take pictures of bodies. Diplomatic powers force
her and her civilian comrades off the dig, along with O'Brian
and Kleat, and the trio make their way to an ancient, fog-enshrouded
Angkor-like city where they have evidence an army patrol went
missing years ago.
But just as a typhoon looms offshore, the outcasts learn of an
even bigger find. A mysterious ex-patriot guides them into the ruins
of the ancient city, where they begin a harrowing search for the
remains of an entire patrol of GIs that strayed in combat thirty
years ago. With storm winds hammering their jungle fortress, Drake
discovers that a war she never knew never died. Her survival comes
to depend on her journalistic skills to solve a forgotten murder
among these warriors left behind. In the end, her only hope for
salvation is to redeem the lost souls that surround her.
Paramount Pictures is reckoning on Reese Witherspoon and Ted
Tally. Witherspoon is in negotiations to star in and produce a
feature film adaptation of the supernatural thriller
The Reckoning. – Liza Foreman, Hollywood Reporter
Long writes with poetry, style, and pace...first-rate
entertainment. – Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code
An adventure thriller that takes its characters on a haunting
trip beyond the boundaries of human endurance and into enemy
territory – superb, thrilling and terrifying. – Vince Flynn
As stylishly written as it is suspenseful, The Reckoning is a thriller that illuminates the fragile thread between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, hope and horror. Bringing readers ever closer to enemy territory, it is a hair-raising journey into one of modern history's darkest periods and an intense look into the hearts still haunted by it. With Long in command of every taut, gripping element, The Reckoning is a solid, coolly told, smoothly paced narrative.
Arts & Photography / Fashion / Biographies
& Memoirs
Nudie the Rodeo Tailor by Jamie Lee Nudie &
Mary Lynn Cabrall (Gibbs Smith, Publisher)
From Hank Williams to Roy Rogers, from Elvis Presley to John
Lennon, only one man made clothing that was fabulous enough to be
worn by the legends of Country and Rock and Roll music, only one man
set stage fashion on its end and clothed Hollywood's elite.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1902, Nudie Cohn built a
reputation as one of the most sought after clothiers in Los
Angeles... all on a few sparkly G-strings.
Nudie the Rodeo Tailor tells the unbelievable story of
Nudie and Bobbie Cohn and the legendary fashion legacy they created.
The book was written by Jamie Lee Nudie, granddaughter of
Nudie, who grew up in Nudie's Rodeo Tailors and her business
partner, Mary Lynn Cabrall – they keep the Nudie's Rodeo Tailors
business going.
Nudie Cohn's first store (Nudie's for the Ladies, New York City)
featured those famous and lavishly ornamented G-strings and stage
costumes, and allowed him to build a reputation as a master tailor
with a taste for the flashy. After a few years, Nudie went west to
Los Angeles, turning his attention to Western clothing, and became
the first person to incorporate rhinestones into cowboy dress. It
was the $10,000 gold suit that Nudie made for Elvis Presley that
rocketed Nudie to stardom and cemented his status in fashion
history. Nudie would go on to design clothing for Dale Evans and Roy
Rogers, Elton John, Gene Autry, John Wayne, John Lennon, Steve
McQueen, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Cher, Liberace, Eric Clapton,
Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and the
rock groups America and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Nudie blurred
the boundaries of fashion and cast a far-reaching influence over the
clothing worn in country music, rock music, movies, and television.
From his silver-dollar-and-steer-horn-studded convertible
Cadillac, to his skills on the mandolin, to his "everyday" wardrobe
that consisted of his own rhinestone suits and unmatched boots (to
commemorate his humble beginnings – at one time, he couldn't even
afford a matching pair of shoes). When he died in 1984, the
entertainment world lost one of its most colorful figures; Nudie was
his own kind of star.
Nudie the Rodeo Tailor chronicles the life of the man who
embodies the American dream itself, with an amazing selection of
photographs of suits, clothing, accessories, and of Nudie himself
with the hundreds of clients and friends he made through the years.
Nudie the Rodeo Tailor is filled with an amazing selection of photographs of suits, clothing, accessories, and of Nudie himself with the hundreds of clients and friends he made through the years. Just slightly tongue in cheek, this is a comprehensive and handsome picture book, a fun read, a testament to a great success story.
Male Bodies: A Photographic History of the Nude by
Emmanuel Cooper (Icons of Photography Series: Prestel) is a
stunning, comprehensive survey of male nude photography from 1840 to
the present day.
For a century and a half, photographers have been documenting the male form in order to serve a variety of purposes, from motion and anatomical studies to models for subsequent paintings to purely aesthetic and erotic ends. From the archetypal human form in art to the gay icon, the male nude occupies an important and unique place in the history of photography. Despite increased exposure, whether in gay magazines or in advertising, the naked male figure retains an aura of mystery, a secret to be revealed only in the privacy of the bedroom or, briefly, the changing room.
The entire continuum of male nude photography is the subject of
Male Bodies. Fifty images by such masters as Edward Weston,
Imogene Cunningham, Minor White, Diane Arbus, Joel-Peter Witkin,
Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol and Grace
Lau are presented in two-page spreads. The other photographers are
Eugène Durieu, Thomas Eakins, Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules
Marey, Albert Londe, Fred Holland Day, Paul Richer, Eugen Sandow,
Wilhelm von Gloeden, Frank Eugene, Guglielmo Plüschow, Vincenzo
Galdi, Kurt Reichert, George Platt Lynes, Bruce of Los Angeles, Al
Urban, The Ritter Brothers, Earl Forbes, George Rodger, Will
McBride, Bernis von zur Mühlen, Peter Hujar, Joel-Peter Witkin,
Mason West, Arthur Tress, John Coplans, Edward Lucie Smith, Richard
Sawdon Smith, Dianora Niccolini, Jim Mooney, John Paul Evans, Karen
Tweedy Holmes, Wolfgang Tillmans, Robert Flynt, Robert Taylor, Robin
Shaw, Stefano Scheda, Vivienne Maricevic, Tony Butcher, Mike
Ferrari, Jonathan Webb, Jo Brunenberg, and Brett Wexler.
Together these pictures trace an arc through the development of
photographic history, technique, and style, while also following the
cultural patterns that helped define our ideas of male beauty.
Essays on each image describe and analyze the historical,
technical and social contexts in which it was taken. In addition,
commentary by Emmanuel Cooper, a leading writer on art, photography
and gay issues, traces the development of nude photography during
the past century and a half, starting from its use for motion,
anatomical and medical studies, through to its expression of fears
of homosexuality, the rise of gay liberation and the advent of
HIV/AIDS.
In the final images,
Male Bodies looks at the new wave of photography of the
male nude within its historical context, and asks how this reflects
and comments on the times in which we live.
While the male body is extremely aestheticized in our time, it
remains contentious, yet its contentiousness makes images of the
naked male body an enduring topic.
Male Bodies illustrates how both male and female photographers
continue to interrogate the naked male body. From paradigms of
physical perfection to gay icons, this illustrated survey of male
nude photography presents in one stunning volume various portrayals
of masculinity as seen through the eyes of the world’s most renowned
photographers.
Arts & Photography
Bringing Graphic Design in-House: How and When to Design It
Yourself by Orangeseed Design (Rockport Publishers)
is geared toward untrained and marginally trained designers
working within a company that has decided do their design in-house
rather than hire an outside firm, and toward small business owners
that have to design their own collateral material.
With the market tight, more and more design is being pulled
in-house to save money. The result is that untrained designers often
must create collateral that can stand up to the competition (who may
be using professional designers) – this can be a daunting task.
Designing is difficult in a perfect world and even more difficult
when one is dealing with a lack of a basic graphic design education.
Being able to evaluate the tools, the limitations, and the
tasks at hand is vital to success. Time, budgets, equipment,
software, experience, expertise and human resources make up a long
list of challenges businesses must overcome when attempting to put
their best face forward.
These challenges and more are addressed in
Bringing Graphic Design in-House, the goals of which are two
fold. The authors at OrangeSeed Design, a company which
designs corporate identity systems, brochures, advertising, and
promotional material for business and consumer products and
services, address how to design in-house. They also discuss
instances where it is best to hire professional outside designers
for specific portions of the work. The authors encourage businesses
to look closely at their available resources and understand when it
is best to hire out for design and when it is best to just do it
themselves.
Bringing Graphic Design in-House begins with an overview of the
basic elements of graphic design – layout, color, art and typography
and explains the best ways to use them. The book also offers readers
an in-depth look at individual design elements, with features such
as:
-
40 examples of logos
-
20 letterheads/business card designs
-
10 different ideas for brochures
-
10 samples of websites
-
Various newsletter ideas
In addition, the authors discuss all the necessary equipment,
from computers to software to handy gadgets to general supplies
needed to create a successful in-house design department.
Bringing Graphic Design in-House is a sourcebook for ideas and
how-tos for creating promotional and collateral items in-house with
the minimal resources available.
From production tips to creative touches to project management,
the book enhances the reader's understanding of design and how they
can most easily and cost-efficiently do it themselves. The founder
of OrangeSeed, Damien Wolf should know what he’s talking about; his
prior experience includes working as an in-house designer for a
small computer service company and a large international legal
information publisher.
Arts & Photography / Art & Design /
Instruction & Reference / Ages 10 & up
How to Draw Cars the Hot Wheels Way by Scott Robertson
with the Hot Wheels Designers (MBI Publishing Company)
Hot Wheels cars have been zooming around for over 35 years.
Millions of children and adults have played with these vehicles.
How to Draw Cars the Hot Wheels Way demonstrates detailed
drawing techniques so readers can draw and design Hot Wheels cars
just like the designers at Mattel. The easy-to-follow illustrated
directions cover areas such as perspective shadowing, and
information on how to add details to a drawing by using a computer.
Original artwork by Hot Wheels designers are used in the book.
Illustrations, drawn by author Scott Robertson, are easy enough for
a beginning artist, and an experienced artist will learn techniques
that are specific to the subject. They emphasize how to draw
fantasy, custom, concept, and hot rod cars. Tips and
suggestions from Robertson and Hot Wheels designers provide more
information on how to make cars look like Hot Wheels cars.
How to Draw Cars the Hot Wheels Way provides how-to-draw
detail that is appealing and easy to follow for Hot Wheels and
drawing enthusiasts from ages 10 to adult. Detailed drawing
techniques with descriptive captions allow readers to create their
own automotive designs. No matter what the reader’s
experience is, anyone who likes to doodle will learn how to create
and detail cars in the Hot Wheels way.
Arts & Photography
Incredible Light and Texture in Watercolor by James
Toogood (North Light Books)
Award-winning artist James Toogood is a master at creating
realistic and eye-catching light and textures in his own work. He's
enjoyed more than 30 solo exhibitions in the United States and
abroad. Toogood's paintings have been featured in top art
magazines as well as several books including Best of Watercolor;
Selections from the Permanent Collection, Woodmere Art Museum;
Painting Light and Shadow; Splash 6 and Splash 7. He currently gives
workshops in watercolor technique and teaches at the Somerset Art
Association (Bedminster, NJ) and the Perkins Center for the Arts
(Moorestown, NJ).
Every truly great watercolor painting hinges on the qualities
of light and texture – accurate use of light and texture can
create a look of realism and help establish mood in a painting, but
artists often have trouble creating these effects.
Incredible Light and Texture in Watercolor, by James Toogood,
explains the fundamentals of painting and how to apply these
essential ideas for dramatic results in watercolor paintings,
including:
- Explanations of natural and artificial light, as well
as how light influences texture.
- Step-by-step demonstrations that show how a whole
painting comes together.
- Basic color theory and pigment lessons.
- Mini demonstrations with close-up views of techniques
for light and texture.
- Drawing and composition basics to build a strong
foundation for any piece of artwork.
- Tips and tricks for using light and texture to set mood, elicit response and create believability.
Toogood also shows artists easy methods for creating realistic textures, whether natural, manmade or the textures of people and how to achieve various atmospheric conditions. Readers will also find a chapter dedicated to using contrast and similarities in a painting to increase the dramatic impact of their watercolor paintings.
Beginning and advanced artists will appreciate the wealth
of instruction in
Incredible Light and Texture in Watercolor, a concise
guide in which Toogood shows readers how to create drama, depth and
believability in their work.
Business & Investing / Computers &
Internet / Biographies & Memoirs
Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut
by James Marcus (The New Press) is the entertaining story of
the first five years of Amazon.com, recounted by employee number 55.
Americans with an eye cocked toward the markets were asked to believe that Amazon, a two-year-old bookseller, was worth more than the combined values of Sears and US Steel. – from Amazonia
James Marcus, writer, journalist was hired as a senior editor at Amazon.com in 1996, where he stayed till 2001, giving him a ringside seat for the company's explosive rise and dismal wallet-busting swoon. Now – as the e-commerce giant makes an astonishing comeback – he tells all. Unlike the recent crop of dot.com memoirs, this is no tale of a bankrupt and brokenhearted entrepreneur. Marcus came aboard as a self-described "token humanist," and his take on the new economy juggernaut is predominantly a cultural one. Why, he asks, did Jeff Bezos' brainchild become the key symbol of Internet euphoria? How did the company change as it morphed from a miniscule start-up to a global, multibillion-dollar leviathan? Was the Web breaking more promises than it kept? And finally: What could an editor do to resist being transformed into a hyperventilating shill?
In answering these questions, Marcus takes us to meetings, job
interviews, trade shows, and corporate retreats. We spend a freezing
holiday season at the warehouse, and a considerably warmer afternoon
at the company's summer picnic—where Bezos himself mans the dunk
tank.
From his first interview with Jeff Bezos to Nordic-style company
retreats, senior editor Marcus gives us the insiders' view of the
bookselling monolith. We learn about the unique caste system at
Amazon, where programmers are king but everyone works the customer
service phones; and we experience the giddy hilarity of Marcus and
his colleagues as they become millionaires – briefly – then lose it
all again in the wild oscillations of Amazon's stock values.
He reveals the man behind the myth: Jeff Bezos, poster child of
the digital age; we witness the bookseller's growing pains as it
moves from Bezos's garage to a sprawling campus and payroll explodes
into the thousands; and Marcus relates his own confusion at the
difficult balance between editorial integrity and successful
selling, and between the boon Amazon represented for independent
publishers and the bane it represented for independent bookstores.
In the beginning, he says, “with a staff of twenty-five
editors – bigger, in fact, than a national magazine – and a huge
pool of freelancers, we were able to walk, talk, and even quack like
a real publication.” But Amazon morphed as it grew; metrics
began to rule; and the editorial department was no longer the focus.
Despite the demoralizing shift, Marcus makes evident the loyalty
editors continued to display, a "quasi-religious devotion… almost
impossible to explain to outsiders." The concept of making history
was just too intoxicating for most to abandon (as were the stock
options).
Marcus tells his story with wit and candor, revealing what
it was really like to live in the New Paradigm, where you "monetized
eyeballs" and "leveraged your verbiage" to reach an "inflection
point" (make money). – Booklist (starred review)
Has the shapeliness and intensity of a novel.... An utterly
beguiling book. – Jonathan Raban, author of Waxwings
The most impressive aspect of
Amazonia is Marcus's sculpting of self into an everyman
caught between two magnets – culture and commerce. –
David Shields, author of Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow
of Celebrity
Not only great fun, but a sobering reminder of how quickly
both our pipe dreams and our technology can overtake us. –
Lisa Zeidner, author of Layover
Marcus's writing has enough genuine humor and self-deprecation to
squelch any accusations of "optimizing for optics," or worse,
whining. Aside from a few sections that feel somewhat adrift
(oblique mentions of an imploding marriage and an extended Emerson
sidebar) the prose is driving and the voice engaging and remarkably
fair.
For anyone who worked at Amazon.com in the early days, reading
Amazonia is akin to leafing through a high school yearbook (I
was an Amazon editor from 1997-2002). – Brangien Davis
Amazonia is a work of rare wit and razor-sharp observation, and a superlative guide to America's lost world of the nineties. Marcus provides a captivating, witty account of how the fledgling e-retailer transformed itself from a startup that generated $16 million in sales in 1996 to a behemoth with revenue of $5.3 billion in 2003. A modern fable told with thoughtful insight, Amazonia may well be the year's most charming memoir; it is an amusing inside glimpse at what is surely one of the world's strangest businesses.
Cooking, Food & Wine
Sweetly Southern: Delicious Desserts from the Sons of
Confederate Veterans edited by Lynda Moreau (Pelican)
Charming tales and simple instructions comprise this collection
of over 170 of Dixie's finest recipes, courtesy of contemporary
Confederate kitchens from Florida to Alaska.
Sweetly Southern includes desserts, candies, punches, and
sweet-tasting snacks submitted by members of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans. Members pay homage to their ancestors by submitting
favorite family treats, including such militarily inspired desserts
as Dying General Buttermilk Pie, Jeff Davis Pudding Pie, and Robert
E. Lee Orange Pie. From historic confections like Lady Baltimore
Cake to contemporary favorites such as Peanut Butter Pie, these
recipes reflect the sweet tooths of modern Confederate families
across the United States. historical anecdotes accompany the
recipes, which range from cakes to cobblers to candies. Vintage
photographs and capsule biographies of soldiers from the War Between
the States round out this nostalgic cookbook.
Sweetly Southern is edited by Lynda Moreau, a professional
publicist and lover of all things Southern. For the past ten years,
Moreau has worked in the publishing industry, currently serving as
director of marketing for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc.,
and overseeing merchandising and catalog operations.
The foreword is provided by R. G. Wilson, commander in chief of
the Sons of Confederate Veterans. As the oldest patriotic and
hereditary organization for male descendents of Confederate soldiers
and sailors, the Sons of Confederate Veterans continues to preserve
and defend the history and principles of the Old South.
These tried-and-true dishes, tested by home cooks, will impart a
sweetly Southern flavor to family gatherings.
Sweetly Southern allows readers to discover the traditional
dishes that evince the flavor of the Old South, as well as savory
regional favorites from all over the country.
Education / Early
Childhood Development
Infants and Children, 5th Edition by Laura E. Berk
(Pearson Allyn & Bacon) is a shortened, paperbound version of
Infants, Children, and Adolescents, Fifth Edition, covering the
prenatal through middle childhood years (through age 10) and
designed for courses in child development and early child
development.
Infants and Children contains the complete chapters 1-13 of
Laura E. Berk's full-length text, and the two books bring Berk's
trademark scholarship and readability to the subject of
chronological child development. With a heightened emphasis on the
interplay between biology and environment, and stronger focus on
education (both at home and at school) and social policy as critical
pieces of the dynamic system in which the child develops, Berk,
distinguished professor of psychology at Illinois State University,
pays meticulous attention to the most recent scholarship in the
field. A sampling of topics includes the genetic code,
motivations for parenthood, body and brain development in toddlers,
child health care in the U.S., language development, and gender
typing.
A Berk signature feature is the stories and vignettes of real children, which illustrate developmental principles. Infants and Children “teaches while it tells a story.” There are a number of special features, many of which are the boxes:
- Social Issues: Education boxes emphasize the role of education at home, at school, and in the community in children's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development.
- Social Issues: Health boxes underscore the need for social policies around the world that support the physical and psychological health of children and families.
- Biology and Environment boxes highlight the growing attention in the child development field to the complex, bi-directional relationship between biological and environmental influences.
Other features include:
- Milestones tables summarize major physical, cognitive, language, emotional, and social achievements of each age span. Besides offering an overview of change, each entry is page-referenced to provide the student with a convenient tool for review.
- Ask Yourself questions have been thoroughly revised and expanded into a unique pedagogical feature that promotes four approaches to engaging actively with the subject matter, labeled “Review, Apply, Connect, and Reflect.”
- Observation Program: This real-life videotape (now two hours) contains hundreds of observation segments that illustrate the many theories, concepts, and milestones of child development. An Observation Guide helps students use the video in conjunction with the text to deepen their understanding of the material and apply what they have learned in everyday life.
Creating stronger connections between domains of development, Berk in this fifth edition has expanded her coverage of culture, emotional development, and cognitive, biological, and social development. Also in this edition, the author has added Applying What We Know tables, which offer practical advice in a concise format on nurturing, protecting, and supporting all aspects of children's development. This advice stems from research gathered from many different fields, including teaching, social work, and health care. New topics include The Teratogenic Effects of Acutane (Chapter 3) and The Role of Religion in Emotional Development During Middle Childhood (Chapter 13). Students will find multiple-choice questions that will allow them to “practice” their test taking, as well as links to other Web sites.
For the instructor,
Infants and Children includes a state of the art,
interactive and instructive online solution for courses in child
development designed to be used as a supplement to a traditional
lecture course, or completely administer an online course.
The author's writing style is very engrossing. She is
exceptionally accomplished in her knowledge of developmental
psychology. I think her writing will be easy for my students to
follow. – Algea Harrison, Oakland University
I particularly appreciate Berk's inclusion of multicultural
perspectives. It is important to help students, particularly those
who are just beginning their professional preparation, to put what
we know about young children and their development into a cultural
context. This text does that masterfully with words AND with
pictures. – Nancy Freeman, University of South Carolina
The thing that I am most impressed with is the examples the
author uses. I found that often I had new insights into child
development issues even though I have been teaching and working in
the field for years. These insights were so well thought out that I
think that they would be very helpful to students when learning the
material. – John Prange, Irvine Valley College
As always, Berk provides a comprehensive discussion of
developmental issues. What I appreciate is that the text provides
good coverage of areas that are often neglected by other texts
(especially applied developmental issues). – Deborah Laible,
Southern Methodist University
In her signature storytelling style, Berk creates a “cast of
characters” for each unit based on real children and families,
artfully using their “stories” to illustrate the sequence and
processes of child development and applications of theory and
research and she keeps the story going throughout the chapter. These
same characters come back in subsequent chapters, enhancing
continuity. Information in the chapters is consistently presented in
a clear, concise style and Berk has a great writing style. The
color photographs, particularly those illustrating the prenatal
stages of development, are of high quality. The integration
of research findings and “plain language" explanations is a great
contribution.
Infants and Children is a comprehensive and intelligent
resource.
Entertainment / Radio
More Riffs, Rants, and Raves by William O'Shaughnessy
(Communications and Media Series, Volume 9: Fordham University
Press)
Bill O'Shaughnessy's back. Here's his third big book of
interviews, editorials, essays, commentaries, observations, and just
plain good talk from an authentic American voice.
From the "bully pulpit" of radio, O'Shaughnessy, president of Whitney Radio and editorial director of WVOX and WRTN in Westchester County, New York, is in the middle of everything: politics local and national; culture high and low and in-between; the media; and, most of all, the rich flow of ideas and opinion from what the Wall Street Journal calls "the quintessential community station in America."
In
More Riffs, Rants, and Raves, O'Shaughnessy gathers interviews
with everyone from Tony Bennett on the singer’s art to former New
York mayor Ed Koch on the art of politics. Essays and talks from
luminaries range from Henry Kissinger to Larry King, Rudolph
Giuliani to Tim Russert and Dan Rather. A master of the craft of
provocative conversation, O’Shaughnessey talks fairly and frankly
with anyone – from bishops to best-selling novelists. Here some four
dozen conversations trace almost 30 years of history. There are
moving pieces on the impact of September 11, vivid sketches of
movers and shakers, and provocative, deeply felt calls for
protecting the freedoms provided in the First Amendment. Mario Cuomo
also supplies penetrating thoughts on how to restore justice and
wisdom to America's political culture.
O'Shaughnessy's pronouncements add up to ... true centrism, a
search and call for common ground, for a consensus built on fair
play, decency, common sense, getting along. – David Hinckley,
Critic-at-Large, New York Daily News
O'Shaughnessy is really the conscience of broadcasting. – Patrick
D. Maines, President, The Media Institute
Bill O'Shaughnessy's editorials make his New York TV counterparts look like so much mish-mash. – New York Times
Few people have as rich a talent for ‘writing for the ear’ –
Charles Kuralt and Charles Osgood, certainly. Also Paul Harvey. And
Bill O'Shaughnessy, who is among a select few who create magic with
their words. – Mario M. Cuomo
I applaud Bill O'Shaughnessy's intelligent editorials on Free
Speech. His is a brave stance. – Howard Stern
From colorful sketches of local pols to intimate conversations with great writers and artists, More Riffs, Rants, and Raves is an endlessly fascinating portrait of our time and place marked as always, by O'Shaughnessy's intelligence, insight, and eloquence.
Entertainment
Tales To Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic
Book Revolution by Ronin Ro (Bloomsbury)
The inspiration behind The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier
and Clay, Jack Kirby has been hailed by Wizard magazine as "Without
any doubt...the single most important creator in the History of
American Comic Books."
Everyone knows Jack Kirby – even if they don't know it. The
renowned comic book artist, along with his writing partner Stan Lee,
created some of the most memorable and beloved superheroes in
popular culture: The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, The Incredible Hulk
and many more.
Tales To Astonish by Ronin Ro is a novelistic behind-the-scenes
account of one of the most enduring – and overlooked – comic book
artists as well as a look at the comic book industry, from its
inauspicious origins to its sensational successes.
Born to a tailor and a seamstress in 1917 on New York's Lower
East Side, Kirby grew up like many scrappy kids in the area –
ashamed of their hand-me-down clothing and their parent's immigrant
accents, dodging gang fights and bullies; and spending their time
reading pulp magazines and going to the picture shows. By the 1930s
newspapers were beginning to slap together comic strips and that is
when Kirby realized his destiny.
Through original interviews with friends and colleagues,
including Stan Lee, Ro, author of award-winning, international
bestsellers, chronicles Kirby's rise and influence starting with his
early beginnings churning out stories for Max Fleischer Studios, at
that time a major corporation. Along the way, we witness the effect
of World War II and The Vietnam War on comics – the former inspiring
patriotic heroes like Captain America, the latter prompting a
cynical repudiation of heroism – as well as the contentious battles
between companies and artists about the possession of original
artwork. In the 1940s Kirby, along with partner Joe Simon, was
taking the medium in a bold new direction; abandoning numbered
panels and arrows, he let the stunning, vibrant, action-packed
scenes move the story along. The 1960s ushered in the Stan Lee-Jack
Kirby era, bringing to life an amazing pantheon of heroes: The
Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, Silver Surfer and
the Marvel Universe. In a few short years Lee and Kirby forever
changed the American comic book by introducing angst-ridden heroes,
sympathetic villains, and a dynamic style that inspired everything
that followed. Forty years later, the Marvel Comic heroes he created
or designed continue to draw readers and inspired a new breed of
artists, filmmakers, and authors.
An entertaining and insightful portrait of one of its most
enduring and overlooked artists,
Tales To Astonish is also a lively account of the comic book
industry, from its inauspicious origins to its sensational
successes.
Entertainment / Movies
Two Brothers: A Fable on Film and How It Was Told by
Jean-Jacques Annaud, with an introduction by Diana Landau
(Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook Series: Newmarket Press) is a
lavishly illustrated companion book to the new film by the
award-winning director of Quest for Fire, The Bear, and The Name of
the Rose—about twin tiger brothers in the jungles of French
Indochina in the colonial period, a major family summer movie from
Universal Pictures.
Five months shooting a major feature film in Thailand and
Cambodia, amidst the temples of Angkor, with tigers imported from
France and the US was an extraordinary, even life-changing
experience for the international cast, starring Guy Pearce (Memento,
L.A. Confidential), and a crew of more than 400 people. Their leader
was the intrepid director/writer/producer Jean-Jacques Annaud who
has demonstrated his willingness to undergo enormous hardship in
order to bring the film that he has imagined to the screen, as
evidenced by his visionary work on earlier movies.
Fully illustrated with stills, drawings, historical paintings,
and images that inspired and tracked the process,
Two Brothers covers the entire moviemaking odyssey, from
pre-production, begun more than a year prior to shooting, through
the final post-production stages. The book showcases
production stills, on-set photos, drawings, historical paintings and
interviews with Annaud's international cast and crew.
Two Brothers is the story of twin tiger brothers Kumal and
Sangha, born amidst the temple ruins and exotic jungles who are
separated as cubs and taken into captivity when a zealous
Englishman, played by Guy Pearce, invades their jungle home in
search of valuable relics. One tiger becomes a circus
performer, the other a trained killer. Years later, the brothers
find themselves reunited, but as forced enemies pitted against each
other, with surprising results.
From the origin of Annaud's passion for wildlife to the unique
set of challenges that making a film with two animal protagonists
presents, the book fuses production anecdotes with historical
information about the film's setting and the treatment of tigers
over the years.
Annaud explains that a combined passion for wildlife and history
inspired the film, while the Cambodian filming location held a magic
all its own: "To this day, that first visit to Cambodia remains the
artistic shock of my life. I just could not believe the combination
of religious devotion and sheer artistic beauty. The romanticism of
it all was fascinating. The forest's revenge on man. The trees
strangling the stones."
This Cambodian setting, while providing the ideal location for
the film's story, posed a distinct set of challenges. As Annaud
tells readers, "We were shooting in one of the Seven Wonders of the
World, so we had to take every precaution to make sure that there
was no damage to the location."
While the film's setting presented its own set of trials, making
a film with a mostly animal cast was difficult as well. As trainer
Thierry Le Portier, who worked with the tigers in Gladiator,
explains, having tigers as your two main characters presents a
special set of circumstances: "We used 30 tigers in all ... our
biggest problem was to always have tiger cubs from seven to 12 weeks
old, at the ready. We followed all the births, all over the world.
Zoos were notified of our search and kept us up to date."
In addition to finding tigers who looked the part, Annaud and Le
Portier had to devise methods to elicit performances from the
animals, since Kumal and Sangha's expressions and movements comprise
much of the film's action.
Jean-Jacques Annaud plunges into the animal world with
Two Brothers. This time it's tigers who steal the headlines in
an epic worthy of the most popular children's stories a la Rudyard
Kipling. – Judith Prescott, The Hollywood Reporter
I wanted the story to be reminiscent of the fables I loved so
much as a child. It is constructed upon the wondrous imaginative
references of children – the jungle, the mysterious ruins, the
golden palace, the world of animals, the circus. – Jean-Jacques
Annaud about
Two Brothers
The stunning illustrated movie-book
Two Brothers provides readers with an in-depth account of
Annaud's timeless film's journey to the screen, with close-up
photos depicting the filming process – as well as other chapters on
the actors, costumes, sets and script. The book also provides
an extensive history of the area and its inhabitants, while vivid
photography and drawings transport the reader to the land of lush
vegetation, ancient ruins and alluring wildlife.
Entertainment / Culture Studies / African American
Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for the Sign of Blackness by Herman Gray (University of Minnesota Press)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s television representations of
African Americans exploded on the small screen. Why did this occur,
and what relation do these shows have to society's idea of
"blackness"? How do these shows relate to earlier television series
featuring African Americans? Herman Gray's
Watching Race, now available in paperback, offers a new look at
the changing representations of African Americans on television.
Starting with the portrayal of blacks on series such as The Jack
Benny Show and Amos 'n' Andy, Gray details the ongoing dialogue and
struggle between television representations and cultural discourse
to show how the meaning of blackness has changed through the years
of the TV era. Drawing on analyses of The Cosby Show, Frank's Place,
A Different World, In Living Color, and Roc, as well as music
videos, news coverage, and advertising,
Watching Race critically examines how the political stakes,
cultural perspectives, and social locations of key cultural and
social formations influence the representation of "blackness" in
television.
In the contemporary politics of black popular culture, much
critical attention has been given to identity and expressive
culture. These critical discourses and the popular attention they
have generated play a strategic role in the maintenance of and
challenge to various systems of domination. Gray’s aim in
Watching Race is to extend these critical discourses and
cultural strategies, particularly as they bear on commercial
electronic mass-media forms, especially television. Gray, associate
professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
examines critical debates about black expressive culture and black
cultural productions within television as a means of exploring
processes by which questions about the American racial order – and,
within it, blackness – are constructed, reproduced, and challenged.
His focus on commercial network television and the struggles over
the meanings and representations of blackness expressed and enacted
there deliberately shifts attention to commercial media as a site
of cultural politics.
The chapters are guided by many of the theoretical advances and
suggestions developed under the rubric of cultural studies,
especially as these have been developed and applied by feminists and
scholars of color. Most generally, Gray is concerned with trying to
clarify just how we might talk about, theorize, and understand the
representations of "blackness" presented in commercial culture,
especially network television and the political projects in which
these representations are deployed.
The decade of the 1980s constitutes the social and historical
staging ground for this examination. Gray situates the discussion in
the 1980s because it is a period rich with struggles, debates, and
transformations in race relations, electronic media, cultural
politics, and economic life.
He takes seriously commercial culture (especially commercial
television) and the kinds of representations that are produced and
circulated there as the subject of critical reflection and analysis.
He contends that it is possible – indeed, often necessary – to
approach commercial culture as a place for theorizing about black
cultural politics and the struggles over meaning that are played out
there. Hence, he suggests that commercial culture serves as both a
resource and a site in which blackness as a cultural sign is
produced, circulated, and enacted.
In dominant media and popular culture we see the emergence and
construction of new black subjects and subject positions. These new
discursive subjects are situated in cultural and media
representations of a racial order marked discursively by images that
incorporate notions of blackness into the existing social, cultural,
and political order without necessarily challenging and disturbing
that order.
In the framing of these representations of blackness as small,
insignificant matters of difference (rather than the basis for
structures and relations of power) and in the presentation of them
as spectacle in the circuits of film, advertising, and television,
the relationship of these constructions to what Lipsitz calls lived
histories and social struggles is safely hidden and relegated to the
level of the covert. The special and unique qualities of African
Americans, whether Whoopi Goldberg or Clarence Thomas or Malcolm X,
can be celebrated and folded into the existing system of gender,
race, and class. Daily we witness on television the transformations
of racialized relations of power into entertainment and spectacle
based on difference. Like so much of what happens on television,
this move represents a kind of approved and sanctioned knowing and
not knowing. In this rearticulation, the existing order can be
affirmed, as can the new and different subject positions that it
underwrites. But as African American claims and struggles within and
over the representation of blackness suggest, this is only one
possible articulation. Cultural struggles, including those over the
representation of blackness in our present, help to prepare the
groundwork, to create spaces for how we think about our highly
charged racial past and possibilities for our different and
yet-contested future. Commercial television is central to this
cultural struggle. In the 1980s, claims and representations of
African Americans were waged in the glare of television. Those
representations and the cultural struggles that produced them will,
no doubt, continue to shape the democratic and multiracial future of
the United States.
In the postscript to the paperback edition Gray says that in the
end he came to realize that the social and cultural conditions that
produced these moments have changed and that the conditions of the
present moment may require a different kind of conversation,
dialogue, challenge, and representation. Just as the presence and
work of black athletes, musicians, and writers have reconfigured and
redefined the very nature of sports, sounds, and stories in the
social and cultural life of the United States, so too has the
presence of The Cosby Show, Frank's Place, Roc, A Different World,
In Living Color, and South Central. These and future representations
of and claims on blackness are part of an ongoing dialogue within
and across social locations and positions within and outside black
communities. Black television makers, audiences, storytellers, and
programming have transformed the look and feel of commercial network
television. Inevitably, television programs about and
representations of blacks will come and go, but Gray remains hopeful
about the force and vitality of African American claims on the
meanings, circuits, and uses of representations of blackness. He
remains alert to the fact that such claims are sites of political
and cultural struggle, that they are conditioned socially and are
without pure political guarantees; they are, nevertheless, crucial
sites and expressions of struggle.
Watching Race is clearly the best book ever written on African
Americans and television.... Finally, a book that moves out of the
prison house of stereotypes, beyond the common yet simplistic
dichotomies of 'positive' versus 'negative' images. Gray brilliantly
and persuasively turns our attention to the more complicated issue
of the politics of representation. – Robin D.G. Kelley, New York
University
This is a complex, subtle, and very important book.... Gray also
argues that television is the site where the key racial moments
(Rodney King, Hill-Thomas hearings, Simpson trial, Los Angeles
riots) of the last two decades have been staged and interpreted for
the American public. A majority of Americans came to know and
understand the American racial order through media representations
of the black ethnic other. For these individuals, there is no
empirical world beyond the worlds of the 'small screen'. –
Contemporary Sociology
A subtle and insightful discussion of the racial politics of
contemporary television, far and away better than anything else I
have seen on the topic. – Lawrence Grossberg, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill
Gray shows how changes in the television industry have made changes in program content desirable and necessary, and rejects static models of 'domination' and 'resistance' because they do not do justice to the complexity of viewers' interactions with the medium. – George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego
Gray offers truthful and sobering ideas about blackness as
defined by American media. He spoons out aspects of our favorite TV
programs we may not want to swallow...but we need a taste of this
medicine. We need to be aware. – a student
Watching Race is a subtly reasoned, academically written culture study aimed at students in media and African American studies classes. It focuses on the medium, television, which we most love to hate, and our most difficult subject matter, race, giving readers who take the time to read it a lot to think about.
History / Military / African
Americans
The American Foreign Legion: Black Soldiers of the 93rd in World War I by Frank E. Roberts (Naval Institute Press)
Still segregated in World War 1, the U.S. Army was reluctant to
use its 93d Division of black soldiers in combat with its own
units and instead assigned the division's three National Guard
regiments and one draftee regiment to the French Army. The
battlefield successes of these African Americans under the French at
the height of the German offensives in 1918 turned white
expectations of failure upside down. Their bravery and heroism
gained the respect of the French and Germans alike and called into
question the U.S. Army's policy of racially segregating its
divisions.
Written from the perspective of the enlisted men and their white
and black officers,
The American Foreign Legion highlights the combat actions of
individuals as well as entire units of the 93d. Readers join Company
C of the 370th Infantry under heavy fire as they capture artillery
pieces, machine guns, and even a portion of a railroad track to
become the first American unit to win the Croix de Guerre. They
learn about the extraordinary bravery of Cpl. Freddie Stowers, the
only African American in the war to be nominated for – and seventy
years later posthumously awarded – the Medal of Honor, and others
who earned the Distinguished Service Cross and French awards for
gallantry in combat. In all, some 3,500 men of the 93d fell in
battle with 591 of them buried in France next to their white
comrades, the only equality that the U.S. Army then granted them.
Their story of overcoming the odds at a time when most believed
blacks performed poorly in combat is told by Frank E. Roberts, who
has been researching the subject for years. While acknowledging the
many problems encountered by the 93d, Roberts, retired colonel,
engineer and writer, focuses on the many triumphs of these tenacious
soldiers as they fought both the enemy and the prejudices of their
fellow Americans.
There is no greater brotherhood or sisterhood than that of the
battlefield. The soldier who advances under fire and yells ‘cover my
move’ relies on a trust greater than anyone can explain. No longer
is that trust reliant on a race or gender test, only the willingness
to serve. The 93d helped prove that patriotism, heroism, and
brotherhood have no color, creed, or litmus test beyond what is in
the human heart. – from the foreword by Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton
Jr., USA (Ret.) former 2d lieutenant, 369th Infantry Regiment, 93d
Division, 1945
The full story of the accomplishments of the African Americans in
World War I is finally told in
The American Foreign Legion. Carefully researched, with 15
photographs, 10 maps, and extensive documenting notes and index,
this is an engrossing, important and little known piece of
history of interest to World War I history buffs as well as those
researching the struggle for civil rights.
History / Medicine
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs: Frontier Medicine in
America by Wayne Bethard (A Roberts Reinhart Book,
Taylor Trade Publishing)
Powder papers, booty balls and sugartits –
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs has a cure for whatever
ails! During America’s frontier era these unusual names were given
to popular medicinal forms that were said to cure everything from
fallen arches to broken windmills. Grandmas, mommas, and even
certified physicians treated the sick, lame, and unlucky with
whatever was available: barbed wire and horseshoe nails, cactus,
pokeweed, buckeyes – you name it. Ironically, many of these homespun
treatments actually worked. But then, on the other hand, many of
them didn’t. In
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs, practicing Texas
pharmacist Wayne Bethard takes a lighthearted look at the most
popular medicines from the frontier days and how they were intended
to work. An authoritative “folk materia medica” lists common drugs,
the dates they were in use, customary doses, and idiosyncrasies.
There are even lists of ingredients, or recipes for common
medicines, like Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, for example. Bethard’s
outstanding collection of bottle labels and advertising art rounds
out this colorful survey of America’s medicinal past.
This tongue-in-cheek account of early-day medicines and medical
practitioners makes for a fun read but also makes us glad for
modern-day medicine. In the old days, the treatment stood a good
chance of killing you before the ailment did. – Elmer Kelton, voted
All-Time Best Western Author by the Western Writers of America
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs should be of value to any
writer or researcher of the history of medicine or of the progress
of science in the past two to three centuries. Of special use to
fiction writers is a timeline of dates associated with major
discoveries in the arts and sciences. This book is the American
frontier. – Don Coldsmith, columnist, novelist, lecturer
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs deserves a prominent place
in the library of every historian, historical novelist, and anyone
who enjoys a good story. – from the foreword by Henry Chappell,
author of The Callings and At Home on the Range with a Texas Hunter
From screw worm killer to gargling oil liniment for man and
beast, this book gave us the willies; thank goodness there’s no one
around to perscribe guano (bat crap) for the condition!
Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs is going to be a heck of a
lot of fun for historians and historical novelists as well as
general readers who like historical, Western and medical
non-fiction.
History / US / Reconstruction
Emma Spaudling Bryant: Civil War Bride, Carpetbagger's Wife,
Ardent Feminist, Letters and Diaries 1860-1900 edited by Ruth
Douglas Currie (Fordham University Press)
Wooed by her ambitious schoolmaster, John Emory Bryant, Emma
Spaulding became the Civil War bride of a radical Republican
carpetbagger in Georgia. For the young Emma Spaulding, life might
have been the simple story of a nineteenth-century woman in rural
Maine. Instead, she emerges as one of the more interesting women of
nineteenth-century America.
In
Emma Spaudling Bryant, an extraordinary collection of letters,
pulled together by Ruth Douglas Currie, Professor of History
at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC and author of a biography
of Bryant’s husband, Emma's writings reveal a woman of
determination, faith, and integrity. Emma Spaulding Bryant
embraced her own causes of women's rights and temperance while
maintaining full support for her husband's controversial agenda.
Covering her life in Buckfield, Maine, from her marriage to a
captain in the Eighth Maine Infantry, to her move to Georgia as the
wife of one of the prominent figures in Reconstruction politics, the
letters open a window on what life was like for an intelligent,
independent woman during three of America's most turbulent decades.
Moving from Augusta, Georgia, to Athens, Tennessee, to Chicago,
to New York, Emma not only followed the tracks of her husband's
career, she endured years of separation and hardship while learning
self-sufficiency.
The grueling years in the shadow of her husband's political
career gave Emma a backbone of steel and the convictions of an early
feminist as she struggled with poverty, childrearing, illness, and
work. Emma became an independent thinker, teacher, suffragist, and
officer in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. And Emma
supported John's agenda – his self-described mission to
"northernize" the South, to work for civil rights for
African-American males – and frequently reflected on national
political events. She stood by her husband when his self-righteous
character embroiled him in endless controversy.
In eloquent language, she coached her husband's understanding of
"the woman question," and despite heated exchanges over marital
control, this correspondence frames a marriage of love and devotion
that spanned four decades.
Gracefully written, abreast of current scholarship, the book is abundantly documented and equipped with a good bibliography. – Choice
Emma Spaudling Bryant is a revealing portrait of Emma Spaulding
Bryant, shedding new light on how, in spite of standing in her
husband's shadow, a woman could wield power to further a feminist
agenda in nineteenth-century America. Author Currie includes a brief
but informative commentary at the beginning of each chapter, giving
the background and setting the letters in the chronological chapters
in the context of John's career. An epilogue and the bibliography
will also be helpful to historians.
History / Europe
The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing 600-Year History of the Royal
Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts Kept at the Tower of London
by Daniel Hahn (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin) is the
strange six-hundred-year history of the Royal Menagerie at the Tower
of London.
From a polar bear that fished the Thames nightly for his
dinner to elephants that drank only wine, the inhabitants of the
southwest corner of the Tower of London were a strange and rowdy
bunch. No less strange was the cast of characters that visited them:
William Blake, Chaucer, and Samuel Pepys, to name a few. Daniel
Hahn's history of the Tower of London's Royal Menagerie tells the
story of the thousands of exotic creatures who found a home in one
of the world's most forbidding and infamous fortresses.
What began as a wedding gift to England's King Henry III: three
leopards from his new brother-in-law, Frederick, the Holy Roman
Emperor, grew over the next six hundred
Widening the scope of the book with entertaining trivia, off-beat tales and cheeky asides, Hahn, writer, researcher, translator and editor, manages to create a credible, living history from a collection of long-departed beasts and birds.
Daniel Hahn's ironic yet compassionate book is both chilling in
its understated account of inhumanity ... and warming in its final
accent on latter-day reform. He wraps together social and political
strands to form a delightfully erratic guideline between the human
jungle and the zoo. – The London Times Literary Supplement
Hahn guides his ark of the animals across six centuries. It
enchants, even as the ear hears the growling and the shrieks of
those long-dead captives within the white walls by the river. – The
Guardian
With wit and impeccable scholarship,
The Tower Menagerie delves into an unexplored realm of history
surrounding the Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London and tells the
story of the unusual creatures who found a home in one of the
world's most forbidding and infamous fortresses.
The Tower Menagerie also explores the way in which the concept
of animal captivity for the purposes of entertainment, enlightenment
and science evolved over hundreds of years. Brimming with
unforgettable stories, historical illustrations and maps,
The Tower Menagerie provides an intriguing, lively survey of our
changing attitudes toward animals. An entertaining journey through
six centuries of British history, this rich, well-researched account
is a must-read for historians and animal lovers.
Home & Garden
The Gardener's Year by Jonathan Edwards & Peter McHoy
(Lorenz Books) is a complete practical guide to gardening tasks
throughout the year, featuring projects for spring, summer, autumn
and winter.
Creating and maintaining a garden is an exciting process: every
season brings new attractions, and also a new set of tasks. Knowing
what to do when is crucial, and
The Gardener's Year by Jonathan Edwards and Peter McHoy takes
readers through each season in detail, covering work to do in the
flower garden, the kitchen garden and the greenhouse.
Spring is a busy time in the garden, as everything is bursting
into growth. The Spring section covers sowing and planting flowers,
planting shrubs and trees, preparing and planting the vegetable plot
and creating bog and rock gardens and ponds. Summer is a time to
reap the rewards of all the hard work as this is when the flowers
and vegetables are at their best. Summer is spent deadheading
flowers, trimming, pruning, propagating, watering, controlling weeds
and harvesting fruit and vegetables.
Autumn is when gardeners can focus on extending harvests and
repairing the lawn, but it is also a good time to plant new trees
and shrubs and fill containers with winter-flowering plants. There's
usually plenty of tidying-up to do, and debris can be converted into
valuable compost and leaf-mould. Winter is a quiet time, but there
are still some important tasks, such as improving and warming soil
ready for new crops, forcing bulbs, protecting tender plants and
propagating new plants.
Jonathan Edwards is an experienced garden writer and editor, formerly a garden journalist, feature editor for Amateur Gardening and deputy editor of Gardening Which? Magazine, and Peter McHoy started his career as a seed analyst, but soon moved into magazine journalism – he has written more than 60 books.
The book contains 180 step-by-step projects, with sequences
clearly explained – they include, for example, sowing a new lawn,
pruning shrubs, and planting pots, window boxes and hanging baskets.
Whether readers are keen gardeners or complete beginners,
The Gardener's Year is practical guide to help and inspire them
to create and enjoy their own perfect gardens. The 900-plus
full-color photographs of projects and beautiful garden scenes are
quite exceptional.
Health, Mind & Body / Professional & Technical
Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating Health Promotion Programs:
A Primer (4th Edition) by James F. McKenzie, Brad L. Neiger &
Jan L. Smeltzer (Pearson Benjamin Cummings) is written for
students who are enrolled in their first professional course in
health promotion program planning.
Covering both theoretical and practical information, the
text employs a step-by-step format to reinforce concepts and
practices. Authors James F. McKenzie, Ball State
University, Brad L. Neiger, Brigham Young University, and Jan L.
Smeltzer provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the
practical and theoretical skills needed to plan, implement, and
evaluate health promotion programs regardless of the setting.
Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating Health Promotion Programs
(Fourth Edition) features updated information throughout, including
the addition of new planning models, expanded discussions of topics
such as measurement, data collection and data sampling, intervention
strategies, and evaluation techniques. Key features include:
- A straightforward, step-by-step format makes concepts clear
and the full process of health promotion programming
understandable.
- Theory and practice are combined with examples and
activities for developing a health promotion program.
- Activities are included at the end of each chapter to
provide hands-on experience.
- Chapter introductions, learning objectives, summaries,
questions, and activities appear in each chapter.
This book provides, under a single cover, material on all three
areas of program development: planning, implementing, and
evaluating.
Each chapter includes objectives, a list of key terms,
presentation of content, chapter summary, review questions,
activities, and web-links.
- The chapter objectives identify the content and skills that
should be mastered after reading the chapter, answering the
review questions, completing the activities and using the
web-links. Most of the objectives are written using the
cognitive and psychomotor (behavior) educational domains.
- Key terms are introduced in each chapter are presented in a
list at the beginning of the chapter and then printed in
boldface at the appropriate points within the chapter.
- At the end of each chapter, readers will find a one- or
two-paragraph review of the major concepts contained in the
chapter.
- The review questions at the end of each chapter to provide
readers with some feedback regarding their mastery of the
content.
- Each chapter also includes several activities that allow
students to put their new knowledge and skills to use. The
activities are presented in several different formats for the
sake of variety and to appeal to the different learning styles
of students. Depending on the ones selected for completion, the
activities in one chapter can build on those in a previous
chapter and lead to the final product of a completely developed
health promotion program.
New to This Edition
· Chapter
1 has been updated and expanded to include new definitions from the
Report of the 2000 Joint Committee on Health Education and Promotion
Terminology, and additional information about the Certified Health
Education Specialists (CHES) and Competencies Update Project (CUP).
- Chapter 2 on planning models still includes presentations of
older planning models, but also now includes presentations of
these newer planning models – A Systematic Approach to Health
Promotion, Mobilizing for Action through Planning and
Partnerships (MAPP), Assessment Protocol for Excellence in
Public Health (APEX-PH), SWOT Analysis, Healthy Communities, The
Health Communication Model, and Healthy Plan-IT.
- Chapter 3 on starting the planning process has been expanded
to include greater insight into working with program
stakeholders.
- Chapter 4 has been expanded to address benefits and barriers
of comprehensive versus categorical and practitioner versus
consumer-driven assessments.
- Chapter 5 includes expanded discussions of measures,
measurement, and data collection, and sampling.
- Chapter 6 includes additional information on Healthy People
2010.
- A complete updating of Chapter 7, including the addition of
several new and emerging theories.
- Chapter 8 on interventions has been completely reorganized
and now uses terminology consistent with the terminology used by
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to describe
interventions.
- Chapter 9 includes more information on community building.
- Chapter 11 has been modified to better identify differences
between true marketing campaigns compared with more basic
promotional or advertising strategies.
- Chapter 12 has been reorganized to present a single generic
model for implementing a program that includes more information
on implementation timelines.
- Chapter 14 has been updated to present a new classification
system for approaches to evaluation.
- A revised instructors' manual and test-bank have been
created.
- PowerPoint presentations, by the author, are available online.
Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating Health Promotion Programs is written for students in a first professional course in health promotion program development, and is designed to help them develop the skills necessary to carry out program development regardless of setting. Comprehensive, thoroughly reviewed, & newly updated by both practitioners and professors, the book reflects the latest trends in the field. Students will find the book easy to understand and use – it is unique among health promotion planning textbooks in that it provides readers with both theoretical and practical information. Co-author Neiger, with his experience as a consultant to the Centers for Disease Control and the Utah Department of Health is a welcomed addition.
Law / Women’s Studies
The Bellwomen: The Story of the Landmark AT&T Sex Discrimination
Case
by Marjorie A. Stockford (Rutgers University Press)
tells the story of a young lawyer named David Copus, who, in
the early 1970s, teamed up with government colleagues to confront
the mature and staid executives of AT&T over the company’s treatment
of its female and minority employees.
Their disagreement resulted in a $38 million settlement
that benefited 15,000 employees, more than 13,000 of them women, and
changed our perceptions of women’s and men’s roles in the workplace
forever.
Copus, who worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), was charged with representing American citizens who suffered from employment discrimination. Time and again he saw young women in the South, many of them black, being turned down for available jobs in local phone companies – usually as telephone operators – often for no valid reason. He and the EEOC decided to challenge AT&T’s company-wide sex discrimination practices. Eventually, the friends and colleagues of AT&T’s employees who worked at other companies, witnessing AT&T’s capitulation, began to hire and promote women into better jobs themselves. At the same time, the EEOC started to aggressively push corporate America to give women more opportunities.
The Bellwomen unfolds the history of this case, illuminating the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of all the players, from AT&T corporate leaders, to the lawyers of the EEOC, to the female activists fighting for what they believed. Marjorie Stockford writer, consultant and public administrator also profiles three beneficiaries of the case, presenting their ambitions and achievements.
Combined with the power of America’s civil rights laws and the influence of the second wave women’s movement, this case provided a catalyst that drove many more women into the paid workforce in non-traditional jobs. By the late twentieth century, when women could be seen working everywhere, from construction sites to corporate offices, it appeared that they belonged there and always had.
The Bellwomen is a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable, account
of an important piece of history – the legal action that launched a
thousand careers. Marjorie Stockford brings to life the stories of
the pioneering women and the courageous government lawyer that
helped open the workplace opportunities all women enjoy today. This
book deserves to be widely read so that we don't forget how much
effort was required to ensure simple equity, and as a reminder to
remain vigilant against vestiges of discrimination that can still
creep into corporate cultures. – Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Arbuckle
Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Men and Women of
the Corporation and Evolve!
This book provides an insightful perspective, putting in better
context the leaps women have made at AT&T over the past thirty
years. The women profiled in this book paved the way for many of us
who have competed and advanced on equal ground over the past twenty
years. – Cathy Martine, AT&T Senior Vice President – Voice Internet
Services and Consumer Product Management
The author of
The Bellwomen has the inside track; Stockford was
one of the beneficiaries of this landmark employment discrimination
settlement. Unfolding like a novel, the book recounts a
fascinating slice of history written in an engrossing and
easy-to-read style.
Literature & Fiction
An Unfinished Season: A Novel by Ward Just
(Houghton Mifflin)
From the award-winning and distinguished chronicler of
American social history and political culture, Ward Just,
An Unfinished Season captures the 1950s hauntingly. In a
time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government
corruption, even the small-town family could not escape the
nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within."
In the small town of Quarterday, half a day's ride from Chicago,
nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his father, who runs a
printing business, fends off workers threatening to strike and then
begins to unravel himself. A gruff and private man eager to maintain
his power, Teddy Ravan vows not to budge, despite hearing that
Communists are behind the strike and receiving threatening phone
calls at home. To protect himself and his family he borrows a gun,
which he carries even after the strike ends.
Meanwhile, Wils, planning to attend the University of Chicago in
the fall, gets a summer job at a Chicago newspaper and suddenly
finds himself straddling three worlds – that of the working-class
reporters eager to expose local corruption, of the glamorous
debutante parties on the North Shore where he spends his nights, and
of the burgeoning cold war between his parents in Quarterday. Most
important, he meets Aurora Brule, the daughter of a renowned
psychiatrist with a disturbing past in World War II. Wils and Aurora
fall in love, but their happiness is cut short by a tragedy in the
Brule family and by the unraveling of old secrets that make Wils
question everything he once thought he knew.
Just is the author of thirteen previous novels, including the
National Book Award finalist Echo House. In this, his 14th
book, Just once again shows his deep understanding of the folly of
human nature.
It's always a pleasure to read Just's prose – crisp and
intelligent, animated by dry humor and by a realism that is too
humane to be cynical. This novel, with its resonant questions about
the class divisions that most Americans refuse to acknowledge, is
one of his most trenchant works to date. – Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
Supple as ever, Just takes coming-of-age material and puts his
distinctive stamp on it ... One of Just's best works: stuffed with
surprises, sparkling with insights. – Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
"Ward Just writes the kind of books they say no one writes
anymore: smart, well-crafted narratives – wise to the ways of the
world – that use fiction to show us how we live," wrote Joseph Kanon
in the Los Angeles Times.
An Unfinished Season is quintessential Just, bringing us into
the secret, shadow life that inhabits politics, business, family,
and love in 1950s Chicago. It is a subtle, probing portrait of a
time when government suspicion and corruption seeped into
everything. It is also a beautifully atmospheric depiction of a
place and a searing story of lives on the brink of transformation.
Literature & Fiction /
History & Criticism
The House As Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's
Literature by Pauline Dewan (Mellen Studies in
Children's Literature, V. 5: Edwin Mellen)
In the conclusion to
The House As Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's
Literature, Pauline Dewan quotes critic Victor Watson's remark
that "good writing for children ... habitually masks the complexity
of its effects." In many ways his statement could be applied to good
critics of writing for children and specifically Dewan's study. All
of us have had the experience of reading a critical study of a work,
an author, or a group of works by several different authors and then
remarking to ourselves, "Yes, it seems so simple and obvious. Why
didn't I think of it or notice it before?"
The House As Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif
in Children's Literature takes a basic setting
and, by extension, a basic idea found in a large majority of stories
written for children and then studies a wide range of novels –
classic and contemporary; realistic and fantastic; British,
American, Canadian, and a few others – and shows how they reveal a
series of complex patterns and themes relating to this basic setting
and idea.
Some years ago, Jon C. Stott, Professor Emeritus of English,
University of Alberta, suggested that all of the settings in
children's literature could be listed under either (and sometimes
both) of the heading "home" and "not-home." The conflicts in
children's stories began, he hypothesized, when characters found
themselves in "not-home" settings, that is, places that did not
offer the security or sense of belonging so central to their lives.
Most of these stories involved journeys in which the children left
their "not-homes" and proved themselves worthy of reaching "homes"
where they belonged.
In
The House As Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's
Literature Dewan, accomplished writer, Ph.D. in English from
York University (Toronto), specialist in Victorian literature, does
not disagree with this concept of opposed pairings. However, she
does reveal the incredible complexity that lies beneath this
apparently simple binary opposition. Reading through her study, we
become aware of such contrasts as innocence and experience,
childhood and adulthood, interiors and exteriors, nature and
civilization, sensitivity and insecurity, freedom and confinement –
all of which are embodied in the various homes found in the books
she discusses and in the characters' actions and attitudes toward
these.
Starting her study with the belief that "setting should be an
integral component contributing to the overall significance of each
novel," Dewan examines the inside and outside of houses; the search
for a house; houses of the past; land, sea, and island homes; home
away from home; and the search for a house and parents. In doing so,
she skillfully delineates the psychological complexity of the idea
of home for both the child protagonists and the novelists who have
created them. Equally as interesting as these categories are the
novels Dewan gathers together to exemplify them. Twain's The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer is linked to several Beatrix Potter tales,
Watership Down with Wilders' Little House series, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn with Sarah Plain and Tall, and Anne of Green
Gables.
The creation of these groupings, along with the close readings of
depictions of settings and of characters' interactions with these,
allows readers to explore more fully the nuances in individual
stories and the variables in the characteristics that draw together
these often disparate novels. In addition, through the juxtaposition
of discussions of titles not usually considered together, Dewan
invites critics to reread well-known, often favorite, novels from
new, enlightening points-of-view.
Throughout children's literature, characters leave home, either
temporarily or permanently, for a variety of reasons. Changed family
circumstances precipitate many moves: one or both parents die,
fathers change jobs, the family's financial situation changes, or
the family buys a new home. Loftier ideals motivate many
protagonists to leave home. Some characters leave to accomplish a
quest, others wish to make discoveries, some want to find new lands,
and many want to right a wrong or generally defeat the forces of
evil. Various types of searches inspire many characters to leave.
Some search for treasure, adventure, a cure to a problem, a lost
parent, a missing brother, a lost member of royalty, or a lost
talisman or some other object of significance.
There are those who leave home and get lost. Others leave home in
order to escape the dangers of war, an abusive situation, or
confining circumstances. Some children leave to recover from
illness, while many go for a vacation. Leaving home can involve
changing countries, changing planets, or even changing worlds. Some
individuals leave home because they are forced to do so through
circumstances, while others are forcibly kept away.
With few exceptions, leaving home challenges characters to change
in response to the move; it helps steer children towards their
eventual place in the adult world. "You are not the hobbit that you
were," says Gandolf to Bilbo when they return home in The Hobbit.
Similarly, in The Book of Three, when Taran asks why his house has
grown so much smaller since he left, Dallben replies, "It is not
Caer Dallben which has grown smaller. You have grown bigger. That is
the way of it." Characters like Claudia Kincaid in From the
Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. E. Frankweiler and Burl in The Maestro leave
their childhood behind them when they leave home. Mrs. Frankweiler
notices that, with the move away from home, "Claudia was tiptoeing
into the grown-up world. Likewise, as Burl moves further and further
away, "childhood dripped off him in great huge gobs of sweat." Much
more so than its adult counterpart, children's fiction concerns
itself with the maturation of character, and frequently this
maturation is precipitated by moving away from home.
Home in all these books is part of a pattern. Correspondences
between home and the self are evident in an entire host of
children's novels. Structural patterns as well as symbolic ones
suggest design and purpose.
The outward journey frequently reflects the inward pattern of our
lives. Sometimes characters start in a place they are unhappy with,
move to a better place, and return to their original home. The
return to a previous setting is always a return with a difference.
Characters reframe their ideas about their first dwelling in the
light of their experiences in another place.
The reverse pattern is also widespread. Moving from an agreeable
to a disagreeable, or at least opposed setting, and back again is
characteristic of novels such as The Animal Family, the Robinsonnade
novels, Julie of the Wolves, Homecoming, Monkey Island, Hold Fast,
The Finding, Silverwing, and Sunwing. As Snufkin says in Comet in
Moominland, "You must go on a long journey before you can really
find out how wonderful home is."
In a number of novels like Watership Down, the Little House
books, and the Borrowers series, the characters live in one place
after another. The final home in each of these works is one that
integrates the best elements of the previous dwellings. In other
works like the Bromeliad trilogy, the protagonist moves in linear
fashion to progressively more auspicious settings. These different
types of patterns are just a few of the more prominent ones; they
suggest how prevalent structural designs involving home are in the
literature.
According to Dewan, in novel after novel, we find details of
settings chosen for their significance and symbolic resonance. These
details acquire additional weight as they are juxtaposed with other
details in the novel, thereby "increasing the story in every
direction." The way novelists use settings in children's novels is a
primary example of this carefully crafted and deceptively simple
manner of writing. In discussing symbolic meanings in a novel,
Flannery O'Connor argues: "The fact that these meanings are there
makes the book significant. The reader may not see them but they
have their effect on him nonetheless." The same can be said of
patterning within the novel. Child readers may not consciously
detect such designs but that does not mean they go unnoticed.
Home is the place that anchors children. In Jacob Have I Loved,
Louise Bradshaw is unable to leave home until she discovers her
roots in it. Ironically, such roots provide the necessary foundation
for expansion. The ever-expanding circumference of the child's world
in fiction is a particularly significant pattern for children. Paula
Fox writes, "We are all born provincials, but there is in us that
push against the constraint of circumstance, of the given, that we
show in our first efforts to stand up on legs that are not quite
ready to support us, in that struggle toward a larger life we make
in our first attempts at human speech." C. S. Lewis maintains that
certain types of science fiction "are actual additions to life; they
give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and
enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience." What he
says of science fiction applies equally to settings in children's
literature.
"Good writing for children," argues Victor Watson, "habitually
masks the complexity of its effects." He elaborates: "I have found
myself repeatedly seeking to explain and illuminate what I have come
to regard as the central and distinguishing characteristic of
children's writing – a ‘poetic’ – able to suggest subtle, complex
and private values in simple, transparent and carefully crafted
language and form."
On page one of the Introduction, Dewan writes, "This book is
written especially for those who would like to see children's
literature placed in the same context and judged by the same
criteria of its counterpart. It is also aimed at ... those in a
position ... to help readers of all ages develop a richer and fuller
response to children's imaginative literature." She has achieved her
goal, both as a critic and advocate of children's literature. As a
critic, reader, and frequently teacher of literature to elementary
school children, I will be influenced by her patternings and close
reading to study well-known works in a new light and to present them
to university students, grade school teachers, and children in new
ways. – Jon C. Stott, Professor Emeritus of English, University of
Alberta.
In
The House As Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's
Literature Dewane succeeds in her goal of elevating children’s
literature so that it is analyzed and evaluated on the same basis as
adult literature. Her bibliography of primary sources lists over 200
titles; while the list represents only a portion of the children's
novels in print, it includes a large number of the books on which
most scholars and critics focus their attentions.
Literature & Fiction / History
& Criticism
Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian
England by Albert D. Pionke (The Ohio State University
Press)
The working classes, colonial subjects, European nationalists,
and Roman Catholics – these groups generated intense anxiety for
Victorian England's elite public, which often responded by accusing
them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range
of literary and historical evidence, Albert D. Pionke argues in
Plots of Opportunity that the pejorative meanings attached to
such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the
many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society.
After surveying England's evolving theories of representative
politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke,
adjunct assistant professor of English and comparative literature at
the University of Cincinnati, traces the intersection of democracy
and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by
Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli,
John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histories,
and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical
prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the
Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic
discourse.
By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy
in every case,
Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly
similar strategies of repression, resistance, and concealment used
by competing agents in the democracy debate.
In the autobiographical introduction to Secret Societies (1847),
idiosyncratic English
author Thomas De Quincey admits that a precocious fascination has
prompted
his essay on this "highest form of the incredible". He remembers
that between
the impressionable ages of seven and ten, he engaged in numerous
debates with "a
For De Quincey, secret societies serve as repositories of
purposes and truths too advanced for the culture at large. In a
tacit challenge to the prevailing middle-class standard of
Victorian manliness as transparent and open, he approves and even
celebrates the secrecy practiced by these "small fraternities of
men.” In fact, their clandestine community of truth is described as
"doubly sublime;” a label that grants them both spiritual and
aesthetic status. Secret Societies thus invites its readers to
practice the same kind of secrecy as its subject by appealing to a
set of imperceptible standards of value accessible only to the
"meditative" and too advanced for the middleclass "great vortex of
society." In other words, De Quincey attempts to overcome the
presumed hostility to secret societies sparked by Barruel s
accusation of "treason" by abandoning the Abbe's external political
register in favor of his own discourse of interiority.
Secret Societies neatly captures the complex dialectic between
exterior political condemnation and interior subjective attraction
at the heart of Victorian England's multivalent rhetoric of secrets.
Plots of Opportunity offers an extended reexamination of this
dialectic that seeks to clarify the unanswered questions of “how”
and “why” from De Quincey’s original investigation of secret
societies. Instead of accepting the ahistorical sublimity of these
"small fraternities" or attempting to uncover their "purposes" and
"awful truths," however, this book strives to situate De Quincey's
"general economy of Secret Societies" within the specific confines
of just over forty years of English culture, from 1829 to1870.
Although this period from Catholic emancipation to Italian
unification contains many factual secret societies – the Freemasons,
the Thugs, the Carbonari, etc. – it is the productive function of
the secret society as a rhetorical figure that series as Pionke’s
main object of analysis.
These secret societies or agents occupy a broad spectrum of
class, religion, race, and nationality, ranging from aristocrats to
trade unionists, Establishment clergy to Roman Catholics, British
bureaucrats to Indian rebels, and Irish nationalists to Italian
brigands. Their party affiliations and political positions similarly
run the gamut from ultraTory to Liberal to radically Radical, from
constitutional monarchist to red republican. Even these agents'
ideological investment in accusations of conspiracy ranges widely
from an apparently genuine belief in the presence and danger of
secret plots to more opportunistic denunciations for the purposes of
propaganda. The central project of
Plots of Opportunity is to trace this rhetorical intersection of
secrecy and democracy during several crucial moments of debate over
the character of England's emerging democracy. Pionke approaches
these moments of democratic crisis by focusing first, on the
explicitly political reaction in Parliament, the periodical press
and elsewhere to attempts by an under-enfranchised constituency – to
gain more equitable representation; and, second, on a network of
more literary texts that absorb this initial political rhetoric and
use it to construct a field of aesthetic possibilities that offers
potential insights into and consequences for the original crisis.
Due to the increasingly close connection between Britain's domestic
and imperial policies during the period under consideration,
Pionke’s investigation interrogates the productive functions of the
figure of the secret society both at home, where it was often
initially deployed in an effort to stop "the lower orders" from
securing social and political equality, and abroad, everywhere it
served as a useful tool for preserving the "natural" inferiority of
the "non-English races." In both cases the figure of the secret
society allows De Quincey's dialectic between condemnation and
admiration to become especially perspicuous, inflecting the
parliamentary, periodical and literary discourses that, together,
constitute Victorian England's larger democratic debate.
Ultimately, Pionke establishes that, far from being a mere
"aberration of maturing bourgeois society'', the figure of the
secret society actually played an ideologically central and largely
overlooked role in the ongoing development of that society. In the
first two-thirds of the nineteenth-century, the ongoing connection
between accusations of secrecy and the period's tumultuous debate
over the character of England's emerging democracy means that the
figure of the secret society can serve as a useful barometer for
Victorian England's failure to manifest its promise of universal
political subjecthood. Liberal interpretations of the
post-Enlightenment doctrine of "natural rights" simultaneously
appealed to universalist notions of equality in order to justify
electoral reform and the preeminent status of the Commons even as
they sought to keep undesirable constituencies perpetually
disenfranchised by branding them secret societies. These accusations
were intended to deny groups like trade unionists, English Catholics
and colonized peoples the chance to assert themselves as citizens by
representing them as non-subjects – they could not be trusted to
vote, for example, because their ties to clandestine organizations
precluded their ability to function as autonomous individuals. What
Pionke argues throughout
Plots of Opportunity is that such "plots of opportunity" should
be viewed with extreme suspicion, since they usually indicate that
the ideals of democratic equality and political universalism are
being circumvented in an effort to perpetuate an uneven distribution
of social power.
This book will engage historians and literary critics alike, and
it brings a strikingly fresh perspective to bear on debates about
political struggles that have for too long been treated as if they
were cut and dried, rather than evolving contests for control of
society's ear. – John Plotz, Brandeis University
Plots of Opportunity examines how the figure of the secret
society brought into focus a number of key debates in the Victorian
engagement with mass democracy. Anyone interested in the cultural
and political meanings of secret societies in the Victorian era –
and contemporary times – should read this book. – David Vincent,
Keele University
Plots of Opportunity is a thoroughly research academic analysis,
offering a new window for historians and literary critics into 19th
century England; that new window is the juxtaposition of secrecy and
democracy.
Literature & Fiction
Wedding Ring by Emilie Richards (Mira Books)
In
Wedding Ring, the first book in Emilie Richard’s planned
Shenandoah Album series, three generations of women
discover the healing gift of family, memories and love.
Tessa MacCrae feels as if she's facing a prison sentence when she reluctantly agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out and repair the old family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. She is prepared for inevitable anger and tension – the only emotional bonds they've ever shared. The three women have never been close, but Tessa hopes that time away from her husband – no matter how trying – will help her find the answers she desperately seeks and come to a decision about her failing marriage.
At first the summer is filled with all-too-familiar emotional storms. Helen, the family matriarch, is domineering, sharp-tongued and incapable of sharing feelings – except negative ones. Widowed at a young age, she has struggled her whole life, hanging on to the family farm by sacrificing everything, particularly love. Fiercely independent, Helen resents her daughter and granddaughter's intrusion, too angry to admit that she needs their help.
Nancy, Tessa's mother, appears to be little more than a hand-wringing social climber, who spends her days entertaining and courting Richmond's wealthy elite. What Tessa can't see is the woman so ashamed of her roots and desperate for acceptance that she would do anything to be loved, or the anxious wife trying to hold on to a marriage on which she has never had a firm grasp.
But with the passing weeks, their lives begin to change. Here in her grandmother's house, Tessa comes face-to-face with the family and the history that has shaped her. As Tessa restores a tattered wedding-ring quilt pieced by her grandmother and quilted by her mother years ago, the secrets that have shadowed their lives unfold in a drama of discovery, hope and healing. For the first time, Tessa can look past the years of resentment and regret and see her mother and grandmother for the flawed but courageous women they are.
Through, days of hard work, simple living and the determination
to repair the torn fabric of their own lives, Tessa, Nancy and Helen
discover that what was lost can be found again.
Recalling her work as a volunteer in the Ozark Mountains,
and acknowledging her roots in Virginia's pastoral Shenandoah
Valley, Richards launches a trilogy of novels inspired by quilt
makers, a series that will resonate with fans of family sagas.
Richard’s pieces together each woman's story as artfully as a
quilter creates a quilt, with equally satisfying results, and her
characterizations are transcendent, endowed with warmth and
compassion. – Booklist
True to form, Richards's latest novel Wedding Ring once again features complex characterizations and in-depth explorations of social issues. A trained and experienced family counselor, her apparent fascination with relationships of all kinds lends complexity and credibility to her exploration of these topics.
Literature & Fiction / Mythology
American Folktales: From the Collections of the Library of
Congress edited by Carl Lindahl (M.E. Sharpe)
For over seventy-five years the national library has sought
actively to gather in, preserve, and share with the American people
the traditional songs and stories from our nation's diverse cultural
communities and from around the world. Since its creation in 1976,
the American Folklife Center has continued this important work as an
essential part of its mission "to preserve and present American
folklife."
The collections of traditional poetry and music in the Archive of
Folk Culture are legendary, their reputation enlarged and spread in
part by the series of long-playing recordings, published by the
Library of Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, called "Folk Music of
the United States." Over the years the Folk Archive has broadened
its purview to embrace a wide range of cultural traditions:
occupational and regional culture; folk art and craftsmanship; and
storytelling and oral history. Today, the archive houses over three
million items in the form of sound recordings, photographs, film and
video, manuscript materials, and ephemera that document our cultural
heritage and folklife. Thousands of people visit the American
Folklife Center each year, or call or write, with questions about
traditional cultural life and requests to use archive materials.
With the recent addition to the collections of documentation from
the International Storytelling Foundation; the September 11 Project;
the Veterans History Project; and StoryCorps, the archive is now as
rich in the area of storytelling and oral history as it is in
traditional music.
In light of this development, Carl Lindahl's book
American Folktales is particularly welcome as a major
contemporary publication that draws upon the spoken word traditions
found in the Archive of Folk Culture. Here readers will find Jack
tales as told by traditional storyteller Ray Hicks; stories from the
South as collected by John and Alan Lomax; as well as tall tales,
jokes, children's stories, and personal experience narratives from
contemporary American life.
American Folktales takes its shape from the conviction that even
the best stories only grow better as we get to know their tellers.
Lindahl hopes that readers will agree that each of the tales
gathered here possesses sufficient entertainment, esthetic, or
cultural value to be enjoyed for itself, yet if he were to break up
the repertoire of one gifted teller and distribute the stories into
various thematic niches – tall tales, ghost stories, jokes – readers
would be denied a deeper sense of the sources, uses, and power of
that speaker's art. The first half of
American Folktales is organized to focus primarily on the
tellers, rather than the genres, of the tales. The first thirty-two
stories represent a sizeable chunk of the recorded repertoire of
America's best-known family of traditional storytellers. These are
followed by fifty-three tales representing the art of five
individuals. Wherever possible, Lindahl has added recorded
autobiographical comments from the storytellers and provided
information about the speakers and their lives that may bring the
reader closer both to the stories and to the storytellers.
The second half of the book is broken mostly into generic and thematic units: legends, tall tales, jokes, children's st