SirReadaLot.org

January 2005, Issue #69

Guide to this Issue's Contents

Page Contents: Fashion, Managing Motivation, Playing to Win, Cooking with Children,  The Relationships of Children, Archeology for Children, Children's Atlas of War, Computer Graphics, Skillet Cookery,  Movie about Music Legend Ray Charles, Supervision Counseling, When Gambling becomes a Disorder,  Psychoanalytic Work in a Public Clinic, A Southern Black Community, 9/11 Memoir, American Bunkers, Populists And Progressives, Gardening Orchids, Making Beaded Jewelry, The Extraordinary Potential of Pigs! Vernacular Buildings, Racist Fiction, American Dreams Transmogrified, Colombian Theatre in the Vortex, Benefits of Carnivores, Spirituality of Aloneness, More Open Society, Scalia Dissents, Economic Hit Men, Reading Food Labels for Nutrition, Atherosclerosis, Max Wertheimer Gestalt, Between Brain and Culture,  Reading Skills ESL, Writing Skills, Literary Terms Glossary, Collisions at Sea, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on Religion, Creative Kabbalah, Postmodern Christianity, Celtic Moon Goddess, Judaism and Christianity Origins, Astronomy, Weighing the Soul, Martial Arts, Golf In the Southeast, Automobiles: Hummer, Gloria Trevi's Cult Problems, Women's Rights in America? Readings about Women in Western Culture 

Arts & Photography / Fashion

Fashion: A Canadian Perspective by Alexandra Palmer (University of Toronto Press)

Canadian fashion does exist.

Although Canadian fashion may be sympathetic and reliant upon the United States and Europe, Canadian fashion identity does exist beyond northern exposure.

Fashion takes a sweeping look at what Canadians have worn for the last three centuries, and what those choices have done to draw attention to Canadian fashion at home and abroad. Covering a broad range of topics – such as the iconic Hudson Bay blanket coats, garment factories of the late 1800s, specific Canadian fashion couturiers – i.e., Lida Baday, Hilary Radley, Alfred Sung – whose influence has reached international stages, as well as the contemporary role of fashion journalists and their effect on trends.

Author Alexandra Palmer, the fashion and costume curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and an adjunct professor in the graduate program in art history at York University and the art history department at the University of Toronto, gathers together some of the top curators, designers, fashion writers, historians, and artists in the country to create a truly dynamic and thought-provoking collection of essays.

Contributors include: Christina Bates, Katherine Bosnitch, Gail Cariou, Susan Turnbull Caton, Cynthia Cooper, Barbara M. Freeman, Deborah Fulsang, Barbara E. Kelcey, Peter J. Larocque, M. Elaine MacKay, Jan Noel, Alexandra Palmer, Lydia Ferrabee Sharman, Elizabeth Sifton, and Eileen Stack.

This book is important, timely, and immensely relevant. Alexandra Palmer has put together a rich and varied col­lection that will contribute to Canadian cultural history and undoubtedly initiate further projects and debates. The content of each essay is excellent and the collection is outstanding in its complementary diversity. – Janice Helland, Department of Art and Department of Women's Studies, Queen's University

Fashion is an intriguing and readable historiography that links past to future, couture vision to trade trends, and heritage costuming to Fashion Television. Controversial and unconventional, this collection breaks new ground in examining Canada, fashion and national identity.

Business & Investing / Management & Leadership

100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy by Steve Chandler & Scott Richardson (Career Press) is the culmination of many years of successful leadership coaching and training by best-selling author Steve Chandler and attorney Scott Richardson, and the natural follow-up to Steve's two previous best-sellers – 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Reinventing Yourself.

Covering concepts such as "Don't manage people, manage agreements," 100 Ways to Motivate Others draws on the success of live workshops, seminars, and personal coaching programs on communications and leadership. This book inspires tough-minded leadership that gives the gift of clarity and vision to every person following the leader.

The first step in motivating others is for readers, assuming they are the leaders wanting to motivate followers, to realize that "if there's a problem, I'm the problem." Once they truly get that, then they can use these 100 ways. After readers have learned to motivate themselves, Chandler and Richardson will help them learn:

• How to slow down and enjoy a new level of focus.
• Why multitasking is a myth, not a strength, and keeping life simple and straightforward is the goal.
• The power of building on their people's strengths.
• How to avoid the damaging inclination to obsess about people's weaknesses.
• A simple and creative way to hold people accountable.
• How to enjoy cultivating the art of supportive confrontation.

It's hard to believe that so much powerful, practical wisdom can be packed into such an easy-to-read book. It's a voyage into the pure essence of what really works. I've already ordered it for my entire staff. – Ron Hulnick, President, University of Santa Monica

Chandler and Richardson in 100 Ways to Motivate Others have crafted a vital, user-friendly, inspirational guide for executives, managers, and professionals ... and those aspiring to reach that level. The seminars, done for such organizations as Banner Health, General Dynamics, Scripps Hospital, Wells Fargo Banks, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and M&I Banks, and this book which came out of the seminars, will appeal to managers, teachers, parents, CEOs, and coaches.

Business & Investing / Management & Leadership

Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? by George Stalk & Rob Lachenauer (Harvard Business School Press)

It's time to play hardball, to create losers.

There are two extremes in business competition today. Companies can play softball, relying on weak tactics that look like strategies, but do little more than keep the company in the game. Or, they can play hardball, employing tough strategies designed to rout, not simply beat, competitors. Which of today's companies are playing hardball? What strategies are they using to win?

In Hardball, veteran strategists George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer argue that business is about winning and losing, not about "playing nice." For too long, companies have focused on soft issues like customer relations and corporate culture while ignoring the killer strategic instinct that has been the hallmark of winning since business competition began. Stalk and Lachenauer show that hardball winners exercise soft management, but in the context of classic hardball play, rallying talent and building culture through focus on the few issues most critical to success. These companies play rough, but they never break the rules and keep their promises to customers, shareholders, and employees.

In their "hardball manifesto," authors George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer of the leading strategy consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group, show how hardball competitors can build or maintain an enviable competitive edge by pursuing one or more of the classic "hardball strategies": unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, devastate profit sanctuaries, raise competitors' costs, and break compromises.

Stalk and Lachenauer show how hardball companies move beyond mere competitive advantage to achieving decisive advantages that neutralize, marginalize, and even punish rivals. Through examples that take leaders deep inside the world of hardball competition, Hardball reveals the classic hardball moves who uses these strategies, under what circumstances and in which industries each strategy is most effective.

Every leader must teach the next generation how to compete. Hardball  shows us the way to play and win. – Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO, General Electric

With so much cynicism over greed and lapsed ethics in the boardroom, Hardball offers a refreshing way to start over. –Matthew Winkler, Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg News

Hardball throws you directly into the uncomfortable truth that companies are always either hunting or being hunted. Physical and cerebral at once, this book clears the air. – Tom Hout, coauthor of Competing Against Time

Hardball is already causing a stir. – The Economist
The authors' message, eminently worth the read, is that you can succeed by competing relentlessly, intelligently and, yes, fairly. – The Wall Street Journal

Today's global marketplace may be the toughest and most unforgiving playing field business has ever seen. Hardball redefines and reinterprets the meaning of competition in this new era – and outlines the classic strategies today's companies must use if they're in the game to win it.

Children’s / Cooking

DK Children's Cookbook by Katharine Ibbs, with photography by Howard Shooter (DK) provides everything young readers need to know to make delicious meals and sweet treats.

Focusing on favorite meals and snacks to inspire young chefs who are ready to learn new skills, the DK Children's Cookbook is loaded with accessible recipes. Children learn to enjoy preparing food safely as they experiment with new flavors and have fun in the kitchen. Katharine Ibbs, an experienced home economist and food stylist, brings her fresh approach to cooking to the DK Children's Cookbook. A passionate believer in the importance of learning about cooking from an early age, Ibbs has taught cooking classes for kids and contributed to numerous children's cookbooks.

Readers can start with an easy-to-make Fruit Smoothie for breakfast, have Pasta Salad for lunch, and then serve Barbecue Chicken and Mandarin Cheesecake for dinner. Some more samples from the various sections of the book:

• Breakfast: Breakfast omelet, Blueberry pancakes
• Light Meals: Pesto toast, Cheese melt with poached egg, Falafel with tzatziki, Sushi rolls
• Main meals: Mashed-potato pies, Lamb kebabs, Roasted vegetable lasagna
• Desserts: Mandarin cheesecake, Fruit crisp, Tropical fruit meringues
• Baking: Banana squares, Noon bread, Orange crunch cookies, Vegetable tart

Each step-by-step recipe is easy to follow, with straightforward instructions and colorful "look-as-you-cook" pictures of each dish. Every recipe comes with hints and tips so readers can adapt them and make food that they like.

Readers learn to mix, blend, baste, roast, steam, and bake with this guide. With illustrated explanations of cooking terms, equipment, and techniques, and preparation tips and advice about healthy eating, the DK Children's Cookbook has everything readers need for making delicious dishes that will have their friends and family coming back for more.

With over 50 mouthwatering recipes, DK Children's Cookbook has something for everyone. One thing we especially like about this cookbook is that, although there are a number of meat recipes, there are plenty for vegetarians too. Whether readers want to learn how to cook or are already budding chefs, this book would make a good choice.

Children’s Books (Ages 4-8) / Archeology

A City Through Time by Steve Noon, Phillip Steele (DK) takes young readers on a journey to discover the exciting history of a city.

From early Green settlement to industrial metropolis, readers watch a fictional town grow and see how its citizens lived through the centuries.

Written by Philip Steele and illustrated by Steve Noon, illustrator of the award-winning A Street Through Time, A City Through Time, begins as a place where farmers come to trade. Thousands of years later, huge jetliners fly over a sprawling city that is home to millions of people.

Great cities of the world don't become great overnight. As readers travel through the centuries, they see how cities change and grow to become teeming centers of civilization, where something is always happening. From Greek soldiers on the march to commuters on a crowded rush-hour subway, A City Through Time shows readers how people from each era go about their lives.

Readers will find incredible panoramic pictures showing each stage of the city's history, and features focusing on key buildings and the people who live and work in them. The book shows Roman citadel with its bathhouse, the medieval city with its mighty castle, and the modern metropolis with its gleaming skyscrapers. Every picture is packed with color and detail – illustrating, through the lives of citizens and slaves, lords and peasants, factory workers and tourists, how a city transforms itself over the 2,500 years of its history.

Illustrator Noon, in A City Through Time, vividly brings to life the history and growth of a city in this stunning, oversized picture book. Beginning with the birth of a Greek colony and ending with a modern metropolis, A City Through Time is a captivating journey through 2,500 years. Every page puts readers into the heart of the urban hustle and bustle.

Children’s / Reference / History / Military

Atlas of American Military History by Stuart Murray (Facts on File)

From the Battle of Bunker Hill to the Battle of Midway, from Vietnam to the War in Iraq, from George Washington to Douglas MacArthur, Atlas of American Military History covers the full span of America at war, exploring the personalities, methods, strategies, and historical contexts of each conflict. Following a loose chronological framework, Atlas of American Military History examines every significant military campaign and war in which the United States has been engaged, both domestically and internationally.

Stuart Murray, freelance writer and the author of several books on military history, begins the story as European warfare came to North America. It was 1565 when as age-old hostility between France and Spain brought siege, pillaging, and massacre to Florida. When the Englishman, Sir Francis Drake, sacked Spanish St. Augustine in 1586, the colonial wars were under way. Through the 1600s, native peoples and colonists also often matched strength, and the colonists did not always win. During the mid-1700s, native peoples were important allies of the warring British and French, but when the newly independent United States expanded at the end of the century, the Indians were the losers. The War of 1812's battles intermingled with aggressive operations to remove the native peoples of the Old Northwest and South.

According to Atlas of American Military History, a few decades later, America's belief in her "Manifest Destiny" to con­quer the continent brought Texas and much of Mexico under the Stars and Stripes. In 1861, the War Between the States tore the nation in two, but from civil war rose a United States that was stronger than ever, industrializing and on the move. The last decades of the century saw the conquest of the West, with the Indians forced onto reservations.

After defeating Spain in 1898, the United States entered the 20th Century as a colonial empire, an aspiring Great Power that came to the fore during the First World War. Then came World War II, from which the United States emerged the most powerful nation on earth, leader of the "Free World," and bastion of liberty. Next, the adversary was the totalitarian Soviet Bloc, with intrigue, subversion, and the threat of nuclear destruction as the chosen weapons. Near the end of the 20th Century, this "Cold War" dissolved into a confusion of new adversities, dangers, and tensions.

Global politics were now often defined by the hunt for oil reserves, a quest complicated by the resolve of some aggrieved peoples to strive for their rights. Awesome martial technology dominated the conventional battlefield, but the guerrilla fighter – whether patriot or fanatical terrorist – struggled on against immense odds. Thus, the 21st Century opened with the greatest militaries ever known attempting to combat clandestine networks of shadowy enemies who were willing to die for causes they held sacred.

More current and accessible than any similar title on the topic, Atlas of American Military History provides bountiful full-color maps accompanied by an insightful textual narrative. The maps and text are well integrated and complement each other nicely, giving readers access to information on important topics in a comprehensive and authoritative manner. Full of fascinating information that will interest students and general readers alike, and with a wide range of topics that receive detailed treatment in both text and maps, Atlas of American Military History offers a thorough, fascinating account of all aspects of U.S. military history.

Computers / Interactive Multimedia / Graphic Design

Introduction to Computer Graphics – Design Professional by Daniel Bouweraerts (Design Professional Series: Course Technology / Thomson)

Part of the Design Professional Series, Introduction to Computer Graphics provides a solid overview of the applications and software used in print and digital media. Readers learn about the most commonly used applications in computer graphics with this introductory text from the Design Professional Series, each volume of which provides guides to today's hottest multimedia applications. In separate sections dedicated to both print and digital media, Daniel Bouweraerts, graphic communications professor at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada and former business graphics designer, presents a comprehensive overview of design concepts, the main software applications, and production technologies.

Introduction to Computer Graphics:

• Builds a foundation in the theories and concepts of design.
• Provides an introduction to the tools that have revolutionized computer graphics, including software, production and reproduction technologies, and electronic publishing and proofing.
• Engages visual learners with a full-color interior and eye-popping graphics.
• Helps readers build their understanding of print and digital media concepts with numerous exercises and projects.
• Contains images created by professional designers from across the country.
• Is accompanied by extensive Instructor Resources to facilitate use in the classroom.

There are many levels of tech­nology to learn. Many step-by-step books exist that go into depth on individual applications, but Bouweraerts felt the need for a text that presents an overview of the available applications for both print and digital media. Once students understand the context of each application and have learned the basic skills presented here, they can move on to more in-depth application study.

Introduction to Computer Graphics builds a foundation in design theories and concepts to foster student creativity. This text is organized into two sections – one dedicated to print media and the other to digital media. Within these sections, the chapters introduce the tools that have revolutionized computer graphics, including software, production and reproduction technologies, and electronic publishing. Design tips and sidebars address topics related to chapter content.

• What You'll Learn bullet and graphic are provided at the beginning of every concept.
• Chapter Introduction lays the groundwork for the concepts that follow, giving a brief historical perspective on the chapter topic and/or explaining relevant terminology and processes
• Software Overview explains the uses of each package, briefly comparing their major features, and dis­plays a screen of each one.
• Software Discussion and Instructions contains commands, within the text, for completing some basic software procedures using some typical tools. These instructions give readers brief, hands-on experience that lets them view the software package's basic capabilities and appreciate the program's strengths.
• Summing It Up page provides a short summary of the major points covered in the chapter and design samples that illustrate the concepts and skills covered.
• Projects includes a variety of end-of-chapter material for additional practice and reinforcement. The chapter concludes with four projects: two Project Builders, one Design Project, and one Gallery. The Project Builders require students to apply the concepts and software skills they have learned in the chapter to create a project. The One Step Beyond and Two Steps Beyond features extend knowledge further into the concepts. In the Design Project, readers create a project from scratch with less guidance. The Gallery features real-world work by professional designers and asks students to evaluate the works based on how they illustrate the concepts discussed in the chapter.

The Instructor Resources CD-ROM puts the resources and information needed to teach and learn effectively into the instructor’s hands. Resources include:

• Instructor's Manual, available as an electronic file.
• Syllabus, allowing instructors to prepare and customize their courses.
• PowerPoint Presentations
• Figure Files
• Data Files for Students
• Solutions to Exercises
• Test Bank and Test Engine, ExamView, a powerful testing software package that allows instructors to create and administer printed, com­puter (LAN-based), and Internet exams. ExamView includes hundreds of questions that correspond to the topics covered in this text, enabling students to generate detailed study guides that include page references for further review. The computer-based and Internet testing components allow students to take exams at their computers, and also save the instructor time by grading each exam automatically.

Introduction to Computer Graphics is designed to appeal to the creative spirit and to speak directly to the multimedia and design community. This book gives students the solid foundation necessary to becoming successful in graphic design by striking a balance between design theory and technology. With the technology growth over the years, it has been an increasing challenge to keep students focused in both areas, and this book maintains that dual focus.     - Anna Washington, M.A.T., M.Ed.
 

Cooking, Food & Wine

The Sensational Skillet Cookbook: Create Spectacular Meals With Your Electric Skillet by Wendy Louise (Champion Press Ltd.)

Wendy Louise, the author of the Complete Crockery Cookbook – Create Spectacular Meals with Your Slow Cooker, has had a life-long interest in cooking. Coming from a heritage of good cooks, she has learned from the best – the women in her family. Authoring her second cookbook, Louise has again included many family-inspired favorites, along with specialties gleaned from friends and "comfort foods" she remembers from childhood. Her recipes and wisdom have been featured in newspapers throughout the United States, and she has appeared on many radio programs from WLRQ Light Rock 99.3 in Melbourne, Florida to the K.C. Caldwell morning show in Oregon.

The Sensational Skillet Cookbook encourages readers to move beyond the ordinary with main entrees, side dishes, desserts and more – all prepared in the electric skillet. Each recipe includes a Secret for Success to expand readers’ cooking knowledge, plus informative tidbits and recipe descriptions. The book features over 180 recipes, from traditional to innovative.

Presenting real food, from real kitchens, for real families, Louise walks readers through recipes as complicated as Chicken Kiev to as simple as Lorraine's Swiss Steak, Veal Marsala to Mother's Monday Hash, Aunty Mae's Southern Fried Chicken to Vegetarian Chili, Mrs. Larson's Swedish Pancakes to Baked Apples. An extensive chapter called "Outside the Pan" offers an array of non-cook, assembled sides, salads and condiments to be prepared while dinner is cooking. The Sensational Skillet Cookbook includes a temperature chart and full glossary to maximize skillet preparations.

Louise cooks up a storm with her electric skillet; and, in The Sensational Skillet Cookbook, readers find the same quality recipes that Louise is noted for. This cookbook provides solutions for busy folks who don’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen.

Entertainment / Movies

Ray: A Tribute to the Movie, the Music, and the Man foreword by Taylor Hackford, preface by Jamie Foxx (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebooks Series: Newmarket Press) is a tribute hardcover gift book and full-color companion to that amazing film – the never-before-told life story of American music legend Ray Charles – directed by Taylor Hackford, starring Jamie Foxx.

Just meeting the man was life changing ... Ray Charles leaves us with so much. His fingerprints are forever a part of our culture.... I am forever his student. – Jamie Foxx, from his Preface

Having overcome the monumental obstacles he'd faced in his life, Ray Charles exuded a confidence that can only come from a self-made man. He trusted his instincts more than anyone I've ever known, and working with him was a major life experience for me ... He was the best of what America is, and it was impossible not to be inspired by him. – Director Taylor Hackford, from his Foreword

Bold in invention, unmatched in talent, human in frailty, indomitable in spirit: musical genius Charles was a true American original. Born Ray Charles Robinson into rural poverty along the Georgia/Florida border, witness to his brother's death at the age of five and blind at seven, orphaned, Charles knew adversity early and first-hand. Yet he found his redemption in music, hitting the road at a young age to sing and play piano as he struggled to formulate his signature sound.

The soulful singer exploded with worldwide fame when he pioneered a style incorporating gospel, rhythm and blues, country, orchestral, and jazz influences that would eventually be called “soul.” But, as music writer Christopher John Farley puts it, Charles defies such tidy labels: “He didn't add sex to church music – he just stopped denying it was there.” But he was more than a soul provider. Throughout his career, he explored a variety of genres, including jazz and country, imbuing each with his singular grit and charm ... Whatever the style, in his greatest performances Charles explored melancholy and then beat it back with pounding piano playing and his broad-shouldered baritone.

As he revolutionized the way people appreciated music, he simultaneously fought segregation in the very clubs that launched him and championed artists' rights within the corporate music business.

Ray features the complete screenplay illustrated throughout with movie stills, historical photos, storyboards, and commentary by friends, musicians, and historians, as well as complete cast and crew credits, and original introductions by director Hackford and actor Foxx. In addition, Ray showcases a special 16-page tribute section on Charles, created after his death, with excerpts of articles and eulogies. As realized by Hackford and filmmakers, Charles' story is ennobling, yet historically faithful, the story of a troubled, yet inspired man: a father to eleven children by various women, a heroin addict for twenty years who kicked the habit, and a universally lauded twelve-time Grammy' winner.

The book tells some great stories on Charles as well as on Foxx. For example, Producer Stuart Benjamin recalls Charles' enthusiastic dedication to the project: “We had some old songs in the movie that Ray had performed when he was starting out but he had never recorded. We were talking about perhaps bringing in a music arranger and Ray said to us, ‘Baby, you've got Ray Charles here, why would you bring in somebody else? I'll do the music for you.’ And he did.”

Another is about Foxx, a talented musician himself, having attended university on a piano scholarship, but as director Hackford remembers, to get the part he had to pass the most difficult audition of his life – in front of the master himself: “When I introduced Jamie Foxx to Ray Charles and told him that Jamie was an accomplished pianist, Ray immediately demanded that they sit down at two pianos and jam.... Jamie instantly took the bait, sitting down to play a little funk and gospel. Ray matched him for a while and then started playing Thelonius Monk ... Jamie didn't have Ray's jazz background so he was in trouble with Monk's complicated figures, and Ray didn't let up on him. He said, ‘Come on, man, it's right under your fingers, come on, man.’ The pressure was almost embarrassing ... However, Jamie didn't wilt. He stayed with it until he'd mastered Monk's intricate phrasing. At that moment, Ray jumped up and hugged himself, saying, ‘This is it! This kid can do it. He's the one.’”

By any measure, the story of Ray Charles is the quintessential American dream. Despite adversity, he rose to the pinnacle of his profession, revolutionized American music, and became the first recording artist to own his master recordings, a feat that not even Frank Sinatra was able to negotiate. Charles owned and operated a multimillion-dollar recording business and traveled millions of miles during his lifetime to perform for kings and queens around the world. When he died in the summer of 2004, he was among the most respected and revered musicians of his time.

Ray provides an unflinching portrait of Charles' musical genius as he overcomes personal demons while transforming into a legend. This is the book for anyone interested in the filmmaking process, the evolution of a great American icon, or the healing grace of music. Illustrated with 200 color movie stills, historical images, storyboards, and behind-the-scenes photos, this pictorial moviebook explores the film's fascinating and unflinching account of Ray Charles' life – the moving and ultimately uplifting story of one of this country's most beloved performers.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling / Parenting & Families

Children's Friendships: The Beginnings Of Intimacy by Judy Dunn, with a foreword by Jerome S. Bruner (Understanding Children's Worlds Series: Blackwell Publishing) explores the nature of young children's friendships.

Children's Friendships demonstrates in children’s voices that important relationships with other children begin very early. Judy Dunn, Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, notes that less attention has been paid to the close relationships of children within individual pairs or triads of friends than to other types of relationships. But it important to study children’s friendship because friends matter to children – we are missing a major piece of what excites, pleases, and upsets children, what is central to their lives even in the years before school, if we don't attend to what happens between children and their friends. The pleasures, but also the betrayals, the jealousies and tangled intrigues, make friendships key to the quality of children's lives. The focus of most research on children's social development until relatively recently, though, has been either on their relationships with their parents, or on their relations with the group of classmates at school – their popularity or isolation in the classroom or playground – as the major players in children's development.

According to Dunn, it is also important to study friends because young friends can be important as emotional supports. Many small children spend major parts of their days outside the family in day care or nurseries, in the company of other children. The issue of what kind of social relationships they have with these others is of increasing social significance – reflected in a recent surge of research on children in childcare settings. If we are to understand the full impact of these experiences we need to know what kinds of relationships children form with other children, and what these relationships imply developmentally.

But a close look at children in the context of their friendships does more than illuminate the early stages of an important relationship. It gives us a new window on children's cognitive and social development – their understanding of their social world – and on how their friendship experi­ences influence the development of that understanding, and vice versa.

Why should a focus on children with their friends be so revealing? Children's Friendships says it is because of the distinctive features of young children's friendships that we gain this window on what children know and understand about the social world. Children care about their friends, and they are often highly motivated to stay friends, in spite of disagreements and tensions. They want to sort out quarrels with their friends – whereas with their siblings they often don't bother or don't care (or even enjoy the power play, if they win). A friendship is often the first relationship in which children begin to care about and try to understand someone else, and to respond to the feelings, needs and troubles of another.

Another feature of friendship is that it marks the beginning of a new independence from parents. Children throughout our evolutionary history, and currently in many cultures other than those of North America and Europe, grow up not in isolated nuclear families, but within a wider world of others, including children – sisters, brothers, playmates, loose-knit gangs of children. This world of other children means opportunities for friendship, enmities, gang life, leaders and followers. It means opportunities for working out the intricate balance of power and status between people, for sharing imaginative experiences, for understanding and manipulating the feelings and ideas of others, for a range of relationships that differ greatly from those of parents-with-children.

Eavesdropping on children talking, as Dunn does in the book, also teaches us nor to be sentimental about children's friendships. The birth of intimate relationships outside the family can mean the growth of jealousy and insecurity and new experiences of rejection and loss. Understanding someone well is no guarantee of kindness and support. It can also mean a new dimension to teasing and bullying. One group of psychologists, struck by the viciousness of some of the behavior they recorded in a careful observational study of young children at school, described the classroom as more the source of criminal behavior than a nursery of morality.

Children's Friendships is firmly based in the real world of children. Dunn draws on studies of children growing up in the US, in the UK, Italy, Israel. All the quotations of children talking to their friends, or about their experiences are real children speaking. The pleasures and conflicts, excitements and difficulties that their conversations reveal illustrate the arguments of the book, which are based on systematic, quantitative studies of children with their friends and families.

To pull together the three themes of Children's Friendships:

• The first theme concerns the nature of children's developing relationships with other children, and what has been learned from a close look at what happens between children. This attention to early friendships shows us how much friends can matter to young children, that young children's friendships are in an important sense real relationships, not just the sum of two individuals' acts, and that their relationships differ from those of parents-and-children or siblings.
• The second theme is that our understanding of the nature of children's cognitive and emotional development can be illuminated by studying them within these relationships: the first intimate relationships outside the family. A close look at young friends shows us the link between caring about someone, and understanding them – a two-way connection that underlies all our important relationships, as adults as well as children. It is this combination of emotion and understanding that makes friendship a relationship of great potential influence on children's development – influence for good or for problems in adjustment. Friends can foster each other's development or get them in deep trouble. The intensity of what children can feel about their friends, coupled with their familiarity and intimacy, means that this can be a relationship of great power in influencing the development of their social understanding, their self-confidence, and their later relationships.
• The third theme, then, is that the nature of this developmental influence depends on the quality of the friendship, and that individual differences in the various dimensions of friendship are key. To assess developmental impact we need to understand how friendships differ in terms of affection and support, of intimacy and sharing secrets, of the ‘meeting of minds’ evident in connectedness of communication and play, of power dynamics and control.

Children's Friendships is based on the recent research interest in young friends, but its argument is illustrated also by drawing on the biographies and autobiographies of writers who have illuminated the part that friends played in their childhood experiences and their imaginative growth, and the power of the emotional quality of friendships in early childhood (so hard for psychologists to capture).

Friendships are formed in a particular a particular social world. Differences in time, place and culture mean that children have different opportunities to make friends; the forms and culture of friendships may well differ too. For children in the inner city ghettos, in  the rural Appalachians, and in the prep schools of middle England, the opportunities for developing close relations with other children differ. What friends do together will differ in some ways too. The significance of friendships for children's development and their well-being will differ too, with time and place. In the extreme case of the children growing up in the concentration camps of the holocaust, or the homeless children of bombed cities in the Second World War, close friendships were a crucial source of emotional support and security. For children growing up today in ordinary families, friends are less likely to be such key security figures, at least in the early years of childhood; yet the increasing number of children spending much of their early years in day care or preschool, in a world of other children rather than their close families, raises the question of what kinds of close relationships they have with these others, and what developmental impact such child-child relations may have.

The excitement, the pleasures, problems and humor, the compelling intensity of these relationships with friends (and enemies) in writers' early lives and their fiction are interwoven in Children's Friendships with the present-day examples from the children in Dunn’s research and that of others. The message is that the excitement and dramas of children's changing worlds of friends can not only amuse and move us, but greatly enlighten us about ourselves, our families and friends.

Judy Dunn has the happy knack of helping us to look afresh at the children we thought we knew – including our own ... We glimpse children at their best in this delightful book. – Professor Paul L. Harris, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Drawing on close observation of toddlers, pre­schoolers and school children, this magical book will intrigue parents and inform the practice of professionals who care for young children. – Kathy Sylva, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Oxford

Judy Dunn, one of our most astute chroniclers of children's social lives, provides a fascinating glimpse into the often neglected world of children's friendships ... Parents, as well as professionals will learn much from this timely and readable volume. – Ross D. Parke, Director, Center for Family Studies, University of California Riverside

Dunn, a leading international authority on childhood development, provides in Children's Friendships a beautifully written account of children's early friendships. Drawing on evidence from studies on both sides of the Atlantic, it considers the nature and significance of such relationships for children's development and well-being. The book concludes by drawing out the practical implications of research for parents, teachers and those who care for children, including how to manage friendships at different developmental stages, how to help children with friendship difficulties, and what to do about ‘trouble-making’ friendships and bullying.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling

Training Counselling Supervisors: Strategies, Methods and Techniques edited by Elizabeth L. Holloway & Michael Carroll (Counselling Supervision Series: SAGE Publications) highlights the crucial themes intrinsic to the supervision process, and offers a varied selection of methods for educating supervisors.

Elizabeth Holloway, professor at the Department of Counselling Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and  Michael Carroll, consultant to a number of organizations in private practice, both international trainers, describe how they teach supervision and outline their models for teaching in the context of their practice.

Training Counselling Supervisors covers a wide range of topics including: contracting, reflective processes, supervision in group and multicultural contexts, and evaluation. The text brings continuity across the elements addressed, and heightens awareness of educational methods. Each topic is conceptually described, theoretically discussed, and case studies and exercises are provided.

Training Counselling Supervisors is not a full curriculum in a formal training course in supervision. It focuses on educating supervisors in crucial themes at the core of the supervision process. Each of these authors uncovers one critical factor in the teaching of supervision, and they describe their teaching models within the context of their practice.

Each chapter starts with a brief description of the author's focus in their work as trainers. The topic is then discussed theoretically and described conceptually. Finally, case studies and exercises are provided. Holloway and Carroll designed this text to be one that trainers can use in the design their own teaching strategies and to stimulate their creativity.

In Chapter 1, Holloway overviews supervision training. Her Systems Approach to Supervision (SAS) model is a comprehensive view of supervision within the context of organization and relationship, emphasizing case conceptualization and strategies for supervisory intervention. Chapter 2 focuses on the tasks of supervision. Using his research, Carroll brings readers through each of the tasks of supervision, outlining how trainee supervisors can be coached in each of them. In Chapter 3, Julie Hewson looks at how supervisors can be trained in ‘contracting’ in supervision, using not just theory, but her own gift for the visual. In Chapter 4 Susan Neufeldt posits supervision as a ‘reflective’ process and analyses what that means: she provides frameworks for helping supervisors develop skills of reflection and for teaching these skills to the supervisees. In Chapter 5, Willem Lammers takes a multi-professional approach to examine team and group supervision within ever-widening dimensions. Training for multi-cultural supervision is described by Hardin Coleman in Chapter 6, illuminating the competencies needed. Maria Gilbert and Char­lotte Sills in Chapter 7 tackle how supervisors can be trained in the difficult task of evaluation, and in Chapter 8 Francesca Inskipp provides a model for educating supervisees in how to use supervision effectively. Shoshana Hellman describes in the final chapter the use of a portfolio system for supervisors that is a self-instructional and peer collaborative used with supervisors in Israel.

Intended to encourage trainers in the creative design of their own teaching strategies, Training Counselling Supervisors offers practical, accessible and informed guidance. It will be of immense value to supervisors and supervisees in training in counseling and counseling psychology and across the psychotherapies.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling

Pathological Gambling: Etiology, Comorbidity, and Treatment by Nancy M. Petry (American Psychological Association) provides an overview of problem and pathological gambling from a psychological perspective.

Pathological Gambling examines the prevalence and consequences of problem gambling as well as approaches to treatment. In this comprehensive book, Nancy M. Petry clarifies the current understanding of gambling as a disorder, including its levels of intensity; possible origins in biological, neurological,. developmental, and environmental spheres; and special issues surrounding populations that seem to be more susceptible to problem gambling, including youth, ethnic minorities, and those with comorbid affective disorders such as depression. Petry, professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut Health Center, reviews treatments commonly used for pathological gambling. Petry then presents her own brief cognitive-behavioral approach whose success is empirically proven in the largest known study of psychosocial treatments of problem gamblers.

In Pathological Gambling, Petry reviews theories and data regarding the causes, correlates, and treatments of disordered gambling. She describes clinical manifestations of problem and pathological gambling, and details methods for assessing and diagnosing the disorder. She also presents prevalence rates from studies conducted worldwide and investigates risk factors associated with the development of gambling disorders. One explanation is biological in nature, and thus she reviews the evidence for a genetic basis for pathological gambling. Other possibilities include developmental, cultural, psychological, and cognitive perspectives. She reviews evidence regarding a cognitive component to gambling and describes the relationship between understanding probabilities and belief in control over chance events and their association with gambling. Another explanation is related to access – the percentages of people experiencing gambling problems seem to have increased with the spread of legalized gambling. A shift in demographic characteristics among individuals developing gambling problems has paralleled this increase in gambling opportunities.

In the second half of Pathological Gambling, Petry focuses on treatment strategies. Most problem and pathological gamblers do not seek formal treatment, and many appear to recover from gambling problems on their own. She reviews these data, along with the use of more formal interventions. Controlled clinical trials evaluating treatments are sparse, but she presents both the rationale for and the outcomes of treatment studies. She reviews eight forms of treatment: (a) Gamblers Anonymous, (b) pharmacotherapies, (c) family-marital therapies, (d) psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches, (e) behavioral therapy, (f) cognitive therapy, (g) cognitive-behavioral therapy, and (h) brief and motivational approaches. Throughout Pathological Gambling, Petry presents case descriptions of gamblers to depict the issues confronted by clinicians treating this disorder.

In an area in which opinion often masquerades as fact, Petry has carefully and scientifically examined the important conceptual and clinical issues associated with disordered gambling and its consequences. This text is for every opponent and proponent of gambling and all those in between; it gives open-minded readers a new and emerging scientific literature so they can debate facts rather than fiction. Petry has provided both a cogent and a thorough text that will serve as the foundation on which many future gambling-related programs of research, prevention, and treatment will rest. It is essential reading. – Howard J. Shaffer, Associate Professor and Director, Division on Addictions, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

One of the leading researchers in problem gambling has written a gem of a tome. There is nothing in the field that compares with this work. The book is based on solid science and is full of clinical insights. Many of the chapters provide landmark reviews of their topics. Treatment providers take notice: eight chapters in this volume focus on intervention approaches and strategies, including Petry's very promising cognitive-behavioral therapy chapter. – Ken C. Winters, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

In Pathological Gambling, Petry reviews what we currently know about problem gambling and analyzes promising treatment approaches, making it an invaluable, comprehensive resource for both therapists and researchers in the field of pathological gambling. Pathological Gambling is designed to serve as a guide for both new and experienced clinicians who encounter individuals with gambling problems. It synthesizes the available data across a range of domains associated with psychological aspects of disordered gambling. The concepts and ideas reviewed in the book will influence a new generation of research in this field as more researchers and clinicians begin developing interests in this area.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling / Psychoanalysis

The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens by Neil Altman (Relational Perspectives Series, Volume 3: The Analytic Press, Inc., Publishers) addresses the social context of psychoanalytic work by focusing on the public clinic and its dynamics and interdisciplinary relationships as a part of the psychoanalytic field.

With a systemic perspective, author Neil Altman highlights how the dynamics of society regarding race, culture, and class, the dynamics of an inner-city public clinic, and the dynamics of a therapeutic dyad within such a clinic reflect one another. In this way, Altman, postdoctoral student at New York University, brings together, within an overarching perspective, the social and the psychological, the individual and society, bureaucracy and the clinical interaction.

The Analyst in the Inner City begins with a series of vignettes to set the stage for the discussions in later chapters. Altman’s intention is to give readers a "feel" for the inner-city public clinic, in the context of the community, the intrastaff relationships within the clinic, and the clinical work that takes place.

In Chapter 2, he presents multifaceted background material to orient readers to later discussions. This chapter begins with a history of psychoanalysis in the public sector, along with factors that have led analysts to avoid the public sector in general. Next, he presents a theoretical frame of reference that draws heavily on contemporary relational and neo-Kleinian perspectives, well suited for the work of integrating social and psychological factors in inner-city therapy. Further, a projective-introjective framework provides a model for conceptualizing the psychic functions served by categorizations based on race, culture, and social class. Finally, he gives an introduction to postmodern currents in psychoanalysis that inform his perspective.

In Chapter 3, Altman looks at race, culture, and social class in detail. His concern in this chapter is both theoretical and clinical. Theoretically, his goal is to place these social phenomena within a psychoanalytic framework. He shows how the social system and the individual psyche reflect each other. This project entails a consideration both of the ways in which social class, race, and culture imprint themselves on the individual psyche and of the ways in which psychic operations are reflected in how society is structured. He demonstrates how these social phenomena make their appearance in the clinical interaction, with examples of implications for practice. He uses a three-person psychoanalytic model, in which the third term refers to the social context in which the analytic work takes place. With this third term, one is able to take account of such factors as the social system that structures both psyches in the analytic situation and that is necessary to understand such phenomena as racial prejudice.

In Chapter 4, he applies his projective-introjective, three-person psychoanalytic model to a social issue at the core of the concerns in The Analyst in the Inner City: the private-public split in capitalist society, as reflected in the bifurcation of public from private practice in psychoanalysis. "Public" and "private" come to have psychic significance; for example, in the United States, the public sector comes to represent what is devalued: poverty, difference, strangeness, and so on. Here he uses psychoanalytic understanding to put a social phenomenon into a fresh perspective, to show how the social is inherent in the psychological and how the psychological is inherent in the social.

In Chapter 5, he turns the lens onto the public clinic, seeking to integrate the social with the psychological by considering the dynamics of a public clinic, with its interdisciplinary relationships, for example.

Finally, in Chapter 6, he offers some thoughts on the future of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis offers a humane and complex-minded response to human suffering at a time in history that is marked by increasing degrees of dehumanization and a search for "quick-fix" solutions to problems. According to Altman, the age of "managed care" threatens the survival of psychoanalysis but also makes its survival, essential as a counterforce, an alternative vision of psychological treatment. These goals are served by exposing, grappling with, and countering the elitism of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as labor-intensive as it is, can never be undertaken with large numbers of people. This fact does not make psychoanalytic elitism inevitable; it is addressable by bringing racial, cultural, and class differences within the psychoanalytic domain and by being active in the public sector, as therapists and consultants, so as to bring the psychoanalytic vision to bear on work with people from a wider variety of backgrounds.

Altman addresses the complex social issues revolving around race, culture, and social class in inner city public clinics, arguing that social divisions reflect the splits that accompany the consolidation of an individual sense of self. He presents vignettes illustrating the work within an inner city clinic, traces the history of psychoanalysis in the public sector, and offers insights on the future of psychoanalysis in the age of managed care. – Book News, Inc.

With a candor and political sophistication rare in the profession, Neil Altman challenges analysts to face issues of race, class, gender, and community in the context of the profession's history of moral concern. He does all this and, never losing his analytic focus, provides intriguing case material that demonstrates the entanglements of politics, history, and treatment, all the while giving the reader a sense of possibility and hope in these difficult times. Altman's lively prose brings to life a recent psychoanalytic idea – that of a three-person psychology – in a way that will persuade and enlighten. It is inspiring that an analyst could write such a book at this time in our nation's history. The Analyst in the Inner City will become a classic, and deservedly so. – Philip Cushman, author, Constructing the Self, Constructing America

Acutely poised between hope and despair, this is a courageous and probing book, full of compelling clinical examples. The Analyst in the Inner City is of practical significance to the clinician working in the inner city, and at the same time, it concerns itself with what we can learn about psychoanalysis and its theory by taking analytic work into the inner city. Altman intertwines the practical with the theoretical in a way that highlights the inseparability of the two. By linking these two projects in one book, Altman offers his own source of inspiration, his own way of finding meaning in this stressful and often frustrating work at the margins of society, theory, and practice.

History / Social Sciences / African American

Rooted in Place: Family and Belonging in a Southern Black Community by William W. Falk (Rutgers University Press)

Throughout the twentieth century, millions of African Americans, many from impoverished, historically black counties, left the South to pursue what they thought would be a better life in the North. But not everyone moved away during what scholars have termed the Great Migration.

What has life been like for those who stayed? Why would they remain in a place that many outsiders see as grim, depressed, economically marginal, and where racial prejudice continues to place them at a disadvantage?

Through oral history William Falk in Rooted in Place tells the story of an extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina lowcountry. Family members talk about schooling, relatives, work, religion, race, and their love of the place where they have lived for generations. In “Colonial County” and the town of “Yvonne”, blacks historically enjoyed a numerical majority as well as deep cultural roots and longstanding webs of social connections. Falk, professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, finds that these factors more than outweigh the racism they face and the economic disadvantages they suffer.

Falk did not want to write a book just for academicians, but accessible to a general readership, in part because "the story" would intrigue them. He knew much about the huge scholarly literature on the "great migration". So, who stayed and what were their lives like in a place that so many people, including social scientists, assumed was so bad?

His plan was to pursue this question with census data. But because he also wanted to write a readable book, he thought it would be helpful to visit some historically black counties and collect people's stories about their lives there. Falk says he envisioned visiting three counties – one in the Mississippi Delta (the most widely catalogued and written about part of the Black Belt), one in the central South (running across the middle of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi), and one in the Lowcountry (the coastal marshy area of South Carolina and Georgia).

Falk simply wanted to spend a little time chatting with local people to find out what their lives had been like in this historically black place, and why, more specifically, they had never left, as so many others did. His great stroke of luck was being introduced to someone from Colonial County, an African American student at a regional university. She expressed a willingness to assist him, by introducing him to her grandparents. After several conversations with them, it was clear that her grandfather, a man called “AC”, was very knowledgeable about the county and willing to help. He represented the age group in which Falk was interested (people over sixty years old) and could introduce him to the generation who had made a choice to stay rather than leave when leaving was a very common thing to do.

Falk arrived in January 1996. Initially, he spent three months in Colonial County. Subsequently, he returned at least once a year for several years. He traveled every road, paved and unpaved; visited in people's homes; went into many of the stores, city hall, and other similar places. He read every publication he could find about the county and the region, all at the local public library. He also read the local newspaper, mostly on microfiche, back to its beginning, over one hundred years ago.

His "sample" of local people was definitely not random but, rather, pur­posive. AC introduced him to many of his relatives, including his siblings, children, and former wife. Through AC, he also got access to elected officials and others in the county. Falk spoke in passing with other people – black and white, young and old – as he made his way around the county and neighboring counties. The impressions he formed were based on all these, but mostly from time with AC's family and especially AC. His voice is heavy in Rooted in Place.

Falk asked local people what kinds of questions they would ask if they were him. He listened carefully and took good notes. He did all of his own transcribing and reviewed his notes at the end of each day. He noted the most significant things learned, and then asked, in subsequent meetings, about those things. The story told in the voices of local people. It is also told, as much as possible, exactly as it was told to Falk. Many African Americans in the Lowcountry have a pronounced dialect, called sometimes "gullah," sometimes "geechee" – he former refers most often to the dialect of South Carolina, the latter to that of Georgia. He renders it in a way that allows readers to hear what he heard, believing strongly that it is an important part of the story being told.

Falk came to the place in search of information on processes related to migration. Not only did he find myself challenged methodologically, but he also found himself pondering the utility of various sociological concepts. "Place" was something onto which he stumbled. He knew nothing about its literature until his time in Colonial County forced him to make sense out of his experience, floundering around in a new, interdisciplinary literature. In so doing, he saw "place" as a historically situated social construction. Without strict adherence to phenomenological principles, he let the "essence" of the story arise from the actors. He listened to what they told him, and from that he strung together individual stories to create a larger sense of what had been most meaningful.

Rooted in Place brings the texture of a southern family epic and the sociological imagination together with intellectual courage and intimacy. Absorbing and original. – Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin and Call to Home

Rooted in Place is highly readable. Falk depicts life in a generally overlooked place; a place (representative of all historically black counties) that has given birth to a large part of the American population; a place inhabited by Native Americans before the Pilgrims; a place so unique and so much a part of American history that it is hard to believe that it is nearly undiscovered, and little understood, by most social scientists and the general public; a place that begs for our attention even while remaining overlooked; a place (like most rural places) off the interstate and so mostly off the map for most of us. This "conversational ethnography" argues that an interconnection between race and place in the area helps explain African Americans' loyalty to it. Rooted in Place will encourage others, especially sociologists, to undertake similar ventures or, more accurately, adventures.

History / Biographies & Memoirs

And the War Came: An Accidental Memoir by David Wyatt (Terrace Books / University of Wisconsin Press)

On the day of the terrorist attacks, a man begins writing down things said by his family and friends. The trauma appears to have marooned diarist David Wyatt, professor of English at the University of Maryland, in a shell-shocked present tense. But as he experiences all of the emotions of that fall, he is visited by deep memories that transform his daily journal-keeping into an "accidental memoir." So the narrative, And the War Came, reaches a surprising and moving conclusion on Thanksgiving Day.

Juggling the roles of English professor, restaurant owner, husband, father, son, and friend, Wyatt, finds sustenance at the core of ordinary American life, resources at once so available and so elusive.

David Wyatt focuses our attention on the ripple effects of a stone tossed into a pond – a private pond, and a public pond, as well: as the circles widen and disappear, we remember and re-imagine the initial tossing of the stone, and re-examine our own lives in the context of the choices we’ve made, and the decisions that have been made for us, individually and as a nation. – Ann Beattie, author of The Doctor's House and Perfect Recall

Instinctively finding moments in which people are revealed for their true essence, Wyatt places the September 11 events on a human, domestic level, and shows how they touch everybody's lives. – Brian Bouldrey, author of The Boom Economy

This is truly astonishing storytelling, an unprecedented combination of autobiography and reflective essay, written with a startling clarity that evokes the vivid immediacy in our lives. There will be much journalism and historical commentary about September 11 – but none can possibly match the emotional dimensions, the bewildered humanity, the day-to-day feel of things, how our inner lives are suddenly made turbulent, how we seek solace in the familiars of love and family. And the War Came is humbling, sad, and inspiring. I am tremendously grateful for this marvelous book. – Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and The Haunting of L

Passionate about people, books, food, and landscapes present and lost – and absolutely unheroic – the voices summoned in And the War Came counter the sanctimonious and the sentimental. Wyatt’s elegantly understated memoir reveals how the events of September 11 affected ordinary people and presents this anthology of thoughts, feelings, and interactions in a frank and immediate voice.

History / Military

Fortress America: The Forts That Defended America 1600 to the Present by J. E. Kaufmann & H. W. Kaufmann, illustrated by Tomasz Idzikowski (Da Capo Press)

From the earliest colonial settlements to recent Cold War bunkers, thousands of forts and fortress structures have been built on the North American continent.

As told in Fortress America by J.E. and H.W. Kaufmann, with the help of technical illustrator Tomasz Idzikowski, seacoast forts were the primary means of strategic defense for the United States from the 1790s until World War II. Almost every seaport on both coasts had at least one of these buildings to protect it at one time or another. Early inland forts were constructed to defend against attacks by Native Americans, as well as by the English, French, and Spanish. In the eighteenth century, the strategy and outcome of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution revolved around these very fortifications.

During the nineteenth century, hundreds of defensive structures were built, some to protect coastal and inland waterways, others to garrison troopers on the Great Plains. In fact, so many sprang up during the century that today there are few places in the continental United States more than fifty miles from a fort.

The latter half of the twentieth century ushered in a decidedly new type of fortification – the subterranean concrete bunker equipped with modern electronic equipment. These defenses helped protect the U.S. from hostile missile attack and at the same time guarded the country's own mobile weapons of mass destruction.
Despite their prominence and importance, there has never been – until now – a single volume devoted to American forts and homeland fortification defense. As in their previous and very successful books, military experts Kaufmann and Kaufmann include never-before-published photographs, extraordinary drawings, cut-aways, and diagrams to illustrate Fortress America. The book is a comprehensive account of North American fortifications and defense structures from colonial times to the twentieth century, supplemented by plenty of visual support materials.

History / U.S.

Representative Americans: Populists And Progressives by Norman K. Risjord (Representative Americans Series: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.) gives readers a glimpse into the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century.

Norman K. Risjord brings together brief biographies to explore the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the period from 1890 to 1920. Populists And Progressives begins by personifying the rise of big business and the early struggle between capital and labor with profiles of John D. Rockefeller and Mother Jones. Risjord, professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and general editor of the American Profiles series, compares William Graham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward to illuminate the intellectual debate over social Darwinism. The Great Plains' form of Populism comes to life through the story of William Pfeffer, while Louis Brandeis represents the Wilsonian variety of Progressivism. A portrait of Carrie Chapman Catt provides a window into the women's suffrage movement, and sketches of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Richard Harding Davis, and John Hay explore the shaping of American policies and politics. Finally, John Muir, W. E. B. DuBois, and Margaret Sanger represent individuals ahead of their time and mark the transition from Progressivism to the liberal thought of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Like the others in the series, Populists And Progressives focuses on a particular time period, utilizing the life stories of individuals to explore the political, social, and cultural dimensions of that era. This volume treats people whose principal contributions fell in the period roughly from 1880 to 1920. The dates are necessarily inexact; three of the individuals studied, Carrie Catt, W. E. B. DuBois, and Margaret Sanger, lived and worked un­til mid-century.

The selections are not ‘representative’ in the sense of average or common. Instead, they are chosen to illuminate and personify historical developments.

Norman K. Risjord's volume succeeds well in illustrating the importance of the era of Populists and Progressives. His approach is through biographies of important and interesting figures, but the context he develops for each figure illuminates all the major issues and controversies of the period. Highly readable, it will serve well in courses within the period as well as in the American survey. – Robert F. Himmelberg, Fordham University

Populists And Progressives, like others in the series of Representative Americans, makes history human; it puts some tissue on the skeletal framework of names and dates. By using a biographical approach, Risjord makes the past more concrete and vivid to recover a heritage that today's readers can feel and experience. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into life at the turn of the twentieth century.

Home & Garden / Gardening & Horticulture

Understanding Orchids: An Uncomplicated Guide to Growing the World's Most Exotic Plants by William Cullina (Houghton Mifflin)

Orchids are the largest family of plants in the world. With 30,000 known species, readers could acquire a different orchid every day for eighty years and still not grow them all. With improved tissue-culture techniques making orchids more affordable, and the Internet making them readily available to consumers, growing orchids is more popular than ever.

William Cullina's widely acclaimed books Wildflowers and Native Trees, Shrubs, and Vines firmly established him as a gardening authority whose knowledge and style make him a valuable friend to beginners, experienced gardeners, and experts alike. With Understanding Orchids, Cullina returns to his first horticultural love with a comprehensive guide to growing these popular yet mysterious plants. Cullina has been passionate about orchids since he was a child – at one point he had a nursery of a thousand miniature orchids, a number of them collected on trips to South America.

In his easy-to-understand style, Cullina, the nursery director and propagator for the New England Wild Flower Society, advises readers on how to choose the right orchids for each level of gardening experience, and which species are best suited to grow on windowsills, under indoor lights, or in a greenhouse. Using Understanding Orchids readers can find the orchids that are right for them, and they can pinpoint the species within a particular genus that are the best ones to start with. Once readers select their orchid, Cullina's guide explains what to do to keep it alive and healthy. Featuring more than two hundred color photographs, Understanding Orchids covers everything readers need to know to grow orchids successfully.

Understanding Orchids reflects the same blend of clarity, humor, direct experience, and judiciously expressed opinion that has made Cullina's first two books so popular with gardeners. – Wayne Winterrowd, author of A Year at North Hill

Cullina ... is extremely well versed in his subject and a skilled writer. His lively text, with its clear instructions will make orchid growing as irresistible to readers as it is to Cullina. – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

With more than three hundred full-color photographs, a detailed encyclopedia of more than seventy-five orchid genera, and Cullina's expert personal tips, Understanding Orchids is the must-have guide for anyone who has ever wanted to grow these sometimes intimidating exotics. For beginners, experienced growers, and experts, this is the book orchid fans have been waiting for.

Home & Garden / Crafts & Hobbies

Exquisite Beaded Jewelry: Use Basic Techniques to Create Distinctive Designs by Lynda S. Musante (Krause Publications) explores a wide range of jewelry-making techniques and builds readers’ skills.

Exquisite Beaded Jewelry contains 30 projects for creating gorgeous earrings, necklaces, bracelets, pins and more, ranging in difficulty from beginner to advanced. The book prepares beginners by offering plenty of food for thought before actually starting the beading process. Explained are bead sizes, shapes and types, tools, wire types, clasps, earring findings and how to create findings, select wire and getting started stringing. Each project is designed to challenge the crafter while teaching new techniques and encouraging creativity. Clear, step-by-step instructions for several bead stitches, including brick and basic, double and tubular peyote stitches. She also provides projects for lariats and cuff and amulet bag necklaces along with fantastic photos and illustrations guide the reader through each project.

Author Lynda Musante shares her ten years of experience to challenge readers to develop their skills as a bead artist. She encourages readers to stretch their imagination in their quest for distinctive jewelry to wear or give as gifts.

The book features

• 30 projects and variations

• Detailed step-by-step instructions

• Helpful how-to photographs

• Techniques for simple stringing, bead stitching, and wirework

• Gallery of inspirational jewelry by top bead artists

A resource guide in the latter part of Exquisite Beaded Jewelry includes information on where to find crafting materials, books, magazines and classes on beading.

The variety of projects included demonstrate the versatility of beading uses, and readers will be inspired by the photo gallery of top beaders’ projects – this is a fantastic guide to creating jewelry with beads, which will intrigue crafters of all skill levels. The finished beaded pieces are nothing short of exquisite.

Home & Garden / Pets / Biological Sciences / Animals

The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs by Lyall Watson (Smithsonian Books)

Not all animals are created equal.

For a start, pigs have it, sheep don't; that is, that special quality of intelligence, a sense of play – creatures more like us than any other animal. Pigs are engaging and mysterious, gregarious and misunderstood from the moment humans invited them into the farmyard. Their basic design has changed very little during the past 40 million years, but something interesting has happened inside their heads, something that sets them apart from all other hoofed animals. They have captured the hearts, minds, and stomachs of almost every culture on earth and taken center stage in art, literature, and religion. Fans of Babe, and readers of Charlotte's Web or Animal Farm know the central place pigs have taken in our lives since long before Toby the Sapient Pig wrote his autobiography.

In The Whole Hog, best-selling naturalist Lyall Watson explores the stunning results of more than 40 million years of porcine evolution and embeds himself in pig culture – the amiable, accommodating societies that pigs form among themselves. Within each of this book's four sections, he studies pigs both ordinary and extraordinary, from the boars of Berkshire to the Babirusa of Indonesia. In bush or barnyard, the variety of pig behavior in every species confirms a surprising intelligence.

Watson, who grew up in Africa with a pet warthog and holds degrees in geology, botany, zoology, and anthropology, suggests that the curiosity and easy company of pigs present a real challenge to the status dogs now enjoy as "man's best friends." He wallows in pig lore both sacred and secular, from Celtic boar cults to surgeons working on the frontiers of transplant technology. He follows pig tracks through several continents, encountering truffle hunters and head hunters, pig stickers and pig herders, pet swine and students of animal behavior. His wide experience contributes to a new awareness of the role that pigs have played in human and natural history.

The Whole Hog surveys the world's pigs, looking at all the evidence and concludes that, when it comes to intelligence and nascent consciousness, pigs should be seen as worthy members of that select company that includes elephants, dolphins, and the great apes.

Anthropology, biology, geography, psychology are all here in a clearly written, amiable text peppered with trivia tidbits (Josephine Baker used perfumed dancing pigs in her stage act) and lots of photos. Even those who read but a handful of these pages will find their opinion of pigs much rosier. – Publishers Weekly 

After reading Lyall Watson's splendid celebration of the pig, if anyone calls me a swine I shall take it as a compliment. – Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape

Pig lovers, natural historians, and aficionados of informative and funny literature will appreciate this scholarly but never pedantic celebration of pigs worldwide. This very accessible work treats pigs from classical literature to the contemporary classic Miss Piggy. Covering all species of pigs, he writes with affection and respect about the latest research into animal consciousness. – Don Wilson, editor of Mammal Species of the World

The Whole Hog is a lyrical, lively natural history and illustrated guide to the wonderful world of...pigs. Watson takes a delightful look at the occasionally amusing, often instructive, and completely admirable qualities of pigs in this indispensable book, not only for everyone interested in natural history but also for fans of Piglet, gourmands, folklorists, and, of course, believers in meaningful interspecies communication. The book is filled with both realistic and fanciful illustrations of pigs that illuminate everything readers could possibly want to know about the extraordinary family of Suids, from their origins and evolution, rich social lives, and combat strategies to their special relationship with truffles, popularity in art and literature, and increasing use today in cutting-edge medical transplant technology.

Home & Garden / Professional & Technical / Architecture

Built by Hand: Vernacular Buildings Around the World by Bill Steen, Athena Steen, & Eiko Komatsu, with photography by Yoshio Komatsu (Gibbs Smith, Publisher) is a celebration of what is so uniquely diverse and yet similar in the buildings of different cultures around the world. The book is the most extensive documentation ever published of traditional ("vernacular") buildings.

Leaving modern architecture and its conventions far behind, Japanese photographer Yoshio Komatsu and his wife Eiko, have traveled to some of the remotest regions on earth, compiling a photographic collection of vernacular or indigenous buildings. The text is a combined effort of Yoshio's wife Eiko, who is his regular travel/work partner, and Athena and Bill Steen, who are active in community building programs that teach low-income families how to build their own shelters, and known for their efforts to incorporate artistic techniques based on local and natural materials into the world of modern construction.
Beginning with the most basic ways that human beings have sought shelter – beneath the trees and stars, under the protection of a rock cliff or cave – Built by Hand traces the transformation of materials such as earth, stone, wood or bamboo into shelters that are both stationary and moveable. It tells the story of a disappearing world of buildings that have been constructed by ordinary people who, as builders and homesteaders, have given artistic, modest and sensible form to their daily needs and dreams. With examples from nearly every continent, sometimes accidental, often asymmetrical, and utilizing materials that are naturally close at hand, these buildings with their molded curves and softened lines convey a beauty that is both personal and human. Quietly and almost without notice, they outwit the might of modern machinery with simple tools and materials that welcome, encourage and amplify use of the human hand.

The final chapter takes a look at the need for a modern vernacular, not the type that seeks to duplicate and imitate the examples in this book, but rather one that is inspired by finding a responsive and sensitive balance between the know-how and wisdom of the past with that which is sustainable and modern.

[Built by Hand] is the most comprehensive and groundbreaking documentation of hand-made architecture ever published. – Prarie Avenue Bookshop
more than just a collection of amazing photos – The Last Straw Journal

This stunning and amazing collection of photographs by Japanese photographer Yoshio Komatsu celebrates traditional/vernacular architecture around the world. Built by Hand offers insights into the world of vernacular building, along with potential solutions to many of the problems that plague modern architecture. It is a must-have collection that preserves and documents the rich cultural past of each structure and its community, and offers inspiration for those looking to build in a way that is motivated by something larger than speed, efficiency, and economic profit.

Literature & Fiction / Historical

The Sins Of the Father: A Romance Of the South by Thomas Dixon, with an introduction by Steven Weisenburger (University of Kentucky Press)

To a twenty-first century audience, Thomas Dixon is anathema in conversations about race, feminism, and economic policy. But in the early part of the twentieth century, Dixon had the distinction of being one of the most popular writers in America. Born in North Carolina, Dixon was the author of twenty-eight novels including The Clansman (1905), which ultimately became the basis for D. W. Griffith's groundbreaking 1915 feature film The Birth of a Nation, and the newly reissued The Sins Of the Father (1912). Inspired by what he called "the Negro problem," Dixon set out to write what he deemed "accurate" sequels to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
It was The Sins Of the Father that Dixon regarded as the most aesthetically satisfying child of his Ku Klux Klan saga. In this novel he telescopes the trilogy’s sprawling historical canvas into one tightly scripted narrative. A bestseller in 1912, the novel’s themes of interracial sex and incest outraged many upon its publication.

Nearly a century later, Dixon’s work is undergoing a critical reevaluation.

The Sins Of the Father revolves around themes of interracial sex that cut daringly close to the author's own family history. At the center of The Sins Of the Father is war-torn Confederate veteran Dan Norton, a newspaper editor and North Carolina KKK leader with an invalid wife. To manage his household, Norton hires an octoroon nurse named Cleo, who is ultimately characterized as a 'racialized' temptress. Major Norton is drawn to Cleo, and the novel explores the consequences of their relationship.

Steven Weisenburger's introduction provides valuable insight into the historical issues treated in the text and locates Dixon's place in the traditions of the American literary canon. Additionally, Weisenburger, Mossiker Chair in Humanities at Southern Methodist University, examines the factors that helped shape Dixon's ideologies and provides analysis into the historical ramifications of the controversial Southern writer.

Encapsulating the historical breadth and thematic depth of Dixon's earlier novels but with a notable twist on the trilogy's radical sexual politics, The Sins Of the Father is a startling look at the politics and history of race formation in twentieth-century America. The book stands firmly in the tradition of American novels such as Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic (1867), Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood (1902), and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) that explore the historically charged issues of miscegenation and incest.

In addition, Dixon's complex social and political views have led to a recent resurgence in historical and cultural scholarship examining his work. A number of new books attempt to locate the controversial writer's place in American thought, including American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Kentucky, 2004); America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (North Carolina, 2003); and Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912 (Oxford, 1996). These books not only examine Dixon as a "racist," but they also explore new interpretations of Dixon, such as his relationship to terrorist practices.

Literature & Fiction

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos (Harcourt)

The summer Michael Smolij turns sixteen, his father suddenly disappears. One by one, other fathers in his Detroit neighborhood follow suit, vanishing from their families, homes, and blue collar jobs for destinations unknown. One man props open the door to his shoe store and leaves a note. "I'm going to the moon," it reads. "I took the cash."

In this debut novel, author Dean Bakopoulos, a former bookseller, offers a portrait, equally heartbreaking and humorous, of one working-class neighborhood buffeted by the harsh reality of the unfulfilled American dream.

In Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, the left-behind families strive for a sense of normalcy in a world turned upside down. The wives drink, brawl, and sleep around, gradually settling down to make new lives, while the sons grow into a manhood for which they have no example. Unable to leave the neighborhood their fathers abandoned, Michael and his friends stumble through their twenties and into their uneasily settled thirties, when the restlessness of the fathers blooms in them, threatening to carry them away.

A beautifully smart, comic, and moving narrative about the fathers who disappear and the sons who take their place, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is somehow both realistic and visionary ... This is a wonderful book. – Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

Families, heartbreak, political and social comedy – there is little that Dean Bakopoulos doesn't grasp in an articulate, wittily per­ceptive, and soulful way, before he hands it back to the reader as literary art. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is an original and brilliant first work of fiction. – Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America

Haunting, sorrowful, and full of humanity, this beautiful novel is an elegy to loss itself. It will stay with me for a long time. – Ann Packer, author of The Dive fom Clausen’s Pier

Bakopoulos doesn't make a single wrong move, seamlessly integrating the magic realism elements into the rest. A dazzling debut. .. – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Part fable and part gritty realist chronicle ... [a] gentle and moving tale. – Publishers Weekly

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon is an extraordinary novel, both a gritty tale of second-generation Americans and an evocative story of restrained longing. This is a haunting, unforgettable debut novel for anyone who has ever been left behind. It signals a bright new voice in contemporary fiction.

Literature & Fiction / Drama

Colombian Theatre in the Vortex: Seven Plays edited by Judith A. Weiss, with an introductory essay by Maria Mercedes Jaramillo (Bucknell University Press)

The plays in this collection date from 1966 through 1997.

The plays in Colombian Theatre in the Vortex are chronicles of three decades of social and political turmoil, even disintegration, in a nation marked by violence, paradoxes, and hyperbole, a country both blessed and cursed by its wealth of natural resources, its culture, and its strategic location in the western hemisphere. According to Judith A. Weiss, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Mount Allison University in Canada, and director of English-language productions of plays from the Hispanic repertoire, the seven plays, selected from among the most significant works of the modern Colombian theatre, reveal the historical, economic, and social roots of Colombia's tragic circumstances. The works offer the national perspective and the sophistication of widely traveled playwrights of international renown, adding the depth of historical experience to complement the flood of information from official sources and foreign media. They are vehicles of critical analysis for making sense of both the causes and the consequences of the violence, as they examine the role of the army, the roots of the drug wars, the situation of women and victims of conflict, and the poisoning of a common ethos.

Translations of the following seven plays are included in Colombian Theatre in the Vortex: Soldiers, by Carlos Jose Reyes et al.: Old Baldy, by Jairo Anibal Nino; Lucky Strike, by Santiago Garcia: Roadhouse, by the Teatro La Candelaria (collectively); Pilot Project, by Enrique Buenaventura; Femina Ludens, by Nohora Ayala et al.; and The Orgy, by Enrique Buenaventura.

Colombian Theatre in the Vortex is a collection offering a rare opportunity to hear the voices of Colombians whose vision and analysis of their situation rarely reach the English-speaking world. The personal narratives and social types contained in these works are both unique and universal: the fictional characters confront life-and-death issues that have plagued Colombian society throughout its history but they also echo the stories of other regions of the world. The translations and introductory notes make the works and their subjects equally accessible for staging in the theatre and for reading and discussion by groups interested in Latin American Studies.

Outdoors & Nature / Professional & Technical / Conservation

People and Predators: From Conflict to Coexistence edited by Nina Fascione, Aimee Delach, & Martin Smith, with a foreword by James A. Estes (Island Press)

Carnivores provide innumerable ecological benefits and play a unique role in preserving and maintaining ecosystem services and function, but at the same time they create serious problems for human populations. A key question for conservation biologists and wildlife managers is how to manage the world's carnivore populations to conserve this important natural resource while mitigating harmful impacts on humans.

In People and Predators, leading scientists and researchers offer case studies of human-carnivore conflicts in a variety of landscapes, rural, urban, and political. Based on the conference 'Carnivores 2002: From the Mountains to the Sea' in Monterey, California with more than 800 scientists, activists, and educators, the book covers a diverse range of taxa, geographic regions, and conflict scenarios. Put together by the conference’s hosts, Defenders of Wildlife, including Nina Fascione, vice president; Aimee Delach, program associate, and Martin E. Smith was until 2003 a carnivore biologist, each chapter deals with a specific facet of human-carnivore interactions. Chapters provide background on particular problems and describe how challenges have been met or what research or tools are still needed to resolve the conflicts.

The authors chose to focus on conflicts between carnivores and humans: the causes, possible solutions, and the relevance of conflict and resolution to the successful persistence of carnivore populations. Finding ways to resolve issues that occur when humans and carnivores overlap in habit and habitat has been a critical need in the recovery and conservation of wolves, bears, otters, and other species.

Throughout the centuries, predators have always held a unique place in the human psyche. Images of carnivores are diverse, but whether the emotions are positive or negative, carnivores fill our imagination in ways that are larger than life. For some people, carnivores elicit fears of child-snatching, bloodthirsty killers; others see heroic images used as symbols of cultural traditions, emblems in sport, and powerful automobiles. Carnivores also play a unique role in our ecosystems, serving as keystone species that help regulate the environment around them in beneficial ways. Yet predators can have more tangible, sometimes detrimental, impacts on humans. Wolves (Canis lupus) and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos), for example, do occasionally kill livestock, and grizzly bears and mountain lions (Puma concolor) have injured and killed humans in North America. Urban carnivores such as raccoons (Procyon lotor) can be considered a nuisance or transmit disease. So a basic question remains: How do we manage the world's carnivore populations to conserve this important natural resource while mitigating any harmful impacts?

People and Predators examines these complex human-carnivore relationships and investigates how humans can work to preserve this group of animals while protecting human lives and livelihoods. The key question facing wildlife managers and legislators is how to manage rare, as well as common, carnivores while addressing the needs of both predators and people. The key questions facing society are whether we will make room for predators and whether we will tolerate them. The dilemmas can be classified generally as "ways in which predators threaten humans and our livelihoods" and "ways in which hu­mans threaten predators and their livelihoods."

Another way to examine the issue is through the various landscapes in which we coexist with predators. People and Predators, divides these landscapes into rural, developed, and political. The three chapters in Part 1, "Coexistence in Rural Landscapes," discuss the challenges of maintaining predator populations in rural areas. Through case studies from the Great Lakes, the northern Rockies, and western Canada the authors ascertain the damage large carnivores can inflict on farming and ranching interests by preying on livestock and propose solutions to predation problems through innovative preventative technologies and livestock management practices that reduce, and in some cases help eliminate, livestock depredation.

Part 2, "Coexistence in Developed Landscapes," examines how the human-carnivore relationship changes as the landscape becomes more developed. In these landscapes, the conflicts are diverse and include problems caused by predators, as well as problems caused by humans. The first obvious challenge in a developed landscape is maintaining enough habitat to support viable predator populations. However, many carnivores can survive in developed landscapes, and residing in such close quarters to humans can provide for a wide variety of conflicts. The authors examine such issues as how humans can share the landscape with mid-sized terrestrial carnivores and urban birds of prey; how human-introduced invasive species can negatively impact native carnivores; how designing wildlife corridors can greatly reduce the negative impacts of habitat fragmentation; and how we can conserve declining species despite human impacts.

Part 3, "Coexistence in Political Landscapes," offers insight into some of the sociopolitical factors impacting carnivore conservation. The challenges faced in the political, legal, and economic arenas may be the toughest to overcome. The four chapters in this final section provide case studies of management challenges for wolves and mountain lions, and suggest recipes for solutions.

Clearly, more research and discussion are necessary for finding additional solutions to these global, complex challenges. In addition to funds, solving these issues will require all-inclusive stakeholder input, dissemination of research findings through education and outreach, and constant evaluation of our ethical responsibilities. Because technology continues to improve and new technologies are continually developed, there will always be a need to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of new tools for managing large predators. Additionally, cultural values and ethics are constantly changing, triggering a need to frequently examine our goals and desires for conserving carnivores.

Though they are complex and often a management challenge, carnivores serve a key role in North American ecosystems and cultural heritage, and both humans and predators deserve to share our continent's wildlands, as well as our rural farmlands and urban parks.

The editors of People and Predators have carefully selected case studies that describe the conflicts between carnivores and humans in a variety of environmental settings. Reading these chapters provides a broad knowledge of one of the most difficult conservation issues we face, and leaves readers with many new ideas about how to advance toward ecological and political solutions to the carnivore-human conflict. – Michael L. Morrison, Great Basin Institute, University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Wildlife Restoration

For many years, conservationists worldwide have maintained that the future of large carnivores in an increasingly human-dominated world depends largely on tolerance informed by science-based management. Paradoxically, those predators once regarded as threats to our survival are now a test of how likely we are to achieve sustainability and coexistence with the natural elements that sustain us. People and Predators cogently and unabashedly addresses that challenge in an important and timely series of instructive chapters by scientists, activists, and educators. I am optimistic that this unusually broad-minded and collaborative effort by improbable colleagues is symbolic of society's increased understanding and acceptance of large predators. – Paul C. Paquet, faculty of environmental design, University of Calgary, and World Wildlife Fund-Canada

People and Predators will helps readers to better understand issues of carnivore conservation in the 21st century, and provides concrete, practical tools for resolving many of the problems that stand between us and a future in which carnivores fulfill their historic ecological roles. The volume promotes a continuing discussion between wildlife professionals and the interested public.

Philosophy / Religion & Spirituality

The Value Of Solitude: The Ethics And Spirituality Of Aloneness In Autobiography by John D. Barbour (Studies in Religion and Culture Series: University of Virginia Press)

Most people feel ambivalent about solitude, both loving and fearing it depending on how they experience being alone at certain points in their lives. Whether encountered through physical distance or mental disengagement, solitude has historically provoked disparate reactions amongst those who have written about it.

In The Value Of Solitude, John Barbour explores some of the ways in which experiences of solitude, both positive and negative, have been interpreted as religiously significant. Barbour, Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, also shows how solitude can raise ethical questions as writers evaluate the virtues and dangers of aloneness and consider how social interaction and withdrawal can most meaningfully be combined in a life.

Barbour's work differs from previous books about solitude in two ways: it links solitude with ethics and spirituality, and it approaches solitude by way of autobiography. Barbour ranges from the early Christian and medieval periods to the twentieth century in examining the varieties of solitary experience of writers such as Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Gibbon, Rousseau, Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Paul Auster. For many authors, the process of writing an autobiography is itself conceived of as a form of solitude, a detachment from others in order to discover or create a new sense of personal identity. Solitude helps these authors to reorient their lives according to their moral ideals and spiritual aspirations.

This is a powerful, comprehensive, and highly original book, impressive in terms of both its breadth and its depth of insight.... The Value Of Solitude is a work of mature scholarship and probing critical reflection. – Eugene Stelzig, SUNY at Geuesco, author of The Romantic Subject in Autobiography