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SirReadaLot.org


We Review the Best of the Latest Books

ISSN 1934-6557

January 2007, Issue # 94

Guide to This Issue

Arts & Photography

A Life on Paper: The Drawings and Lithographs of John Thomas Biggers by Olive Jensen Theisen (University of North Texas Press)

John Biggers forged a career as an illustrator, draftsman, muralist, painter, sculptor, and lithographer during an era in which African American artists had almost no possibility of recognition. Through his drawings he first found the voice that began to resonate with the public. Some of his works have aroused hostility, anger, and embarrassment while others have brought praise and high honors. – from the book

The award-winning art historian Olive Jensen Theisen interviewed John Thomas Biggers during the last thirteen years of his life, and was welcomed into his studio innumerable times. Together, they selected representative works for A Life on Paper, some of which have not been previously published for a general audience.

Biggers (1924–2001) was a major African American artist who inspired countless others through his teaching, murals, paintings, and drawings. After receiving conventional art training at Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State, he had his personal and artistic breakthrough in 1957 when he spent six months in the newly independent country of Ghana. From that time forward, he integrated African abstract elements with his rural Southern images to create a personal iconography. He believed in the power of art; he developed a language of metaphoric images; and he stuck with it with single-minded purpose. His new approach made him famous, as his personal discovery of African heritage fit in well with the growing U.S. civil rights movement. He is best known for his murals at Hampton University, Winston-Salem University, and Texas Southern, and this book contains the drawings and lithographs, which lie behind the murals have received scant attention.

After his death in 2001, his widow continued to work closely with Theisen, resulting in A Life on Paper.

A Life on Paper should be considered one of the most significant documents about John Thomas Biggers. Writing in an engaging language, Theisen clearly records Biggers's committed vision, challenge, ability and sensitivity at expressing the emotions and conditions of Africans and African Americans within the boundaries of drawing and lithography. – Phillip Collins, Chief Curator, African American Museum/Dallas

Dr. Theisen had unequalled access to Dr. Biggers's widow, as well as many of his friends and family. This unprecedented access gives the book a completeness and readability that sets it apart from other literature about the artist and gives the reader a sense of the character of the man as well as of his art. Its charm and readability will appeal to a wide range of readers. – R. William McCarter, Regents Professor Art, University of North Texas

Intimate and informative for both scholars and students, A Life on Paper gives readers a chance to see into the life and thinking of this artist, providing a comprehensive picture of his drawings and lithographs. It tells his story, and also the story of the struggle of a nation moving from its segregated past into the reality of the present with hope for the future. Theisen brings this gift to her audience.

Audio / History / Americas / U.S. / Biographies & Memoirs / Military / World War II

Eisenhower: Library Edition [UNABRIDGED] (5 Audio Cassettes, running time approximately 7 hours) by John Wukovitz, narrated by Brian Emerson (Great Generals Series: Blackstone Audio, Inc.)

Eisenhower: A Biography by John Wukovits, with a foreword by Wesley K. Clark (Great Generals Series: Palgrave MacMillan)

In the third installment of the Great Generals series, Eisenhower, World War II expert John Wukovits explores Dwight D. Eisenhower's contributions to American warfare. American general and 34th president of the United States, Eisenhower led the assault on the French coast at Normandy and held together the Allied units through the European campaign that followed. Eisenhower reveals Eisenhower's advocacy in the pre-war years of the tank, his friendships with George Patton and Fox Conner, his service in the Philippines with Douglas MacArthur, and his culminating role as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.

Eisenhower (1953-1961) displayed common sense, the degree of empathy that made for good relations with both the soldiers he commanded and his fellow officers, and a positive genius for staff work. He stayed in the army during its lean years between the world wars, and when called to high command, his empathy also made him an effective diplomat. As such, he is an indispensable asset to Allied interrelations during World War II.

… It is a sound introduction to its subject, who, like many of his contemporaries, went to West Point to get a free college education. … – Roland Green, Booklist

In his highly readable and concise style, John Wukovits has once again succeeded in packing a wealth of information into a single volume on the life of one of the greatest soldier-statesmen in history. He conveys the strength of character and innate leadership of Dwight Eisenhower in a manner which will captivate the reader. – Michael E. Haskew, Editor, WWII History Magazine

With his depth of research, insightful approach, and clarity of style, the author and military historian John Wukovits has managed to put a human face on one of the 20th century's greatest figures and turn an historical icon into a flesh-and-blood human being. One comes away from this book feeling as if Ike is a friend, not just a legend. – Flint Whitlock, author of The Fighting First: The Untold Story of the Big Red One on D-Day

Wukovits' book is excellently researched but his greatest merit as an historian is a rare ability to make the past a real living thing. This book is a special pleasure to read, for it is peopled by real figures the reader can understand and care about. Eisenhower is not cast as the Olympian figure he is too often made out to be. A superior history of an intensely human man. – Robert Barr Smith, Colonel, USA (ret)

Wukovits in Eisenhower skillfully demonstrates how Eisenhower's evolution as a commander, his military doctrine, and his diplomatic skills are of great importance in understanding modern warfare.

Business & Investing / Biographies & Memoirs / History

Crosley: Two Brothers and a Business Empire That Transformed the Nation by Rusty McClure with David Stern & Michael A. Banks (Clerisy Press)

Why would a 14 year-old kid be looking for a biography of an industrialist? Because growing up in a Cincinnati suburb in the 1950s and 60s meant growing up with the name ‘Crosley.’ The first station I picked up with my first crystal radio was Powel Crosley's WLW. When the television was on in our home, it was usually tuned into Cincinnati's NBC affiliate, WLWT – a service of Crosley Broadcasting.… All of which was no different than the experience of a millions other folks in the Ohio/Kentucky/Indiana area.  Everyone knew of Powel Crosley, owned Crosley products, or were otherwise touched by the name ‘Crosley.’ – Michael Banks

Set in the vibrant Industrial Age and filigreed with family drama and epic ambition, Crosley chronicles one of the great untold tales of the twentieth century. Born in the late 1800s into a humble world of dirt roads and telegraphs, Powel and Lewis Crosley were opposites in many ways but shared drive, talent, and an unerring knack for knowing what Americans wanted. Their inventions and achievements were at the vanguard in a breadth of endeavors, from the world’s largest manufacturer of radios, to the world's most powerful radio station, to the World Series, to the World's Fair, to helping America win World War II. Their breakthroughs in broadcasting and advertising made them both wealthy and famous, as did their ownership of the Cincinnati Reds.

Crosley is authored by Rusty McClure, advisor and investor in numerous entrepreneurial projects, with David Stern, author of over two dozen fiction and non-fiction titles, and the original inspiration for the book, Michael A. Banks, author of more than 40 non-fiction books and novels, a lifelong resident of the Crosleys' hometown, Cincinnati.

Just like Wilbur and Orville Wright, or Walt and Roy Disney, Powel and Lewis Crosley could not have succeeded without each other. Powel was the creative genius, whose personal charisma and flamboyant lifestyle came to epitomize the Crosley Corporation and all of its products and achievements. Lewis provided the practical know-how, working behind the scenes to find innovative ways to turn his brother's visions into reality.

Their partnership began when, as boys, they built a primitive ‘car’ to win a bet with their father. As a young man, Powel struggled to find a place in early automobile manufacturing, but, along with his brother, forged a place in the fledgling radio industry, earning the sobriquet The Henry Ford of Radio for his revolutionary ideas.

Together they created WLW, for a time the most powerful radio station in the world, and built the transmitter used as the Voice of America during World War II. In the depth of the Great Depression, Powel bought – and essentially saved – his home-town team, the Cincinnati Reds, and a year later introduced night baseball to the major leagues.

At the height of their success, they sold their company to realize a life-long dream: making cars. Though the little Crosley never achieved the success they envisioned, it remains one of the most original lines of vehicles in American automotive history.

Crosley is the story of men who fought personal demons and numerous setbacks to achieve the American Dream. But as their fortunes grew, so did Powel’s massive ego, which demanded he own eight mansions and seven yachts at the height of the Great Depression. Beset by a series of personal tragedies, Powel lived his final years lonely and unhappy, while Lewis, a simpler man with simpler needs, enjoyed a time of contentment.

Rich with detailed reminiscences from surviving family members, Crosley is both a powerful saga of a heady time in American history and an intimate tale of two brilliant brothers navigating triumph and tragedy. Finally their story has been told, allowing it to take its rightful place in the annals of American history. Two brothers – one dreamed it, one built it; they were a team.

Business & Investing / Economics

Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico: Climatic, Institutional, and Economic Change by Hallie Catherine Eakin (The University of Arizona Press)

In our increasingly complex world, direct interaction with farmers about their decision-making process may be one way in which new insights can be gained into the process of adaptation. In the field of global change, where research has tended to emphasize processes extending far into the future and covering broad geographic areas, interacting directly with decision makers often means turning to the present time and integrating the local scale into research frameworks. While the knowledge gained from understanding present-day management of risk may not necessarily be directly transferable to future conditions, it can provide important insights into the factors driving potentially adaptive decisions and the social complexity inherent in human responses to environmental risk.

Small farmers are vulnerable to stress, and Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico focuses on two important sources of that stress, climate variability and changing agriculture policy and markets. In the book, Hallie Eakin, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, draws on ethnographic data collected in three agricultural communities in rural Mexico to show how economic and climatic change are not only linked in cause and effect at the planetary scale but also interact in unpredictable and complex ways in the context of regional political and trade relationships, national economic and social programs, and the decision making of institutions, enterprises, and individuals. She shows how the parallel processes of globalization and climatic change result in populations that are ‘doubly exposed’ and thus particularly vulnerable.

Chapters trace the effects of El Niño in central Mexico in the late 1990s alongside some of the principal changes in the country’s agricultural policy. Eakin argues that in order to develop policies that effectively address rural poverty and agricultural development, we need an improved understanding of how households cope simultaneously with various sources of uncertainty and adjust their livelihoods to accommodate newly evolving environmental, political, and economic realities.
 Farmers' responses to the climate patterns they perceive (whether or not, with scientific hindsight, such variability can be directly attributed to global change) illustrate not only how differential resource access and entitlements structure risk perception and choice, but also how the types of livelihood strategies evolving from such choices may alter the flexibility of farm households in dealing with future risk. It is the cumulative impact of individual interannual decisions about production and livelihood that collectively create new social contexts of vulnerability and that structure capacities for adaptation.

For this reason, while Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico is designed to contribute to the growing literature on vulnerability and adaptation to global environmental change, the focus is on farmers' experiences with the here and now: climate variability, extreme events, and the simultaneous disruption of rapid change in sector policy.

Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico uses two concrete developments during the 1990s in Mexico as proxies for how global climate and economic change are experienced at the local level: the impacts of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in 1997, 1998, and 1999 (described in chaps. 2 and 5) and the institutionalization of neo-liberalism and free-trade principles under the Salinas de Gotari and Zedillo administrations (described in chap. 3).

The implications of the rapid institutional changes associated with the agricultural globalization process for farmers' livelihoods, and thus their adaptive capacities, is the subject of Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico. Although Eakin discusses households' differential sensitivity and exposure to both climate hazards and policy reforms at length, household adaptive capacity is the core theme of the book. She illustrates how farmers' livelihood strategies, conditioned by each household's particular suite of resources and entitlements, either enhance or restrict their flexibility of choice in responding to the twin challenges of climatic risk and political-economic change. Defining the concrete linkages between policy reforms, household production and livelihood choices, and vulnerability to climatic risk is no easy task. Although Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico focuses on just two sources of stress to farmers' livelihoods, climate variability and changing agriculture policy and markets, it should be recognized that farmers face a wide variety of other sources of uncertainty and risk, a detailed analysis of which was beyond the scope of this book. Soil degradation, deforestation and land-use change, pest proliferation, aquifer depletion, and technology change (e.g., the introduction of genetically modified agricultural products) are among the many issues pertinent to farmers' livelihoods and production strategies. These other ‘stressors’ are brought up at various points in the text where the farmers made it clear that these additional stressors were directly interacting with their risk-management decisions and livelihood outcomes.

In chapter 2, Eakin presents the evolving geography of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley and describes the types of climatic stress and variability farmers were facing in the late 1990s. Chapter 3 reviews the variety of policy reforms implemented in the 1990s and the high social costs associated with them. As is illustrated in detail in chapter 5, under these new institutional conditions, the options for responding to climatic risk that may be available to producers in more industrialized systems – irrigation, alternative (yet lucrative) crops, capital investments to enhance temperature or moisture control, or market orientation – are unrealistic for the majority of Mexico's producers. The different livelihood strategies of the farmers of Plan de Ayala, Rancheria de Torres, and Nazareno (described in chaps. 4 and 6 through 9) reveal that the most viable means of stabilizing incomes and welfare may be outside the agricultural sector entirely, entailing long-distance migration, peri-urban wage employment, shifts in the meaning and purpose of rural land use, as well as basic education. These actions complicate our understanding of agricultural vulnerability. The documentation of farmers' evolving strategies demands not only cross-sectoral and cross-scalar research, but also sophisticated policy coordination in order to address the new risks posed by their changing livelihoods.

Ultimately, without a better understanding of the process of decision making in the face of uncertainty, we still are unsure whether or not particular agricultural systems can and will adapt, and whether or not policy intervention is needed to encourage adaptation.

Some scholars in search of a theoretical approach to understanding adaptation are now borrowing the ecological concept of ‘thresholds,’ particular degrees of change beyond which adjustment is unavoidable, or, in the worst case, which cause the shift of an entire system to a new state. For example, David Hodell and his colleagues  and Bruce Dahlin have linked the abrupt collapse of the Mayan civilization in the Yucatan peninsula with evidence of a dramatic change in precipitation and water availability in the region. Although our understanding of the implications of current processes of change is myopic and distorted by our position in the present, it is quite possible that we are now witnessing one such transformative period in the history of Mexican agriculture. According to Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico, as the book was being written, farmers all over Mexico were taking to the streets and plazas of the capital in mass marches, blocking border crossings with their tractors, and staging hunger strikes to demand a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a systematic review of the government's responsibilities for rural economic well-being. Their protests followed four years of highly variable and unfavorable climatic conditions that have depressed yields and exacerbated indebtedness.

It is difficult to predict the outcome of the interaction of these processes of change on the future vulnerability of smallholder households and the future adaptability of Mexican agriculture. Yet while the political-economic systems that circumscribe decision making are in constant flux, there is also an element of path dependency in this change: institutional and political choices made yesterday or today have, and will have, an influence on the choice sets available to any particular actor in the future. Thus contemporary policy that marginalizes small-scale producers and aggressively ‘develops’ alternatives for the rural economy would seem, in light of the vast social and environmental uncertainties of Mexico's future, shortsighted.

As Eakin argues in the concluding chapter, the challenge for those of us interested in facilitating the process of adaptation is not to find the degree and extent of diversification necessary to enable adjustment to any particular set of anticipated exogenous changes, but rather to create a process of policy development and evolution that self-consciously sets out to expand choice and opportunity in the future while working with the constraints and capacities of the present.

This work is clearly the cutting edge of the current literature. It is an extremely important contribution to understanding rural vulnerabilities in today's reality. – Timothy Finan, University of Arizona

An important intellectual contribution to the field and well written. – Rinku Chowdhury, University of Miami

Weathering Risk in Rural Mexico will contribute to strengthening the bridge between two lines of research – the human dimensions of climate variability and change, and the social implications of institutional change – that have been too seldom considered together in studies of vulnerability. By view­ing the world through the words and experiences of the farmers in the three communities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley who participated in this study, readers can gain insight into what matters most in farmers' decision making, and what the implications of their actions may be for both the future vulnerability of their families and for the regions in which they live. Eakin promised the farmers of Tlaxcala and Puebla that she would do what she could to enable them to speak to a broad audience about what has helped and hindered their efforts to secure their livelihoods, and by giving a bit of academic weight to their words, perhaps increase the chances that someone with the power to change things would listen. This book should do that.

Business & Investing / Management & Leadership / Biological Sciences

Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech by Gary P. Pisano (Harvard Business School Press)

Why has the biotechnology industry failed to perform up to expectations – despite all its grand promise? In Science Business, Gary P. Pisano, Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration and Chair of the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School, answers this question by providing a critique of the industry.

Biotechnology firms were supposed to be much more efficient at pharmaceutical R&D because they were both on the cutting edge of science and unencumbered by the bureaucracy and organizational inertia of the behemoth pharmaceutical companies. However, Pisano says, to his knowledge, this presumption has never been tested with data. He assembles an extensive data set of biotechnology companies and established pharmaceutical companies and conducts a productivity analysis that spans close to twenty years. What he finds is surprising: there is no discernable difference in the R&D productivity of biotechnology firms (in aggregate) and large pharmaceutical firms. Thus this sector is not only experiencing disappointing financial results, but it is also failing to stand out even where it is clearly supposed to have an advantage.

Science Business explores the nature and causes of the gulf between the promise and reality of biotechnology. As he looks more deeply into the sector, he comes to realize that the problems of the sector are structural in nature. The framework Pisano develops in Science Business is fairly straightforward. He argues that the performance of a science-based business, like biotechnology, hinges on how well the sector is organized and managed to deal with the fundamental business problems created by science. The sciences behind biotechnology create a very specific set of ‘functional requirements’ for the business – risk management, integration, and learning.

Pisano’s analysis reveals that the biotechnology sector is not structured in a way that enables it to deal very well with these three problems. A strong focus on monetizing intellectual property has impeded flows of information, led to fragmentation, and created a proliferation of new firms. As he discusses in Science Business, these three characteristics work directly against the requirements of risk management, integration, and learning at the organizational level. The root cause behind this mismatch is that the sector has indiscriminately borrowed business models, organizational strategies, and approaches from other high-technology industries under the (false) premise that if it worked there it will work here. Not all high-technology industries are alike, and science-based businesses like biotech have unique challenges, calling for different approaches. Highlighting these differences and understanding their implications for business strategies and models, organizational structures, and institutional arrangements is one of the chief missions of Science Business.

A more fundamental issue is the relationship between business and science. Traditionally, these two pursuits lived in different spheres. The university was the bastion of science; the for-profit enterprise, the keeper of business. In biotechnology, these two worlds converge. Private firms are undertaking research projects that only a few years earlier would have been the sole purview of a university laboratory. At most, the science behind the companies is so new – so raw – it requires years of further validation. Some early-stage biotech companies share laboratory space (and staff) with universities or academic hospitals. From the other side, universities see their science as a business. They aggressively patent and seek licensing deals, collaborate with venture capitalists to launch firms, and even move downstream into drug development. Both private enterprises and universities are in the business of science. This fact leads to a deeper question that Pisano explores in Science Business: Can science be a business?

According to Pisano, the biotech industry’s problems stem from its special character as a science-based business. This distinction poses unique business challenges:

  • How to resolve the fundamental clash of values, norms, and practices between the science and business worlds.
  • How to finance highly risky investments under profound uncertainty and long time horizons for R&D.
  • How to learn rapidly enough to keep pace with advances in drug science knowledge.
  • How to integrate capabilities across a broad spectrum of scientific and technological knowledge bases.

The key to fixing the industry? Business models, organizational structures, and financing arrangements that place greater emphasis on integration and long-term learning over shorter-term ‘monetization’ of intellectual property.

The keys to surmounting these difficulties? The author provides suggestions for how industry players can execute these strategies, including ways to:

  • Leverage corporate partnerships and strategic alliances to compensate for a shortage of venture capital funding and the typically short time horizons on which VC firms operate.
  • Deal with the chief limitations – such as information asymmetry between public investors and biotech management teams – inherent in raising and investing capital from public equity markets.
  • Know which types of pharmaceutical innovations call for vertical integration and which call for alliance-building and R&D outsourcing.

Pisano maintains that all industry players – biotech firms, investors, universities, pharmaceutical companies, government regulators – can play a role in righting the industry. The payoff, according to Science Business will be valuable improvements in health care, a more promising future for human well-being, and better financial returns for the investors and company leaders who stake their hopes and resources on this complex industry.

A very insightful analysis of the remarkable evolution of the biotech industry. This is required reading for all involved in this process – biotechnology entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, academics, research centers, policymakers, and investors. – Henri Termeer, Chairman, President and CEO, Genzyme Corporation

In this startling and cogent diagnosis of, an prognosis for, the biotechnology industry, Gary Pisano weaves a powerful economic argument that all is not well in biotechnology, an industry that should be the best hope, for better health care for us all. We in the industry need to better grapple with the challenges posed by this provocative book. – Dr. Josh Boger, President and CEO, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

The industrial structure that has arisen in the United States to develop and exploit the potential of biotechnology is widely regarded as extremely effective. But is it? Few biotech firms have made a profit, and the rate of introduction of new effective pharmaceuticals is not impressive. Gary Pisano’s fine study is the first to bring these ideas into the open, analyze them, and reflect on what they might mean for the future of biotechnology. – Richard Nelson, George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business and Law, Emeritus, Columbia University

Gary Pisano's analysis uncovers surprising facts about the industry’s innovation power and productivity, challenging conventional wisdom. Science Business is refreshing and inspiring for anyone who is interested in the future success of biotechnology, including life science executives, investors, policymakers, and, most importantly, the patients whom it has the potential to help the most. – Dr. Daniel Vasella, Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG

The increasingly close relationship between business and science is a subject that has drawn extensive attention both in academic writing and the popular press. Pisano’s angle is somewhat different; he looks at the problem from the perspective of business: What happens to business performance (profitability, productivity, etc.) when businesses become involved in science either directly or indirectly? An exploration of the thirty-year experiment known as the biotechnology sector provides clues to answering this question. Science Business provides insights that may be useful to managers and investors in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors and scholars and practitioners interested in the science-business relationship more broadly. Pisano not only reveals the underlying causes of biotech’s problems; he offers the most sophisticated analysis yet on how the industry works. And he provides clear prescriptions for companies, investors, and policymakers seeking ways to improve the industry’s performance.

Children’s / Fantasy & Science Fiction

Dirty Magic by Carol Hughes (Random House/Golden Books)

In Dirty Magic, Joe wakes from a night of terrifying dreams…

The garden is disappearing.
Through the faint image of the garage roof Joe can see distant mountains....
It is the landscape he has seen in his dream....

It's on a day so hot the sidewalks are melting that the strange girl appears. Pale as dust and dressed in a military uniform, she takes a step and the ordinary world vanishes. The girl has been sent to fetch Joe across the threshold between worlds to her dark and rainy land.

Joe follows and finds himself in the middle of a bitter war. Two sisters and their armies battle from trench to trench. Patrolling the no-man's-land in between are fearsome unmanned tanks. Joe must dodge the secret police and search for a way through enemy lines, for lost somewhere in this strange land is his sister. It's up to Joe to find her and lead her back to their own world.

In Dirty Magic, Carol Hughes has created a fantasy world that is filled with iconic images of World Wars I and II including no-man's-land, barbed wire, tanks, motorcycles, secret police, and an underground resistance. Filled with unique characters, including a blind guide with super hearing, a cigar-chomping resistance leader and a sassy young apprentice guide, Dirty Magic is a page turner with a surprise twist at the end.

Ten-year-old Joe Brooks sometimes wishes his annoying little sister, Hannah, would disappear. But waking up after a terrible headache, he discovers her bed is empty and an ambulance is outside. Then, to his surprise, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a shadowy, war-torn world, where ill children are held captive – including, perhaps, Hannah. Aided by a fetcher called Katherine, and a cantankerous blind man, he navigates dangerous landscapes and encounters people who aren't what they seem in an effort to locate Hannah. This dense but quick-paced fantasy offers suspense; inventive and plentiful though sometimes graphic details (Joe is tortured); and a dizzying array of plot turns, including a surprise-twist conclusion. Supporting characters are intriguing, and though Joe occasionally seems oddly older than his years, he's an engaging protagonist who gains new perspective on what matters. Give this novel, which is less about magic than about power of imagination, to fans of edgy, intricately layered fantasies. – Shelle Rosenfeld, Booklist  

With Dirty Magic, Hughes puts her remarkable imagination to work, reinventing the once familiar in a spellbinding adventure fantasy. Hughes has executed a gritty, imaginative ‘machine’ fantasy that transports young readers to a dark and scary world.

Computers & Internet / Programming

Programming Language Fundamentals by Example by D.E. Stevenson (Auerbach Publications)

This book is the outgrowth of approximately ten years of experimentation in education. It began when I became dissatisfied with the performance of undergraduate students in computer science studies. It seemed to me that the students were not involved in the process and that their professional skills were not improving. I found myself far more involved in questions of psychology and educational pedagogy than the material itself. – D.E. Stevenson

Who ever thought a computer science professor would work this hard at understanding how to teach so students will learn?

Featuring a thorough, working knowledge of programming languages, Programming Language Fundamentals by Example uses a semester-long project in which a programming language is created. This hands-on project brings to life the concepts and theories fundamental to computer languages. D.E. Stevenson, associate professor of computer science at Clemson University and director of the Institute for Modeling and Simulation Applications, incorporates ‘thinking tools’ such as concept maps, matrices for analysis, and flowcharts.

Surveying the major programming languages that have hallmarked the evolution of computing, Programming Language Fundamentals by Example provides an understanding of the many languages and notations used in computer science, the formal models used to design phases, and the foundations of languages including linguistics. This textbook guides students through the process of implementing a simple interpreter with case-based exercises, questions, and a project that encompasses all of the concepts and theories presented in the book into one concrete example. It covers also such topics as formal grammars, automata, denotational and axiomatic semantics, and rule-based presentation. Written in an informal yet informative style, the textbook uses active learning techniques, demonstrating a learning experience based on methods applied with professional standards.

Stevenson says he wrote the book because, although the technical aspects of programming languages have advanced in the past ten years, students still start from the same base of knowledge. He found that students had little understanding of natural language grammars and even less understanding of semantics and pragmatics. This lack of understanding of language means that the students have little idea of what language does and therefore how to write a program that transforms language. Therefore, this project starts with an introduction to linguistics.

Before retreating to the hallowed halls of academia, Stevenson says he had the good fortune to work at the ‘old’ Bell Telephone Laboratories with a group that had a working relationship with the Unix development folks in Murray Hill. The second break at Bell Labs was an assignment to IBM to participate in IMS development and a subsequent assignment at Bell Labs in a ‘consultant’ organization. The upshot of this experience is the emphasis in the text on project management. Although most undergraduates must find work in industry, they typically have poor time management skills and even fewer design skills. Design is learned by designing, so Stevenson felt he needed to find a way of teaching to get the real-world flavor – problem-based learning and case-based methods.

This text is student-centric because it does not try to be encyclopedic, but rather guides students through the development of a small compiler as a way for them to understand the issues and commonly used approaches to the solutions of those issues.

At Clemson, the course in which Programming Language Fundamentals by Example fits is the capstone course and its purpose is to show students how to be successful computer scientists professionally. If students faithfully apply themselves to and complete the project in this text, they develop a full-scale project using professional-grade development management techniques. They also master concepts, languages, and experiences to prepare them to understand the current research in programming languages.

This text is a shining example of how to use educational ideas in computer science education, and it is unique in the computer science education market, offering a unique approach to understanding how programming languages are created and function.

Stevenson in Programming Language Fundamentals by Example gives the text a flavor of the type of decisions that are faced by language designers by answering questions about language internals with "What does C do?" He attempts to set up a professional, design-team atmosphere and promotes strategies that will work in professional practice. The book should certainly put students one step closer to being prepared to function as designers in the real world.

Computers & Internet / Software / Web Development

Dreamweaver 8 Accelerated: A Full-Color Guide (with CD) by Youngjin.com (Accelerated Series: YJIP Publishing Team, Sybex)

For those who don’t know yet, Dreamweaver is a program for creating web pages, and it is a WYSIWYG program, meaning that what one sees as they create Web pages in Dreamweaver reflects what those pages will look like live on the Web. Beyond the simple entering of text, Dreamweaver allows users to design a layout with various objects, such as images, videos, and Flash files, using tables and layers. Moreover, it contains Web application features that can handle complex server scripts.

In Dreamweaver 8 Accelerated readers learn to use Dreamweaver 8 beginning with a clear-cut introduction to essential concepts, functions and terminology that are difficult to grasp without help. Then they immediately put their new skills to the test by following the practical exercises.

Full-color screenshots and graphics on every page give readers a clear image of what's possible. Real-world examples, from straightforward to advanced, demonstrate how to integrate techniques and pull all the knowledge together. By the end, readers know how to enrich their website with animation, special effects, audio and motion.

Every chapter is divided into three sections: concepts, foundation exercises, and professional tutorials. The book covers basic, need-to-know principles and theories. Step-by-step foundation exercises reinforce concepts. More advanced tutorials expand the learning. In the exercise and tutorial sections, there are sidebars containing notes and tips. In addition, before and after screenshots are consistently provided at the beginning of every hands-on exercise to give readers a clear idea of what can be achieved.

Projects in Dreamweaver 8 Accelerated teach readers how to:

  • Use rollover effects to create dynamic menus.
  • Develop login and registration pages with form elements.
  • Create button symbols.
  • Work with frames and framesets.
  • Create a product page with ghost images.
  • Insert a Flash banner using a layer.
  • Create an interactive page with Flash elements.
  • Format a web page with CSS.
  • Work with various sound formats when adding music to the website.
  • Expand their site with object, command and behavior extensions.

The CD features all the Dreamweaver sources readers will need to practice and complete the exercises in Dreamweaver 8 Accelerated. The CD is compatible with both Macintosh and PC.

Books in the Accelerated Series are practical, easy-to-use, full color guides designed to get readers up and running on a range of graphics software. These best-selling guides were created for professionals, hobbyists and new users looking to jump right in and master their software.

Dreamweaver 8 Accelerated gets readers up and running quickly through hands-on experience meaningful, fun projects – its learn-by-doing approach makes the road to proficiency relatively quick and painless.

Cooking, Food & Wine

West Coast Cooking by Greg Atkinson (Sasquatch Books)

In terms of what Americans eat, the West Coast represents both the oldest and the newest trends of the nation. The Spanish ranchos in California have left us with a taste for the asador that today manifests in a sophisticated passion for the grill; the Native American reverence for wild salmon translates to the coastal obsession with the fabled red fish; Asian populations brought the gifts of soy, ginger, noodles, and wasabi; Indonesian immigrants have introduced us to a lively range of curries. These many pathways lead chef and food writer Greg Atkinson to a bounty of recipes – nearly 400 – that express this lively region. Atkinson wraps his arms around this big culinary territory – from Baja to Barrow – in West Coast Cooking.

Surfer-Style Fish Tacos to Chinese-Restaurant Fried Rice and Hippie Farfalle with Pine Nuts, Currants, and Kale! Fresh salads that range from the exquisitely retro Green Goddess Dressing on Iceberg Lettuce to Berkeley Mesculun Salad with Baked Goat Cheese. West Coast Cooking includes an authentic but simple Tortilla Soup, a classic Northwest Smoked Salmon, a satisfying Sausage Frittata from San Francisco, a heavenly version of Beer-Battered Alaska Halibut.

This complete set of recipes serves up breakfast through dinner and dessert, including the Blue Ribbon Chocolate Cake that won the prize at the San Juan Island County Fair.

Greg has such a talent for teaching us about great home cooking, and it shines through each terrific recipe in this thorough collection, from how to brew the perfect pot of coffee to how to make homemade sauerkraut. … – Jerry Traunfeld, chef of the Herbfarm

How do you define West Coast cooking? That's a big question, and Greg Atkinson, with a wide-ranging career in the culinary world and a thoughtful, philosophical temperament, seems like just the guy to tackle it. … Personally, I plan to mull the question over with a generous plate of Greg's Beer‑Battered Alaska Halibut in one fist and a glass of Washington wine in the other. – Tom Douglas, author of Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen

… This is the straight-up way real home cooks cook. And if you're guided by a writer-cook steeped in the knowledge of local foods, people, history, and lore, you want to race to the stove. – Betty Fussell, author of The Story of Corn

West Coast Cooking charts the quirky and fascinating evolution of California and Pacific Northwest cuisine through stories of the mavericks who shaped it. Atkinson's research is broad and deep, and the result is a major contribution to our understanding of American regional cooking. It's an incredible book. – Grace Young, author of The Breath of a Wok

West Coast Cooking is and expansive, diverse, and spir­ited cookbook. The modern culinary revolution that returned ‘local’ and ‘seasonal’ to the cooking vocabulary is fully reflected in the book. Throughout, Atkinson always keeps the home cook in mind. With a chef's understanding of taste, nuance, and tradition – plus a few tested kitchen shortcuts – his simple recipes produce delicious, successful dishes. The results will expand any home cook's repertoire in many delicious directions.

Cooking, Food & Wine / U.S. Regional

Bayou Plantation Country Cookbook by Anne Butler (Pelican)

Following in the successful footsteps of Audubon Plantation Country Cookbook, named best new cookbook of the year by Louisiana Life magazine, Anne Butler has written Bayou Plantation Country Cookbook.

South Louisiana bayou plantations stand as historical markers of Louisiana's agricultural roots, when cotton and sugarcane reigned, and life on the river was grand. There were floods and crop failures, steamboat explosions and raging yellow fever, but when times were flush, there was no finer place on earth. Having searched archives, attics, diaries, and journals uncovering the authentic lifestyle and customs along the mighty Mississippi and its tributary bayous during the plantation era, Butler introduces readers to the people who rocked on the verandas, sold the cotton, planted the sugarcane, trawled for shrimp, cared for the children, and prepared the meals.

Recipes drawn from life on the bayou and the rich alluvial fields abound with the fresh catch of the day and the newly picked harvest of the garden. Descriptions and vintage photographs of the people and places that make up the delicious history of the bayou country accompany a variety of recipes. Crossing economic lines, Butler introduces the historical people and places of south Louisiana, from the exiled Acadians and their laissez faire way of life to the cotton kings evoking the Gone with the Wind era. Those who dried the shrimp, drove the cattle, shucked the oysters, and harvested the sugarcane are given tribute along with the noted chefs who prepared the meals. Also prominently displayed are recipes from hardworking fishermen who earn a living harvesting seafood from Louisiana waters.

From avocado-shrimp remoulade to soft-shell crabs, from alligator sauce picquante to seafood okra gumbo, the recipes Butler provides offer a comprehensive look at bayou country dining served up with photographs, historical tidbits, and family lore.

For starters Butler offers crab and corn bisque, bacon, lettuce, and Creole tomato soup, seafood okra gumbo, hush puppies, and stuffed artichoke. Main course dishes abound, many laced with the catch of the day, from shrimp etouffeé and oysters Bienville to sautéed shrimp and crawfish stew. Sweets also take on a decidedly Southern flair with praline bread pudding cake, beignets, Italian fig cookies, Creole cream-cheese pecan pound cake, tipsy cake, sweet potato pie, molasses cookies, and dewberry cobbler. For the guest wanting a beverage with a kick, bottomless glasses of sherry flip and mint julep are poured.

Including more than 100 local recipes, the author covers a vast area of Louisiana's diverse economic and cultural heritage.

Anne Butler evokes Southern hospitality in her glorious epicurean tour. – Bloomsbury Review

Bayou Plantation Country Cookbook is a culinary guidebook honoring the plantations and nearby towns stretching west of the Mississippi River to Lafayette. Packed with family anecdotes and lore, this cookbook eases readers into the kitchen by way of a personal invitation to ‘visit’ with the family. Sharing the architecture, history, and food of a bygone era, all the while spreading Southern charm, Butler plays host to Louisiana bayou plantations and homesteads, welcoming readers at the door and acquainting them with past and present inhabitants and their recipes.

Entertainment / Music / History / Biographies & Memoirs

Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti: Two Lives in One by Roberto Pagano, translated from the Italian by Frederick Hammond (Lives in Music Series, No. 7: Pendragon Press)

Pagano writes a rich and varied Italian and draws on a tremendous repertory of historical and literary sources. His book is not a streamlined dictionary item (although he is the author of the entries on the two Scarlattis in the 2000 New Grove Dictionary), but rather a panorama of place and period. Both Sterne and Stendhal (a particular Sicilian favorite) come to mind in the way in which the author himself becomes a personality in the story he is recounting, permits himself digressions, doubts, second thoughts, and even recantations. – Frederick Hammond, Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 2005, from the Translator’s Preface

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) is one of the most cel­ebrated and least performed composers of the Baroque, and his son Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the period. Roberto Pagano's Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti examines the relationship between father and son, interpreted in the context of seventeenth-century Sicilian culture. This study in historical anthropology is filled with new documentation on the lives and careers of the two men, and the boundaries between documented and informed speculation are clearly marked.

At the heart of the relationship between the two Scarlattis lies Domenico's famous legal emancipation from his father, which has generally been viewed as a bold act of personal and artistic defiance. Pagano, foremost authority on Scarlatti in Italy today and former Artistic Director of both the Sicilian National Orchestra and the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, reveals, through a corrected text and translation of the Latin notarial document, that it was actually a renunciation of the ancient Roman patria potestas, a father's power of life and death over his children.

The book has been translated by Frederick Hammond, both performer and scholar. Other titles in the Lives in Music Series include:

  • Hugues Cuenod – With a Nimble Voice Conversations with Francois Hudry
  • Nicolae Bretan – His Life – His Music
  • Entrancing Music: Documented Biography of Franis Poulenc
  • Pied Piper: The Many Lives of Noah Greenberg
  • Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life
  • The Chevalier de Saint Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and Bow
  • Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time

On October 26, 1953, the 268th anniversary of its subject's birth, the Princeton University Press published Ralph Kirkpatrick's Domenico Scarlatti. It was a revelation for its scholarly rigor and colorful writing, its wealth of new documentation, its recovery of the primary printed and manuscript sources of the sonatas, and for the musical insights of the greatest Scarlatti performer of the time. Kirkpatrick's book, together with his edition, performances, and recordings of sixty of the sonatas, became the primary agent in transforming the perception of its subject from Schumann’s contemptuous ‘dwarf among giants’ into the creator of one of the greatest surviving bodies of keyboard music.

A half-century later, the publication of the revised version of Roberto Pagano's Scarlatti: Alessandro e Domenico: due vite in una (1985) in an English translation, Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti, represents another quantum leap in Scarlatti studies. The fifty years following Kirkpatrick's pioneering work have produced extensive researches, especially into Portuguese and Spanish sources such as archival documents and musical manuscripts, which transformed our knowledge of Domenico's biography, sometimes in surprising ways. Domenico Scarlatti is now seen as a leading musical figure at the Portuguese court and a cosmopolitan traveler, whose fame in France was such as to induce the Portuguese ambassador to pay off his gambling debts to save his king's reputation. In another case, a garbled reference to a secret marriage in a document preserved in the Scarlatti family, whom Kirkpatrick located by thumbing through the Madrid telephone directory, turns out on further research to concern not Alessandro but Domenico in his old age, treating his son Alexandro with all the repressive hauteur of his own father.

Not only does Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti summarize the results of this half-century of research, it is equally valuable for scraping off certain barnacles that have clung tenaciously to the history of the two Scarlattis, notably the forgeries of the Florentine scholar Mario Fabbri of docu­ments from the court of Ferdinando de Medici.

As its sub-title ‘two lives in one’ suggests, however, this state-of-the-art biography of Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti is presented in a particular context. First, since Domenico's legal emancipation from his father has always seemed to lie at the heart of his biographical mystery, Pagano examines the histories of father and son as a symbiotic relationship in which a corrected text and a new reading of the legal document of emancipation becomes central. Second, he locates their relationship in the cultural context of seventeenth-century Sicily and southern Italy. Palermitan by birth and profoundly Sicilian, Pagano rightly observes that even today the traditions which formed the lives of the two Scarlattis are still active in Sicily.

Pagano does not claim to add much to the biographical data fur­nished by Kirkpatrick but asserts the conviction that he can read the human experience of the musician in a new key, one dictated by his intimate knowledge of Scarlatti’s father's life and of a southern mentality that may have controlled – and in any case conditioned – the behavior of the Sicilian clan into which Domenico Scarlatti was born.

Pagano says he did not wish to write a fictionalized or ‘invented’ biography. “My analysis of events and facts relates the little that we know about Domenico Scarlatti to the influence exercised on him by a father who must have behaved in a manner absolutely consistent with traditions that have been changed in Sicily only in the smallest degree by the three centuries that have passed,.” says Pagano. He well knows that the corpus of his sonatas – the part of his output that has left its mark on the history of Western music – shows that he is perhaps more significantly linked to the Iberian peninsula than to Italy.

Logically, a consideration of the apotheosis that took place in Spain concludes the human parable Pagano has attempted to reconstruct: it is in the relation between Spain and Sicily that he seeks the distant origins of a conditioned mentality to which he refers constantly. In this sense, Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti may be considered a southern ‘reply’ to the positivistic rigor of the biography worked out by Kirkpatrick

However, he hopes that he have offered sufficiently clear indications so that the established data remain clearly distinct from his interpretations of the whole context, which are guided by the direct knowledge of the conditioned mentality to which he believes that both the deeply Sicilian Alessandro and his son Domenico – as well as the picturesque ‘Barone d'Astorga’ and so many of the other characters who crowd Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti – conformed.

The two decades since the publication of the Due vite have also seen the text of the volume considerably enlarged. The new version, Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti, is born of an exchange that seals Pagano’s thirty years' friendship with Frederick Hammond, whose translation of the text is his response to the same labor that Pagano dedicated to his work Frescobaldi. According to Pagano, Hammond’s long discipleship with Ralph Kirkpatrick made him a competent Scarlattian, and his attention to detail made it possible to check the text in ways impossible in the past – details that were simply unavailable in 1985 have, in recent years, enriched a great tapestry.

Allesandro and Domenico Scarlatti is the most important contribu­tion to Scarlatti studies since Kirkpatrick's Domenco Scarlatti of 1953.

Entertainment / Sports

Fight On! The Colorful Story of USC Football by Steve Bisheff, Loel Schrader (Cumberland House Publishing)

In recent years the University of Southern California football team has set records, enjoyed winning streaks, won national championships, and produced Heisman Trophy winners at a dizzying pace. For USC fans, it has been a wonderful return to the school's longtime glory.

To help fans appreciate the story and its significance, Steve Bisheff and Loel Schrader, who between them have a combined eighty years of covering USC football, have written Fight On!. Here is the story of how the Trojans once dominated college football and are doing so once again. Here also are the glittering history, rich tradition, and remarkable athletes who have marked the USC football program throughout the years.

Coaching legends like Howard Jones, who produced ‘The Thundering Herd,’ and John McKay, whose innovations changed the face of college football and introduced us to a long line of Heisman Trophy-winning tailbacks, are examined in depth. The real stories behind the great USC-Notre Dame intersectional rivalry and the number-one cross-town rivalry in the sport, USC vs. UCLA, are told alongside stories of Hollywood's amazing involvement with the program.

All of USC's seven Heisman Trophy winners are profiled, from Mike Garrett to Reggie Bush, providing readers with rare insights into these special players. And the story of how Pete Carroll turned the Trojans into a full-fledged collegiate dynasty begins with him as a teenager growing up in northern California to his present status as the most successful college coach in America.
Also listed are the ten best games and the fifty greatest players in USC history, providing every Trojan fan with something to argue about. Fight On! covers all the elements that have made USC one of the great football programs in America.

This beautifully-written book gives you an extraordinary insight into the Trojan history and family. Reading it brings back so many cherished memories. It's almost as if they all come to life again. I plan to read this book over and over again. – John Robinson, former USC football coach

Steve Bisheff and Loel Schrader have written a book I'd recommend to anyone interested in the heritage and tradition of USC football. It made me realize how honored I was to play with Mary Goux and how much I wish I could have played for Coach John McKay. This book is a winner. – ‘Jaguar Jon’ Arnett, USC halfback, 1953-56; All-America, 1955

Steve Bisheff and Loel Schrader capture the essence of Trojan football and its important figures, revealing information only the players in the huddle would know. – Marcus Allen, USC tailback, 1978-81; All-America and Heisman Trophy winner, 1981

Fight On! by Bisheff and Schrader is the definitive book on USC football. For Trojan fans, college football fans, and members of the media who cover college football, this will be as much fun to read as watching Reggie Bush run in the open field. For anyone who loves USC football or the sport itself, this is a big read.

Fiction

The Alchemy of Desire by Tarun J. Tejpal (Ecco)

Set against the brilliantly drawn backdrop of India at the turn of the millennium, The Alchemy of Desire, written by Tarun J. Tejpal, New Delhi journalist of twenty-three years, tells the story of a young couple, penniless but gloriously in love. Obsessed with each other, they move from a small town to the big city, where the man, a journalist who dreams of being a writer, works feverishly on a novel, stopping only to feed his ceaseless desire for his beautiful wife, Fizz.

A chance occurrence allows the lovers to abandon the city for a mist-shrouded spur of the lower Himalayas and move into a sprawling old house, which they hope will embody their love. At first they pursue their deep physical need with a reckless intensity.

The narrator of The Alchemy of Desire dreams of writing a novel that will capture the truths of India's turbulent social history since Independence. With the encouragement of Fizz, his devoted lover of fifteen years, he quits his job and immerses himself fully in the task. Stopping only to satiate his constant lust for Fizz, he finds himself struggling as The Inheritors fails to coalesce. Finally defeated, he and Fizz dispatch the manuscript to the bottom of a nearby lake.

Meanwhile, during renovations on the house, a locked trunk is unearthed, and when it is opened, a cache of sixteen handwritten journals is discovered inside. Intrigued, the writer begins to decipher the ‘wordwheels’ of the fading journal entries, which are “without chronology, without grammar, without punctuation, riddled with archaisms and spelling errors.” This challenge becomes his new obsession, as he spends all of his waking hours entrenched in the books. As a series of unforeseen events play out for the young couple, their naked honesty and once-pure desire is contaminated by a strange outside force – mysterious events from the past that intrude upon their perfect love and threaten to undo the young man with a kind of madness. Even the brokenhearted Fizz's departure cannot corral the writer back to sanity. As he pieces together the mysterious story of the curious American woman in the journal, he discovers that it is a story as preoccupied with erotic desire as his own. Slowly he begins to uncover dark secrets, laying bare some truths about himself, his damaged love, and the very essence of life and love itself.

Soon his life is in tatters. As his life and love fall apart, the shocking truth is laid bare and all certainties are overturned.

At last – a new and brilliantly original novel from India. – V.S. Naipaul

Amid the endless cascade of semi-genuine Indian novels by Indian Americans comes the real thing, a kaleidoscopic first novel by a top Indian journalist, erotically rooted in the country. – Philadelphia Inquirer

A sweeping epic ... sprinkled liberally with titillating passages.... Heavy with ambition, Tejpal's debut will please readers. – Publishers Weekly

Tejpal is obsessed with the act of creation in its widest sense. He beats an erotic path through the depths of human desire: sexual, artistic, political.... A memorable and impressive debut. – Sunday Times (London)

This Indian masterpiece is like a voyage down the Ganges, long and infinitely pleasurable – the only thing that worries you is getting to the end too soon. – Figaro

Its rich sexuality lifts this work way, way above the ordinary. Rare is the Indian writer in English who has ventured thus far with the language, force, imagery, and originality. ...Tejpal is audacious as would be those who venture to assault the Himalayas. There are echoes of Nabokov, shades of Henry Miller and Philip Roth, and influences of Rushdie and Jim Corbett. None of which diminish the originality of a novel that is, paradoxically, as exciting as it is a pleasure. – Tribune

The Alchemy of Desire is anything but safe. One of its most soaring notes is its exploration of passion. . . .The novel details intimate relationships with few missteps, without reducing them to voyeuristic fodder. The passion in the novel is deeply organic to the characters and the narrative. . . . It works beautifully. In many ways, the novel is like the man himself: gritty, unrestrained, yet bound by a personal code of honor. – Independent

The Alchemy of Desire puts Tarun Tejpal in the front rank of Indian novelists.... I am inclined to agree with Naipaul: Tejpal has turned out a masterpiece. It is a novel that must be read. – Khushwant Singh, author of Train to Pakistan

Tejpal's mesmerizing, erotically-charged debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, is a candid exploration of sexual passion and obsession wrapped around a subtle exploration of India's multifarious culture and ragged contemporary history.

Inventive, playful, heartbreaking, brimming with ideas and memorable characters, The Alchemy of Desire celebrates the chaotic spirit of a country during a time of great change. It also offers, in searing, lucid prose, a moving meditation on the nature of desire, history, truth, and art. This is a major novel by one of the most significant new voices of his generation.

Health, Mind & Body / Alternative Medicine / Exercise & Fitness

Bone Marrow Nei Kung: Taoist Techniques for Rejuvenating the Blood and Bone by Mantak Chia (Destiny Books)

Most Westerners believe that a daily physical exercise program helps slow the aging process. Yet those whose bodies appear most physically fit on the outside often enjoy only the same life span as the average non-athletic person. It is the internal organs and glands that nourish every function of the body, and it is the bone marrow that nourishes and rejuvenates the organs and glands through the production of blood. By focusing only on the muscles without cultivating the internal organs, bones, and blood, the Western fitness regimen can ultimately exhaust the internal system.

In Bone Marrow Nei Kung Master Mantak Chia reveals the ancient mental and physical Taoist techniques used to ‘regrow’ bone marrow, strengthen the bones, and rejuvenate the organs and glands. An advanced practice of Iron Shirt Chi Kung, Bone Marrow Nei Kung was developed as a way to attain the ‘steel body’ coveted in the fields of Chinese medicine and martial arts. This method of absorbing energy into the bones revives the bone marrow and reverses the effects of aging through the techniques of bone breathing, bone compression, and sexual energy massage, which stimulates the hormonal production that helps prevent osteoporosis. Also included is extensive information on chi weight lifting to enhance the life force within and the practice of ‘hitting’ to detoxify the body.

A student of several Taoist masters, Mantak Chia founded the Universal Healing Tao System in 1979 and has taught and certified tens of thousands of students and instructors from all over the world. He is the director of the Tao Garden Integrative Medicine Health Spa and Resort training center in northern Thailand and is the author of twenty-six books, including Cosmic Fusion, the bestselling Sexual Reflexology, and the bestselling The Multi-Orgasmic Man.

Bone Marrow Nei Kung is a guide, which Westerners can follow to nourishing the body through bone marrow rejuvenation exercises.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling

The Continuity of Mind by Michael Spivey (Oxford Psychology Series: Oxford University Press)

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, but dynamical-systems accounts of mental activity are now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing them to move beyond merely brandishing trendy buzzwords.

In The Continuity of Mind Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the days events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, the individual’s moment-by-moment experience of the world, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that is comprised of diverse mental states.

Spivey, Associate Professor of Psy­chology at Cornell University, and Director of its Cognitive Science Program, has arranged The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. The initial chapters provide empirical demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space.

The Continuity of Mind is a compelling introduction to the dynamical systems approach to cognition that provides the most readable treatment of this work I have seen. Whether you agree that dynamical systems are the future of cognitive science or not, you cannot ignore the arguments that Spivey puts forward in this book. – Arthur B. Markman, Professor of Psychology and Marketing, University of Texas
In The Continuity of Mind, Michael Spivey presents a bold new vision for cognitive science – a vision that replaces discrete symbolic structures with continuous spaces of mental states, and proposes an inherent smoothness in the processes that move thoughts along the pathways of the mind. With a keen sense of history, a twinkle in his eye, and a clear focus on the challenges ahead, Spivey takes us on a fascinating voyage of exploration in this new, continuous, and dynamically changing world. We examine new tools for exploring the continuity of thought. We visit the rusty relics of discrete forms of theorizing and explore how what is good in them may be revived in theories framed in a more continuous vein. It is an important voyage for anyone interested in the mind, whether from a computational, philosophical, psychological, or neural perspective. All Aboard! – Jay McClelland, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
This is required reading for all cognitive scientists, young and old. Regardless of how far along the path to 'continuity psychology' you have traveled, Spivey challenges you to get out of your current attractor basin and continue your journey through theoretical state space. – Ken McRae, Professor of Psychology, University of Western Ontario

The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical-systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete the paradigm shift. Therefore, The Continuity of Mind will be essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the dynamical cognition movement is going.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling

Guided Imagery: Creative Interventions in Counselling & Psychotherapy by Eric Hall, Carol Hall, Pamela Stradling, & Diane Young (Sage Publications, Ltd.)

For therapists who want to include imagery work in their repertoire and who are looking for more than just a tool-kit of exercises, there is a dearth of up-to-date literature on using guided imagery available, according to these four authors. Written by Eric Hall, chartered counseling psychologist and part-time lecturer at the University of Nottingham; Carol Hall, Dean and Head of the School of Education, University of Nottingham; Pamela Stradling, BACP-accredited counselor/practitioner in Reading and Oxford; and Diane Young, counselor and supervisor for the NHS and in private practice in Buckinghamshire, Guided Imagery keeps both experienced and trainee counselors in mind.

Based on research with clients, therapy groups and training groups, going back over 30 years, Guided Imagery is a practical guide to using imagery in therapeutic work with clients. Through numerous examples drawn from their own research and case experience, the authors show how the techniques involved can be integrated into everyday practice, in both one-to-one therapy and in training groups.

In Guided Imagery, the authors introduce and discuss a range of techniques and therapeutic interventions which can help clients generate, express and understand their own symbolic, imaginal language, the language of the soul. The book describes the different processes of using guided imagery and working from a script, and explains how drawing can be used to augment imagery work. In addition to planned strategies for using imagery, the authors also explore how images which arise spontaneously during sessions can be harnessed and used to enhance the therapeutic process. The practical strategies and techniques outlined in the book are examined in the context of a variety of theoretical frameworks and research findings. Potential pitfalls and ethical considerations are also explored.

In the case of guided imagery, the counselor acts as a facilitator or guide and provides the client with an imagery theme to work with, for example, a journey up a mountain. The client describes aloud the internal images that spontaneously emerge. In the guiding role, the counselor may invite the client to imagine that they are elements in the imagery journey and even set up con­versations between them.

In the scripted approach to using guided imagery, the counselor or facilitator provides a narrative structure for the imagery journey. The client or group listen and follow the guide's instructions in silence. This technique is used in situations such as a counselor training group, a personal development group or a therapy group. It may be used with groups of students in schools as part of personal, social and health education and can even be used with children of nursery age. According to Guided Imagery, guided imagery using a script is normally used in a group setting, but can also prove useful for a client who is unwilling or too anxious to verbalize their imagery aloud.

Invariably, a reflective silence follows a scripted imagery journey, even in a large group. After a pause, the guide invites the group to share their experiences, usually in pairs or triads. A scripted imagery journey generates an emotionally charged discussion, which is usually personally significant in some way. Participants report feeling calm and relaxed after such an experience. Images appear to be highly memorable and often a client or group member will spontaneously refer back to their experience in a later session, which demonstrates the way the imagery keeps on working beyond the initial experience.

The authors also cover imagery and drawing; they discuss the ways in which drawing images generated can provide a further dimension to the guided and scripted imagery experience. They say they have found using drawing as an intervention in tandem with the imagery journey to be a particularly potent source of learning. Drawings can provide a visual portfolio which the client can use as a reference point in terms of monitoring their own therapeutic progress.

Guided Imagery also covers working with spontaneously generated imagery. During the flow of conversation, clients unconsciously produce metaphors and images, which capture the essence of their experience. The authors discuss the ways in which counselors can:

  1. Work creatively with client-generated imagery.
  2. Help them to understand the basis of the emotional response.
  3. Transform the response through re-imagining a more desirable state of being.

Each of these imagery-work interventions is discussed in the book. The relationship between imagery interventions and bodily well-being is also explored and a review of the research evidence on their efficacy in therapeutic contexts provided. The book also offers a consideration of the ethical issues posed by the use of imagery techniques in the therapeutic process.

Written for both experienced and trainee counselors, Guided Imagery will be a uniquely useful resource for practitioners and an ideal text for use in counseling and psychotherapy training courses.

Health, Mind & Body / Psychology & Counseling / Self-Help

The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness by Elliot D. Cohen, with a foreword by Albert Ellis (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.)

Throughout the ages, great thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Nietzsche have had incredibly useful things to say about overcoming the strife of everyday living and attaining happiness. Unfortunately, contemporary approaches to psychology have made only limited use of this guidance.

Guided by the vision of these great minds, The New Rational Therapy shows how a person can feel secure and hopeful while living in a precarious, uncertain universe; face evil with life-affirming courage; build self-esteem, respect for others, and global reverence; take control of emotions and behavior; confront moral problems creatively; build rapport and solidarity with others; and hone practical decision-making skills.

The book was written by Elliot D. Cohen, professor and department chair at Indian River Community College, principal founder of philosophical counseling in the United States, advisor to the Albert Ellis Foundation, president of the Institute of Critical Thinking, and  founder and executive director of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy. He is also ethics editor of Free Inquiry magazine and editor-in-chief and founder of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy and the International Journal of Philosophical Practice.

Cohen's The New Rational Therapy is a follow-up to his What Would Aristotle Do? Like the latter book, it shows in detail how many people erroneously think and, by doing so, largely create what is called ‘emotional’ disturbance. More importantly, he indicates what readers can do to correct their dysfunctional thinking, feeling, and behaving.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which Albert Ellis started formu­lating in 1953, is the first of the major cognitive-behavior therapies. It hypothesizes, as Cohen shows in The New Rational Therapy, that most people are born and reared to easily upset themselves but that they are also constructivists who have the ability to think, feel, and act more functionally and to lead happier lives. Unlike most of the other cognitive-behavior therapies that started up in the 1900s, REBT stresses that humans are unusual thinking animals who develop several basic philosophies – that also have strong emotional and behavioral elements that make them and keep them dysfunctional. Moreover, they are often unaware of their core philosophies, and when they become aware of them, they dogmatically believe that they are true or factual. As the Buddhists said some 2,500 years ago, they are actually illusions.

REBT therefore shows readers how to look for and uncover their leading philosophies; to dispute them forcefully, emotionally, and actively; and to change them to effective new philosophies, or rational coping philosophies. Special false or illusory philosophies that often lead them astray include demanding perfection, damning themselves and others, ‘awfulizing,’ and ‘I-can't-stand-it-itis’. REBT shows readers how to discover and dispute these destructive attitudes. Cohen in The New Rational Therapy adds a few more idiocies, such as jumping on the bandwagon, manipulation, ‘the world revolves around me,’ and ‘thou shalt upset yourself.’

According to The New Rational Therapy, people’s personal and interpersonal happiness – as well as that of their significant others, friends, coworkers, and associates – depends largely on the premises behind their emotions and behavior. Philosophers look at things in terms of reasoning from premises to conclusions. They look at their premises to see if their reasoning is sound. In contrast, traditional psychology tends to see things in terms of cause and effect. For example, a therapist might tell them that what caused them to get angry at Jack was some event, for example, that he lied – together with what they thought about it. Just as, under certain conditions, striking a match can cause a flame, many psychologists also think we can discover the scientific laws that cause people to lose their tempers and act in certain destructive ways. Instead of looking for causal laws, a philosophical approach attempts to identify and catalog the various types of fallacious premises in destructive patterns of reasoning. For this reason, Cohen refers to his philosophical approach as Logic-Based Therapy (LBT). This changes the mission of psychology: instead of looking for the causes of self-destructive behavior and emotions, LBT examines the reasoning for dangerous premises.

On the basis of clinical observations and studies over the past two decades, he identifies eleven of the most common and virulent offenders, the eleven cardinal fallacies.

Fallacies of Behavioral and Emotional Rules

  1. Demanding perfection: Perfect-a-holic addiction to what one can't have in an imperfect universe.
  2. Awfulizing: Reasoning from bad to worst.
  3. Damnation: Shit-ification of self, others, and the universe.
  4. Jumping on the bandwagon: Blind, inauthentic, antidemocratic and parrot-like conformity.
  5. Can'tstipation: Obstructing one’s creative potential by holding in and refusing to excrete an emotional, behavioral, or volitional can't.
  6. Thou shalt upset Yourself: Dutifully and obsessively disturbing oneself and significant others.
  7. Manipulation: Bullying, bullshitting, or well poisoning to get what one wants.
  8. The world-revolves-around-me thinking: Setting oneself up as the reality guru.

Fallacies of Reporting

  1. Oversimplifying reality: Pigeonholing reality or prejudging and stereotyping individuals.
  2. Distorting probabilities: Making generalizations and predictions about the future that are not probable relative to the evidence at hand.
  3. Blind conjecture: Advancing explanations, causal judgments and contrary-to-fact claims about the world based on fear, guilt, superstition, magical thinking, fanaticism, or other anti-scientific grounds.

Each of these fallacies is addressed in a separate chapter of The New Rational Therapy. Cohen says readers can learn to refute their faulty premises and find or create philosophical antidotes to the cardinal fallacies. Cohen also shows that just about all people’s philosophical mistakes stem from their innate and socially acquired tendencies, especially from their tendencies to make healthy desires into unhealthy and absolutistic shoulds, oughts, musts, and demands. He shows how many famed philosophers had antidotes for their ‘musturbation,’ and he adds some antidotes of his own. He talks about the cognitive dissonance between a fallacious rule and an antidote. He teaches readers how to construct and apply philosophical antidotes. Then he gets into the eleven transcendent virtues: metaphysical security, courage, respect, authenticity, temperance, moral creativity, empowerment, empathy, good judgment, foresightedness and scientificity.

In The New Rational Therapy, Elliot D. Cohen identifies eleven common and destructive patterns of reasoning that, left unchecked, can substantially impair personal happiness. He provides many useful antidotes to counteract the poisonous effects of these cardinal fallacies. – Samuel Zinaich Jr., president, American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy

The New Rational Therapy is an intelligent and clearly written book. It is enjoyable to read and it gently induces the reader to self-knowledge and self-improvement. The light of reason that shines through this new therapy can indeed be the right medication for persons suffering from mental and emotional disorders. Professional caregivers can find new inspiration here. – Dr. Shlomit C. Schuster, author of Philosophical Practice: An Alternative to Counseling and Psychotherapy and The Philosopher's Autobiography: A Qualitative Study

Clearly written and well argued, Cohen sets out eleven philosophical prescriptions that really can improve our everyday lives. If more philosophers followed Cohen’s lead in their work, there would be many more (employed) philosophers and even more satisfied students of philosophy. – James P. Sterba, University of Notre Dame

At last, here is an uplifting psychology that systematically applies the wisdom of the ages to attaining a life of insight, meaning, value, and purpose. Unlike classical approaches to rational psychology that only scratch the surface of what's wrong, The New Rational Therapy gets to the core and offers penetrating, philosophical antidotes for transcending problems and attaining an enduring happiness.

All told, this is an amazingly profound book. It distills the wisdom of many philosophers as only a professional philosopher-therapist like Cohen can do. What is profoundly new in this book is processing the individual’s philosophical mistakes as a central component of rational psychology; this portends nothing less than a psychological revolution.

Be grateful for Cohen’s combined talents and happy for the unusual self-help material that he has included in this book.

History / Americas / Political Science

Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope by Tariq Ali (Verso)

After the initial shock, I was confident that the coup could not succeed. Two factors helped sustain my morale. The first was the support we retained in the country. I remember one day I got fed up of sitting in this place. I decided to go to the barrios on the hills and with one guard and two comrades I drove out to listen to people and breathe better air. The response moved me greatly. A woman came up to me and said: ‘Chavez, follow me, I want to show you something.’ I followed her to her tiny dwelling. Inside the room her children and husband were waiting for the soup to be cooked. ‘Look at what I'm using for fuel,’ she said to me. ‘The back of our bed. Tomorrow I'll burn the legs, the day after the table, then the chairs and the doors. We will survive, but don't give up now.’ On my way out the kids from the gangs came and shook hands. ‘We can live without beer. You make sure you screw these....’  People were very angry, but they knew who was responsible and we were getting similar reports from all over the country. The middle classes hurt themselves a great deal by that strike. – Hugo Chávez in conversation with Tarig Ali

During his most recent visit to the United Nations, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was mocked, ridiculed, and misquoted by the United States press. The leader of a newly left-leaning Latin America, Chávez was represented as a barbarian and a fool rather than the foremost challenger of the neo-liberal agenda and American foreign policy.

Since 1998, Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution has ignited the people of a continent and brought Venezuela to the fore of international affairs. While Chávez's radical social-democratic reforms have brought him worldwide acclaim from the poor, he has attracted intense hostility from Venezuelan elites and mainstream Western governments and media, who regard him as a blundering interloper, disrupting the smooth progress of the Washington Consensus and daring to show Latin America that one can change the world by taking power.

Drawn from a wealth of first-hand experience in Venezuela and from extensive meetings with Chávez himself, Tariq Ali, writer and filmmaker and editor of the New Left Review, in Pirates of the Caribbean traces the history of the revolutionary process. He shows how Chavez's views have polarized Latin America at the same time that they have drawn international attention to the continent. Ali examines the hostility directed at the Chávez administration and traces the rise of Telesur, Venezuela's pan-Latin American counterweight to the pervasive influence of media conglomerates. Ali also discusses the enormous influence of Fidel Castro on both Chávez and Evo Morales, the newly-elected President of Bolivia. He explores the differences between the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutionary processes and outlines the options available to Latin America at this critical time in its history.

Infused with references to the culture and poetry of South America, Pirates of the Caribbean guides readers through a world divided between privilege and poverty, a continent that is once again on the march.

History / Americas / U.S.

Amarillo: The Story of a Western Town by Paul Howard Carlson (Texas Tech University Press)

Step into the Real Texas. – Amarillo Chamber of Commerce

Amarillo, the Queen City of the Texas Panhandle, is known far beyond its immediate vicinity – the high tableland called the Llano Estacado. The famous highway Route 66 ran through the very heart of Amarillo. Alan Jackson, Emmylou Harris, Neil Sedaka, and James Durst each recorded a different song titled 'Amarillo.' Named by True West magazine as one of the fifty most Western towns in America, this city of 176,000 people remains rooted in its Western past – yet at the same time Amarillo’s background and outlook have a distinctly Midwestern flavor.

In Amarillo, the first comprehensive history of Amarillo, Paul H. Carlson, professor of history at Texas Tech University, explores the city and its environs, from the first peoples who settled in the area to Amarillo’s current position as the marketing and commercial hub of a broad region. The city is the marketing and commercial hub of a broad region, one that laps over into Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. It is also a regional center for health care and for social and cultural activities of all kinds. Amarillo, then, is an attempt to provide a broad, chronological sweep of the social, cultural, political, and economic history of Amarillo and to show how Amarillo has developed as the major urban center for the larger Texas Panhandle.

Amarillo is unique. Perhaps every city is. Yet there are few places of comparable size that have been the subject of as many country songs and western ballads. Yet the country ballads hardly capture the essence of the city as it exists today. Contemporary Amarillo is a community whose citizens overwhelmingly support its cultural and intellectual life, such as live drama and fine arts generally and its superb symphony orchestra particularly. That does not mean it has outgrown country and western music – far from it. Clearly, Amarillo is a community whose city and citizens proudly embrace a western past that includes frontier images of long-booted cowboys, heady cattle drives, rowdy saloons, and busy railheads. The unusual dynamic keeps present-day Amarillo firmly rooted in its western past – a bit western frontier and a bit space age – a contemporary city in which the Old West, both the real and the imagined, remains hearty. Amarillo's subtitle, The Story of a Western Town, embraces the city's country and western music connections, its rural, western traditions, and its strong but modern cowboy-rancher customs.

But, in most ways, Amarillo is no longer a ‘western’ town. Indeed, with a population of some 176,000 people in 2006, it is one of the two largest urban communities on America's western High Plains. It is a thoroughly modern city, urbane in temperament and cosmopolitan in outlook. Still, large numbers of its citizens embrace informality of dress and speech, rural ideals, pickup trucks, country and western music and western dance halls, ‘cowboy’ steak houses, and similar manifestations of the mythic Old West and so keep Amarillo solidly anchored to its deep agrarian roots, pastoral traditions, and rural heritage. This strong dichotomy of outlook helps explain the grand attractiveness of Amarillo. Through its economic and political strength and its deep cultural influences, Amarillo will likely continue to dominate much of the Texas Panhandle well into the twenty-first century.

History / Americas / U.S.

Canal Street: New Orleans' Great Wide Way by Peggy Scott Laborde & John Magil (Pelican Publishing Company)

Canal Street has served as a place for meeting, shopping, protesting, and parading since its creation in 1807 – stretching from the riverfront to the cemeteries, the Street is familiar to natives and visitors alike as a meeting place for downtown shopping sprees, Mardi Gras parades, political protests, daily rendezvous, grand celebrations, and newsworthy events. Many have crossed its path to reach the French Quarter, ridden its streetcars to City Park, or stayed in one of its luxury hotels. More recently, it was the street where news crews stationed themselves after Hurricane Katrina.

Canal Street was considered the border of a new city, and its potential site for a canal ultimately spawned the street's name. Understanding the development of Canal Street (at 170 feet, 6 inches the widest business district street in the country) means understanding the development of New Orleans – specifically, its business and garden districts, once called the American Quarter, and the French Quarter, which Canal Street divides.

Written by local historian and Historic New Orleans Collection curator John Magill and WYES-TV host Peggy Scott Laborde, Canal Street chronicles the evolution of this grand street and all its events, memories, failures, and successes. Since 1987, Laborde has been the senior producer for the New Orleans PBS station, WYES-TV, where she has developed, produced, and hosted documentaries and in-studio productions about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast – she has produced, narrated, or consulted for over forty-five documentaries. Based on a public television documentary, which she produced and narrated, Canal Street chronicles the street's incarnation in 1807, its development, eventual decline, and hopeful revival as New Orleans' main thoroughfare in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is dedicated to a different aspect of Canal Street – from streetcars and social issues to Christmas shopping and cemeteries. Featuring familiar favorites like Mr. Bingle and D. H. Holmes Department Store, Canal Street covers the revitalization of the Canal Street streetcars, the changes along the riverfront, including new establishments like Harrah's Casino, and the transformation of common destinations like Woolworth's into upscale hotels for tourists and convention goers.

Peggy Scott Laborde has a gift of presenting New Orleans history with great heart. This book shows us why generations of New Orleanians have loved the magic of one of America's great streets. We need to understand that magic now more than ever. – Angela Hill, WWL-TV anchor, New Orleans

It is required that we know our past to understand our present, and John Magill is aware of how important this is to all of us at this time in our history as a great city. Canal Street presents the evolution of the Crescent City's beloved main street – a street that might be said to contain more history in its few short miles than most cities can muster as a whole. – Priscilla Lawrence, executive director, The Historic New Orleans Collection

A wonderful tale of a city and how it grew. Peggy knows how to resurrect memories that have been forgotten. – Ronnie Virgets, New Orleans columnist

A wonderful examination of the many functions Canal Street serves in our civic life. . . a great look at the past, a hopeful glance toward the future. – Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune

This exhaustive urban history recalls, celebrates, and documents the contributions Canal Street made to New Orleans' cultural, artistic, commercial, religious, and political landscape. Vintage and contemporary photographs accompanied by detailed descriptions of Canal Street ‘then and now’ make Canal Street a necessity for historians, visitors, and nostalgic former or current residents.

History / Americas / U.S. / Civil War / Biographies & Memoirs

War's Relentless Hand: Twelve Tales of Civil War Soldiers by Mark H. Dunkelman (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War Series: Louisiana State University Press)

In telling their stories, I felt close to these twelve soldiers. I hope that as you read the tales, you will feel close to them, too. Still, I remain humbled and haunted by how little I know about these men and their loved ones – and by how many tales remain untold. – from the book

A happy-go-lucky soldier falls at Gettysburg. A reluctant soldier is doomed by red tape. A veteran is crippled for life because of his brutal treatment as a prisoner of war. Father and son are killed at Chancellorsville. A dying private is immortalized by Walt Whitman. Separated by the war, a husband and wife agonize when their children contract a deadly disease. A veteran claiming he was blinded by campfire smoke is at the center of one of the largest pension scandals of the postwar era. An officer survives a hair-raising escape after capture at Gettysburg, only to die in the Atlanta campaign. A young volunteer retreats into insanity.

Though they did most of the fighting and dying in the American Civil War, ‘ordinary’ soldiers largely went unheralded in their day and have long since been forgotten. In War's Relentless Hand Mark H. Dunkelman retrieves twelve of these common soldiers from obscurity and presents intimate accounts of their harrowing, heartbreaking, and occasionally humorous experiences. Their stories, in their historical detail yet as dramatic as the most powerful fiction, put a human face on the terrible ordeal of a country at war with itself.

These were soldiers from the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, a regiment that Dunkelman has studied for forty years. He weaves a portrait of each man – portraits that reveal how, even for the common soldier, war was a cataclysmic event forever marking his life and the lives of those around him. Through an array of primary sources, Dunkelman reconstructs the lives and legacies of soldiers who died on the battlefield and others who later died of war-related injuries, some who were permanently disabled and others who saw their families undergo trauma.

Recalling a lost world, War's Relentless Hand tells of the resilience, perseverance, and loyalty that distinguished these men, the families and communities that supported them, and the faith and character that sustained them. The soldiers (and occasionally their loved ones) are often quoted in the tales. Portraits of nine of the soldiers illustrate their respective chapters, allowing readers to put faces to their tales. Two of them are pictured with their wives, who figure prominently in their stories. Dunkelman says that when the time came to place the tales in order, alphabetically by surname proved to be an ideal sequence.

Mark Dunkelman has done it again – produced another truly outstanding book that transcends the narrow confines of a single regiment or a handful of soldiers to speak eloquently of the meaning and impact of the Civil War in the lives of ordinary Americans. This is one of the best Civil War books I've ever read. – Steven E. Woodworth, author of Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865

Dunkelman, long a fan and student of the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, recounts the stories of 12 of its members, using, besides sparse official records, letters, diaries, and other primary sources, many graciously lent by descendants. Each man's story is different, and the war marked each man permanently. … Dunkelman's excellent storytelling and characterizations make this, his fourth book about the 154th, attractive to military buffs and general readers alike. – Frieda Murray, Booklist

The stories in War's Relentless Hand are memorable, vivid, and gripping in personality or plot line and they are supported by ample documentation – there is no fictionalization in this book. As the tales reveal, the soldiers – and their families – faced no shortage of troubles and traumas – readers come away feeling close to these men. If ordinary soldiers are remembered, it is usually by their families. For these few, Dunkelman does more.

History / Military / Europe / Biographies & Memoirs

The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801-1805 by Frederick W. Kagan (Napoleon and Europe Series: Da Capo Press)

What is the relationship among domestic politics, international relations, and war? What role do individuals and their personalities play in driving the course of events? How do states come together in coalitions? What makes those alliances strong or weak? What makes them succeed or fail? How important are the ‘great men’ of history compared to their numberless subjects, fellow-citizens, and subordinates? How can there be so little correlation between militant victory and ultimate political success? These questions, so important in the world today, belong at the heart of the study of the Napoleonic Wars, which offer so many valuable insights into them…. – from the introduction

Perhaps no person in history has dominated his own era as much as Napoleon. The Napoleonic wars are of the best-known stories of the modern world. Even so, how much of what we think we know of the politics and the times is accurate?

Despite his small physical stature, the shadow of Napoleon is cast like a colossus, compelling all who would look at that epoch to chart their course by reference to him. For this reason, most historical accounts of the Napoleonic era – and there are many – tell the same Napoleon-dominated story over and over again, or focus narrowly on special aspects of it.

Frederick Kagan, distinguished historian and military policy expert, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has tapped unused archival materials from Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia. Kagan presents the history of these crucial years from the perspective of all of the major players of Europe, including Tsar Alexander I of Russia, King Frederick William III of Prussia, and Austria's Emperor Francis, as well as countless others engaged in the great events of the era. The End of the Old Order brings to the fore the rulers, ministers, citizens, and subjects of Europe in all of their political and military maneuvering – from the desk of the prime minister to the pen of the ambass