May 2004, Issue #61

American Art Deco: An Illustrated Survey edited by R. L. Leonard & C. A. Glassgold (Dover Publications, Inc.) The decorative arts in the 1920s and 30s where dominated by the Art Deco style, one of the most popular forms of twentieth-century design. Championed by progres­sive architects and inspired by such diverse influences as the industrial age and Native American Art, it became a form of artistic self-expression for nearly three decades. American Art Deco includes over 200 black-and-white photographs and important articles that describe the aesthetics of this distinctive style.

American Art Deco is the unabridged Dover republication of Annual of American Design 1931 by the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen, originally published by Ives Washburn, New York , 1931. Edited by R. L. Leonard & C. A. Glassgold, the volume contains an introduction by architectural critic Lewis Mumford, which is followed by com­mentaries by such notables as Frank Lloyd Wright on design principles, the­atrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes on outfitting business inte­riors, and Edward Steichen on commercial photography.

A fascinating glimpse at an exciting and innovative period in the history of American design, American Art Deco will appeal to a wide audience – from interior dec­orators and graphic artists to students of art and lovers of the Art Deco style.

Arts & Photography

Nashville's Lower Broad: The Street That Music Made by Bill Rouda, foreword by Lucinda Williams, introduction by David Eason (Smithsonian Books) is a gritty photoessay of a legendary wellspring of country music.  

This sensitive and intimate portrait of a vanishing way of life in America's ‘Music City’, Nashville's Lower Broad, captures a moment in the life of a legendary town. Like Beale Street in Memphis and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Lower Broadway had been the heart of the music scene in Nashville during the heyday of the Grand Ole Opry, the place where locals could rub elbows with stars, where impromptu jam sessions could last late into the night. But after the Opry moved out of the Ryman Auditorium in the 1970s, Lower Broad began to deteriorate into a down-and-out skid row.

When people, especially tourists, began coming back to Lower Broad in the 1990s, lured by the Ryman's reopening and by urban gentrification, the locals bemoaned the slick, corporate nature of the revitalization and fought to retain some of the authenticity of the old days. For a brief time, the area was reborn with the true spirit of country music. In honky-tonks like Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and Robert's Western World, bands like the hip, retro BR549 played for tips while fans danced the night away, ignoring the shadows of the convention center and the glare of the Planet Hollywood down the street. And Bill Rouda was there with his camera, taking it all in. Rouda, a widely exhibited documentary art photographer, took a lot of pictures and made friends with street regulars and bar staff. Black and white and soft focused, Rouda’s pictures show, for example, Miss Pat’s etiquette instructions over the urinal which conclude, "Do not tear this sign off wall or I will kill you."

With Rouda's photographs, a heartfelt foreword from singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and a moving essay by David Eason, Nashville's Lower Broad captures the heart and soul of country music, vibrantly alive on one city block, documenting an important moment in the evolution of Nashville's Lower Broadway.

Like the music produced there, Bill Rouda's pictures from Nashville's Lower Broad are intimate, gritty, and heartfelt.This beer-soaked family album offers us one last glimpse of a time and place on the cusp of change. – Birney Imes, author of juke joint: Photographs

These great pictures of Lower Broadway show the real heart of Nashville! – Willie Nelson

Maybe the most exciting time of my life was in the sixties and seventies when I was cutting my teeth as a Nashville songwriter. Much of that time every week was spent at the Opry, Tootsie's, and Linebaugh's.This book is a nice jog to the memory. – Kris Kristofferson

If you come to Nashville to visit Lower Broad, don't look for any famous writers or singers – they only go there now to make videos or have their pictures taken. If you want to visit Nashville's Lower Broad, better you buy this book. – Tom T. Hall

Biographies & Memoirs / Entertainment

Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen & Tony Dalton, with a foreword by Ray Bradbury (Billboard Books) Who among film fans and movie buffs cannot remember with fondness the marvelously realistic dinosaurs, fantastic aliens, and imaginative mythological creatures in 20 Millions Miles to Earth, Jason and the Argonauts, One Million Years B.C., and Clash of the Titans?

Who cannot recall the battling skeletons in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or the chaos and destruction wrought from the skies over the capitol in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers? These and other classic movie moments represent the work of Ray Harryhausen, arguably the greatest stop-motion animator in the history of motion pictures.

Inspired by Willis O'Brien's King Kong and schooled by animation genius George Pal (The War of the Worlds, Time Machine, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm), Harryhausen blazed new trails in special effects from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now, in the animator's own words, accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished photos, sketches, and storyboards from his personal archive, comes Ray Harryhausen.

Co-written with film historian Tony Dalton, the book takes readers through Harryhausen's entire career – film by film, triumph by triumph. In words and images, it explains the basics of special effects and stop-motion animation, along the way telling tales of working with the film stars of the day – Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Lionel Jeffries, to name a few – and revealing how Raquel Welch was picked up by a flying dinosaur in One Million Years B.C., why the octopus in Mysterious Island was really only a sixtopus, and what Madusa's blood was made from in Clash of the Titans.

The book explores in detail how the animation models were made. It also offers a film-by-film breakdown of the animation techniques used. And it includes never before seen concept sketches and movie production drawings from films such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans with frame-by-frame deconstructions of how ground-breaking effects were achieved.

Ray Harryhausen is a must for special effects fans, if for no other reason than Harryhausen, with his obsessive eye for detail, saved and now delivers previ­ously unpublished photographs, sketches, and storyboards from his personal achive as well as entertain­ing tales, in intimate detail, from his illus­trious 60-year career.

The king of stop-motion animation lays out his varied career.... A must for special-effects aficionados and geeky fantasy addicts everywhere. – Kirkus Reviews

Biographies & Memoirs

Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips, with a foreword by Walter Murch (University of Kentucky Press) The visionary force behind such popular and critically acclaimed films as Apocalypse Now and the Godfather trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola has imprinted a distinct style on each of his movies and has significantly influenced modern American cinema. In an era of inflated production budgets and complex studio systems, it is rare for a director to gain creative control over all aspects of the filmmaking process—from screenwriting to editing to the coveted "final cut"—that the auteur commands. Coppola is unarguably one of the few modern American exceptions.

Recipient of the Director’s Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Coppola began his career at UCLA’s film school but was soon drawn to an apprenticeship under director Roger Corman, known as "king of the B movie." With Corman he gained practical experience in all aspects of the filmmaking process, particularly in how to manage a budget, a skill Coppola credits with being chosen to direct The Godfather even though Hollywood still considered him to be a young director.

Working as a screenwriter (crafting scripts for The Great Gatsby and Patton, for which he won an Academy Award), Coppola rejected the standard studio practice of hiring multiple writers to work on a single project. Accordingly, he formed his own production company, American Zoetrope, where he exercised complete control over the entire creative process. After founding the company, he began his directorial work in earnest, describing each film as a continuation of the previous one, despite the differences in subject matter.

Author Gene D. Phillips blends biography, studio history, and film criticism to provide the most comprehensive work available on Coppola. Phillips, a film historian and  Professor of English at Loyola, gained access to the reticent director and his colleagues and examined Coppola’s private production journals and screenplays. He reviewed rare copies of Coppola’s student films, his early excursions into soft-core pornography, and his less celebrated productions such as One from the Heart and Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

Not afraid to take risks in filmmaking, the thick-bearded Sicilian Coppola also created important pictures that did not receive critical attention. He notes, "The trouble with American filmmaking is that producers don't allow the risk of failure. If a good film can't risk being a failure, it won't be really good." Phillips illuminates the details of the production history of the harrowing shoot of Apocalypse Now. He was falsely accused of doing heavy drugs during the 238-day shooting and ridiculed for the film being a "financial boondoggle," although most of the finances came from Coppola's own pocket (he mortgaged his house to finish the picture). He also explains how The Godfather was almost cast without the now iconic Marlon Brando – during a casting meeting, Paramount emphatically refused to allow Coppola to cast Brando, and Coppola stood on the conference table in defense of his casting choice. When the president of Paramount still wouldn't grant Coppola's wish, the director "fainted" right on the table, convulsing until the executive agreed to Brando being a part of the film.

Coppola's early use of electronic methods of shooting film is unique in the scope of American cinema. Twenty years before others began using digital means of filming, Coppola was shooting his movies and able to watch them on the screen as soon as the cameras stopped rolling. In this intimate assessment of the director, Phillips discusses Coppola's "godfather" role in this aspect of film as well as his role as a godfather to a whole generation of filmmakers, including film school graduates such as Martin Scorcese and George Lucas. At that time film school was not considered a serious discipline and was viewed negatively by the anti-intellectual filmmakers of the day. But Coppola broke through, degree in hand, receiving studio time to make his masters thesis, You're a Big Boy Now, even though he had no experience in the studio. He became the "great white knight," rescuing and fathering film as an academic field to be studied and mastered.

Because Coppola was so open with the press during his career, revealing behind-the-camera squabbles and his own bankruptcy, he was labeled a reckless spendthrift by the media, earning a reputation that would remain with him for years. Phillips explains his aim behind the book: "I am interested in telling the truth. It's payback time for Francis." Phillips asserts he has proven Coppola is a "genuine cinematic artist who is also a popular entertainer."

Coppola just recently applauded as his daughter Sofia became the third generation (following her grandfather and her father) in her family to collect an Oscar. The definitive assessment of one of Hollywood ’s most enduring and misunderstood mavericks, Godfather argues that Coppola has centered his career around engaging films that reflect his own radically independent artistic vision. The book is the most comprehensive on Coppola to date, categorizing and analyzing every film Coppola ever made.

Biographies & Memoirs

West with the Night [UNABRIDGED] by Beryl Markham , read by Julie Harris (The Audio Partners Publishing Corp.) Audio CD: 8 compact disks, 9 hours 12 minutes.
West With the Night [LARGE PRINT] by Beryl Markham ( ISIS Publishing)
West with the Night [Paperback] by Beryl Markham (North Point Press)
West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham – aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty – and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and 30s. Originally published in 1942 and then reissued in 1983, and now again in 2004, this is the unabridged best-selling autobiography of the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west. But it is much more than a story of aviation.

Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936 she made her famous flight.

With the skill of someone who has filled long nights with stories, Markham recounts her adventures – discoveries, rescues, and narrow escapes, the glint of an airplane abandoned in the desert, the look of a lion about to pounce.... There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. – excerpt from the book

...she has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer...she can write rings around all of us...I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book. – Ernest Hemingway

West with the Night is an exceptional autobiography filled with a strong spirit, fascinating events, and beautiful words. Beryl Markham was raised by her father on a large farm in British East Africa in the early twentieth century; as a child she preferred spear hunting with the native Muranis to her school lessons. At seventeen, when her father lost their farm and went to Peru , she chose to stay in Africa and began a highly successful career as a race horse trainer. In her twenties she gave up horses and started flying airplanes, becoming the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot's license, then the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west. Lyrically and philosophically, West with the Night covers each of these parts of her life. Beryl Markham writes hunting stories filled with danger and tension, then turns and discusses the different qualities of silence or what it is like to fly alone over water for forty hours: "Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in the semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but your own small courage....such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger. " This is the story of an extraordinary woman – and that alone might be enough to recommend it. The fact that it is also extraordinarily well written makes it a gift. – Erica Bauermeister, 500 Great Books by Women

Much more than a pilot's memoir, West with the Night is a wise, funny, and inspiring exploration of a life well lived. The book reveals a poet's feeling for the land, an adventurer's engagement with life, and a philosopher's insights into the human condition.

Especially to be recommended is the audio version of the book, read by Julie Harris, one of America 's finest actresses on stage and screen. Her reading evokes the sights, sounds, and feelings of a remarkable life lived far outside the mainstream.

Biographies & Memoirs

Homesick: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Finding Hope by Jenny Lauren (Atria Books) With bravery, intimacy, and excruciating detail, author Jenny Lauren pours her years of struggle and recovery into the urgent prose of Homesick. Hoping to reach those suffering and seeking release from eating disorders and depression, as well as those living with undetected medical conditions, Lauren shares her thirteen-year battle with Anorexia Bulimia Nervosa, the resulting physical trauma and psychic triumphs.

With captivating blue eyes and dark hair, Jenny Lauren looked as though she'd stepped out of one of the glossy ads for which her uncle, Ralph Lauren, is famous. It was not long, however, before she found herself in a world where it was easy to see herself as less than perfect. As a young dancer, she felt insecure that her muscular frame did not seem to measure up to the slim figures of the other girls – she was ten years old when she first starved herself. Although there were brief periods of recovery, Lauren spent much of her teen and early twenties bingeing, purging, and com­pulsively exercising. In 1997, at 24, her body broke down after years of relentless ravaging; her small intestine herniated. She could barely walk. Although physician after physician told Lauren her ail­ments were in her head, eventually her condition was connected to her eating disorder and the resulting strain on her digestive system. But it was too late – irreparable damage had been done.

Although Homesick centers around Lauren’s struggle with an eating disorder, as well as the dramatic surgery she was forced to undergo as consequence, but there is a larger story that focuses on universal issues: the intricacies of family ties, the pressures of society, and the search for selfhood. From the New York fashion shows to the art galleries of Santa Fe, from the Mayo Pain Management Clinic in Minnesota to the healing sanctuaries in Brazil, Lauren takes the reader on a cinematic odyssey to self-discovery.

Lauren is intelligent, plainspoken, and unflinching. With flashes of wit (for example, she attends a Ralph Lauren fashion show and realizes, "The clothing is incredible as always, but who needs it?"), she evokes empathy. Writing for anyone fighting themselves, their family, or their doctors for the right to a healthy body and mind, Homesick is both a cautionary tale about illness and deterioration and a hopeful story of strength and restoration. This book also raises the question of whether contemporary fashion standards pressure young women into the destructive behaviors of anorexia and bulimia. And it speaks powerfully to a widespread failure by the med­ical community to understand eating disorders.

Biographies & Memoirs

Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings by Ian Pryor (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin ’s Press) Peter Jackson is at the pinnacle of his career. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King claimed an Oscar in each of the eleven categories for which the film was nominated, tying with previous movie record holders Titanic and Ben Hur and gave Jackson a trip down the aisle to accept the award for Best Director.

The first biography of Jackson, Peter Jackson by New Zealand journalist Ian Pryor examines Jackson's personal and professional struggles and successes. He also details how the famous director convinced Hollywood to let a relative unknown helm The Lord of the Rings, one of the most ambitious film projects ever produced.

Peter Jackson exploded onto the popular scene with the release of The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, and his legend has grown with each successive release in the trilogy. Now the owner of one of the world's largest special effects companies, Jackson built WETA to rival George Lucas's ILM, in the process, hoping that the facility would attract international filmmakers to New Zealand. He has also become one of the highest paid directors in Hollywood, receiving a salary of $20 million for the upcoming King Kong remake. However, not much is known about the Kiwi filmmaker's previous accomplishments.

Capturing his career to date in Peter Jackson, Pryor traces the journey of a young movie fanatic inspired by Monty Python and Ray Harryhausen. From Sunday afternoons spent fooling around with a camera, through low-budget cult movies, Pryor delves into Jackson's earliest efforts. He tells of the inspiration that led to the making of the three world-famous Lord of the Rings films and the six other films that preceded them. Pryor looks at the story behind the Rings, explaining how Jackson got the rights and funding to make three films rather than collapsing the story into just one or two films. He also includes interviews and other behind-the-scenes material from the making of those landmark films.

Pryor categorizes Jackson's first six films into the ‘bloodfest trilogy’ of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Dead Alive, which were followed by the ‘experimental trilogy’ of Heavenly Creatures, Forgotten Silver, and The Frighteners. Pryor also argues that the uniting theme of Jackson's pictures has been special effects, and that the early horror films aided in developing the director's eye.

Pryor's Peter Jackson is a comprehensive first look at the director's career to date, and a must-have for every fan who craves more insight about how the Prince of Splatter became the man behind The Lord of the Rings. This in-depth, unauthorized biography includes material never before seen in America, and Pryor's knowledge of Jackson from the start of his professional career brings a perspective that enables readers to understand how Jackson's cinematic talents were honed.

Biographies & Memoirs

Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life by Judith Strasser (Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press) Having grown up in the 60s, she was part of a generation of women with strong anti-establishment political convictions but still dreaming of marrying Prince Charming and living happily ever after. Seventeen years after she married, Judith Strasser escaped her emotionally and physically abusive husband and sought a better way to live. In the process, Strasser, now a freelance writer who conducts poetry and memoir writing workshops for adults and children, rediscovered what she had suppressed through that long span of time: strength and a passion for writing.

Black Eye includes excerpts from a journal Strasser kept from 1985 to 1986 – the year she made the decision to leave her marriage – and present-day commentary on the journal passages and her family history with parents, children therapist, friends. She’s retelling and rethinking it, to help herself and readers like her, heal. Strasser, a former senior producer and interviewer for a national distributed public radio program (To the Best of Our Knowledge), works like a detective investigating her own life, drawing clarity and power from journal passages, dreams, and memories that originally emerged from confusion and despair.

Not coincidentally, the same year that Strasser found the courage to leave her husband, she reclaimed her creative voice. Newly empowered and energized by this enormous life change, Strasser began writing again after twenty-five silent years dominated by her mother's illness and death, her own cancer, and her painful, fearful marriage. Black Eye is one of the fruits of this creative reawakening. Take this passage, for example:

Stu and I stand in the laundry room in the basement of our first house in Madison . He raises his hand and slaps me, hard. Why? Are we arguing about the layer of lint on the dryer? Is he angry because there's laundry detergent caked around the rim of the washing machine? . . . Did I scream at him about something that had nothing to do with clothes? What I remember: my stinging cheek.

One feels one is peering into a life, in all its pure daily awfulness. – Heather Sellers, author of Georgia under Water

An unflinching, unsparing, un-put-down-able diary of a woman's slow tumble to health, freedom, and even joy, against terrifying odds. Black Eye is the kind of book we wish no one had to write, but which we are compelled to read. – Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

Insightful and poetic, Strasser reveals the psychological and social circumstances that led a "strong" woman, an intelligent and politically active feminist, to become an emotionally dependent, abused wife. As Strasser tells it, “I still don’t really get it”, but she’s trying to get it. Mostly self-analysis, Black Eye is personal, triumphant, and inspiring to all who deal with the adversity that is part of human life.

Business & Investing

All Crises Are Global: Managing to Escape Chaos by Marion K. Pinsdorf ( Fordham University Press) From the Enron scandal to the Ebola virus scare, from oil spills to acts of terrorism, crises scar our age. And whether it's an expensive product recall or a deadly airplane crash, any crisis can turn into chaos unless there's an effective management response plan in place.

All Crises Are Global provides the basics of an effective organizational crisis-management plan. Marion Pinsdorf gives managers the tools and sensitivity to deal with the catastrophic effects of a crisis whether it touches on the organization itself, the media, competitors, partners, government, or victims. Filled with real-world examples of successes and failures from the Arthur Andersen meltdown to the at­tacks of September 11, Pinsdorf shows how to plan for, manage, monitor, and mitigate the effects of crises large and small.

Spread instantaneously to a litigious world by global media, crises can no longer be contained or con­trolled, only anticipated and managed. According to author Pinsdorf, former Vice President of Textron and INA (CIGNA) Corporations, and Hill and Knowlton, Inc., and Associate Professor and Senior Fellow in Communications at Fordham's Graduate School of Business Administration, executives can manage the impact of even large-scale events by quickly taking responsibility for the human and financial costs of the organization’s mistakes.

Marion Pinsdorf ... is able to counsel today's harried business leaders from perspectives no one else can offer. By combining what we can learn from the past with modern techniques and creative problem solving strategies, Dr. Pinsdorf shows how we can find new positive ways to take some of the 'hiss' out of the word crisis. – John W. Felton, President and CEO, Institute for Public Relations

Pinsdorf brings keen insight and intelligence to an assessment of crisis management in our global community, along with a dash of common sense and with ... this book is a winner! – Barie Carmichael, Partner, The Brunswick Group

Pinsdorf drills to discover the essence of what turns an issue or incident into a crisis and offers guidance to the even the most battle-hardened crisis communications expert. – Michael Morley, Edelman

In All Crises Are Global Pinsdorf provides techniques for building smart organizations that react quickly before problems es­calate into crises. Practical, tested, and wise, this book helps managers look for trouble spots and deal with them effectively.

Business & Investing / Management & Leadership

Creativity in Virtual Teams: Key Components for Success by Jill E. Nemiro (Pfeiffer, Wiley) is a well-researched and practical resource that offers a new model for attaining high levels of creativity in virtual working arrangements.  

Written by Jill E. Nemiro, an expert in organization and virtual team building, Creativity in Virtual Teams provides a tool that takes readers beyond theory to foster creativity in virtual teams. Nemiro, assistant professor in the psychology and sociology department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and adjunct professor in the human resources design masters’ program at Claremont Graduate University, leads readers through a series of diagnostic tools, questions for reflection, checklists, and exercises that will help them assess and develop the five key components – design, climate, resources, norms and protocols, and continual assessment and learning. In addition, Creativity in Virtual Teams is filled with illustrative lessons learned from nine highly successful and innovative virtual teams.

Nemiro has done an impressive piece of research on this so far neglected area – creativity in virtual teams. If you manage or belong to a team that aspires to higher levels of creativity – and what team doesn’t – you’ll find this book invaluable, thought provoking, and highly readable. – Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, authors of Virtual Teams

Having dealt with small to large virtual teams for over a decade, Dr. Nemiro’s book is the first book to provide a comprehensive, concise understanding of the dynamics and structure of virtual teams. A combination of theory and practical tools for all those either interested in establishing or bettering existing teams. – Patricia G. Flores, region account manager, Global Diversity Sourcing, Hewlett-Packard

This is the first serious study of creativity in virtual teams. It offers a comprehensive framework and valuable assessment tools for putting the book’s lessons into practice in any organization. – Vijay Sathe, The Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University ; author, Corporate Entrepreneurship

Creativity in Virtual Teams provides methods for continual assessment and learning in developing high levels of creativity in virtual teams and is an important resource for those working in virtual teams or transitioning into this new way of working.

Biographies / Outdoors & Nature / Sports

A View from a Tall Hill: Robert Ruark in Africa by Terry Wieland (Countrysport Press) is a reissue of the classic biography of Robert Ruark, telling of the renowned 20th-century safari writer's experiences of Africa during its early struggles for independence.  

Ruark was a nationally renowned columnist and author during his lifetime, and since his death in 1965 his writings have continued to inspire hunters who travel to Africa .  Millions of readers, who can only dream of going there, feel they know Africa intimately from reading his work.

Given his stature in the field, it is a shock to realize that Ruark’s career as a writer on Africa lasted less than 15 years. During that span, however, he lived life at a frantic pace, traveling the world, trying to see everything, do everything, report everything. Particularly, he came to know East Africa like a second home, and he watched its descent to independence with increasing apprehension. In his newspaper columns, he predicted the economic, social, and political chaos that has been daily news from African datelines ever since the colonial flags were lowered.

Ruark’s death in 1965, at the age of 49, was premature but not unexpected. Estranged from his childhood home in North Carolina , exiled from his adult haunts in New York , and finally barred from his adopted land of Kenya , Ruark found his only real home in the tiny Spanish town of Palamós , where he is buried in a quiet corner of the ancient walled cemetery.

In A View from a Tall Hill, Terry Wieland, shooting editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, has not written a biography in the strict sense, but has written about Ruark and his work, the times in which he lived, and the strange allure that Africa had for him – an irresistible fascination Ruark repaid by immortalizing Kenya as if it were a first, tender love.

Excerpt from the book:
From 1951 until the day [Ruark] died, Africa reached out to him with a promise that there he would find something that was worth having – something that did not exist in Manhattan . Even if he could never articulate exactly what that something was, it was solid and tangible to him.

Although many may disapprove of Ruark's views about big game hunting and the role of white settlers in Africa, no one can deny the truth of what Ruark reported in his columns and wrote about in his best-selling novels, detailing the upheavals and tragedy that took place in Africa starting in the early 60s and continuing today.

[A View from a Tall Hill] Sad, fascinating, and the finest tribute that Robert Chester Ruark will ever have. – David Petzal, Field & Stream

Business & Investing / Human Resources

Competency-Based Human Resource Management by David D. Dubois & William J. Rothwell, with Deborah Jo King Stern and Linda K. Kemp (Davies-Black Publishing) The traditional human resource (HR) emphasis on job descriptions shortchanges both the employee and the organization, according to authors David D. Dubois and William J. Rothwell. The more effective method is to fit employee talents to the work that must be accomplished.

Moving beyond industrial-age notions of work, Competency-Based Human Resource Management describes how to reinvent the HR department so that job competencies – rather than job descriptions – become the foundation for all HR efforts. By isolating and focusing on the key competencies that distinguish top performers, HR departments can unleash the power of exemplary performers across all job categories and see significant gains in productivity.

Dubois, internationally respected consultant, author, speaker, life-career counselor, coach, and workshop leader; and Rothwell, president of Rothwell & Associates, Inc., and professor of human resource development at The Pennsylvania State University, show HR professionals how to identify the key competencies that distinguish best-in-class performers – or "exemplars" – from average performers. Readers can then use the key competencies as the basis for all HR functions, including planning, recruiting and selecting, training, and performance development. According to Dubois and Rothwell, this new model of performance management unleashes the power of exemplary performers across all job categories, resulting in enhanced employee satisfaction and significant gains in productivity.

Competency-Based Human Resource Management provides a wide variety of planning tools, checklists, worksheets, and other practical aids to lead HR professionals through the process of making the transition from a work-based environment to a competency-based organization.

Children’s (12 and up)

Story Time by Edward Bloor (Harcourt, Inc) At a time when public debate over standardized testing is growing ever more heated, Edward Bloor's Story Time enters the fray with a biting satire on high-stakes testing.

George Melvil and Kate Peters are promised the finest education when they transfer to the Whittaker Magnet School, an experimental college-prep charter school. It boasts the highest test scores in the nation ... but at what price? Their new school's "Leave No High-Scoring Child Behind" curriculum is focused on beating standardized tests. Classes are held in dreary, windowless rooms, and students are force-fed noxious protein shakes to improve their test performance. Worst of all, there seems to be a demon loose in the building, one whose murderous work has only just begun.

According to Bloor, author of two acclaimed novels, a former middle and high school teacher, ”For my third novel, Story Time, I was eager to do something different, or at least to approach reality from a different direction. The result is a novel that is part ghost story, with lots of supernatural action, and part satire about public schools.

Story Time is set in the Whittaker Magnet School , a grades 6-8 experimental school that boasts the highest standardized-testing scores in the United States . Within this school's sterile, Orwellian environment arises a curious poltergeist – at times funny, at times malevolent – who turns everything upside down. This unfriendly ghost provokes incidents that, should the public catch wind of them, would wreak havoc on real estate values in the highly desirable Whittaker Magnet School district.

I was fortunate to teach in the public school system (nearly twenty years ago) in what now seems to be a golden age, unencumbered by state standards and high-stakes tests. Seventh ­graders could read aloud and talk about The Odyssey, Flowers for Algernon, and Lord of the Flies. They could put on a drama festival in which they wrote and acted in their own plays. They could write and illustrate poems to adorn the classroom walls.

I doubt that so many fanciful activities could occur with such frequency in seventh-grade classrooms in America today. The relentless pressure from above to succeed on standardized tests, pressure originating from the president of the United States himself, trickles down through descending levels of politicians until it pours onto the heads of local principals... "Test-Based Curriculum," the absurd pedagogy upon which Story Time's Whittaker Magnet School is founded, is already a reality in many American public schools. As a result, many children who learn to love reading today do so in spite of, not because of, what they experience in the classroom. In this topsy-turvy system, the politicians win, and the educators and students lose. I believe that, in the Latin words displayed in the Whittaker Magnet School, "We will pay for it" with a less literate society.”

Story Time is bitterly funny satire about the state of modern education aimed at everyone twelve and over.

A no-holds-barred, deeply subversive tale about modern education. – Publishers Weekly

Cooking, Food & Wine / Health, Mind & Body

Rawsome: Maximizing Health, Energy, and Culinary Delight With the Raw Foods Diet by Brigitte Mars (Basic Health Publications, Inc.)

A raw foods diet advocates exactly that: eating raw foods. No cooking, no grilling, no steaming, no application of high temperatures. Why?

Studies show raw foods are digested quickly and easily – in 24-36 hours instead of the 48-100 hours needed for cooked food.

Tackling head-on the skepticism likely to greet proponents of what the world sees as a "fad" diet, renowned nutritional consultant and raw foods adherent Brigitte Mars in Rawsome presents historical data and scientific evidence confirming the efficacy of raw foods diets in:

• Supporting emotional stability
• Increasing energy levels
• Clearing the skin
• Boosting immune-system function
• Improving digestive function
• Dispelling depression
• Sustaining overall good health.

Raw foods slow the aging process and help people reach their optimum weight. Raw food diets have been used to improve the health of those with arthritis, asthma, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, digestive disturbances, menstrual problems, allergies, obesity, skin conditions, and heart disease. The result, over time, is a feeling of buoyant, radiant health.

In addition, Mars points out the environmental benefits of the raw foods diet, making a case for eating raw foods as a means of reducing waste, making the most of agricultural practice, and reducing the human footprint on the earth. Whether readers want to jump right into an all-raw diet or just want to introduce more raw foods into the diet, Mars, who teaches herbal medicine through Esalen, the Boulder College of Massage Therapy, and the Naropa Institute, offers encouragement and practical instruction. Readers will find advice on planning a balanced diet to meet their nutritional needs, combining foods for best effect, preserving raw foods, equipping the raw kitchen, sprouting, juicing, and every other technique that makes the raw foods diet simple, delicious, and healthful.

Mars explains digestion and enzyme activity, and why raw foods can be particularly helpful when it comes to losing weight and increasing energy. She provides a "raw foods encyclopedia," identifying the nutritional content of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and wild edibles (like seaweeds and edible flowers), and explaining how the body converts each of them into energy.

Perhaps most important, Mars provides more than 200 kitchen-tested, real-people-approved raw foods recipes. There are dozens of raw food recipes for:

• Breakfast dishes
• Dairy replacements
• Beverages
• Salads and salad dressings
• Soups
• Sauces and condiments
• Dips and pates
• Entrees
• Alternatives to rice and baked bread
• Sandwiches and other take-it-with-you foods
• Desserts
• Holiday dishes
• Ethnic foods – Caribbean, French, German, Italian, Mexican, Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Southern, among others

Mars also outlines the kitchen tools for making these – no more stoves, toasters, and pots. Instead, the raw food kitchen is stocked with a blender, citrus juicer, food dehydrator, and ice cream maker, and food preparation involves instructions for sprouting, juicing, dehydrating, and fermenting.

For people who want to give raw foods a try but don't want to give up the taste of good cooking, Rawsome provides a solid foundation.

Cooking, Food & Wine

Southern Living Ultimate Quick & Easy Cookbook edited by Jane E. Gentry (Oxmoor House) urges readers to imagine finding all of their childhood favorites in one source revised into simpler, more streamlined recipes.

Readers voted "Quick & Easy" their favorite feature in Southern Living. Now they can enjoy over 450 fast recipes in one cookbook.

Compiled by Jane E. Gentry, an editor at Southern Living, Southern Living Ultimate Quick & Easy Cookbook has these features: colorful banners beside titles identify features like 5 Ingredients or Less, Make Ahead, Ideas for Two, Freeze It, and No-Cook Creation. Hundreds of shortcuts and tips streamline cook time. Readers will find ideas for Two Meals in One, Gadget Magic, and Fix it Faster, which offers options for making a quick recipe even quicker. More than 100 photographs show just what the recipes look like. The staff at Southern Living share their best secrets for organizing the kitchen for speed, stocking up on quick-cooking staples, and breezing through the grocery store in record time. Starbursts indicate dishes that cook in 10, 20, and 30 minutes or less.

Here’s a sampling of some of Southern Living’s editors’ favorites:

• Bring back memories with creamy Corn Pudding – only has 5 ingredients.
• Prep fresh Crunchy Fried Okra in 6 minutes: batter up small, tender whole okra pods and skip the slicing.
• Dress up chicken breasts with three ingredients to make Pecan Chicken.
• Pan-Seared Steaks with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce offer unbelievable flavor with only five ingredients and 10 minutes start to finish.
• Chicken-Fried Steak 'n' Country Gravy is on the table in 30 minutes.

• Pop some fries in the oven when preparing Fried Catfish Sandwiches, and readers will have dinner finished in 25 minutes.
• Spiced Pecans are sure to disappear quickly – only takes 15 minutes.

• Five-ingredient German Chocolate Squares take only 8 minutes.

• New-fashioned Banana Pudding makes everybody happy – instant pudding mix with a little half-and-half to give it homemade flavor.
• Caramel-Nut Pull-Apart Bread is easy on the cook with just four ingredients.

A cross-referenced recipe index makes finding favorite recipes faster than ever.

With Southern Living Ultimate Quick & Easy Cookbook, readers will find a collection of editors’ best recipes with fewer steps and quicker times without sacrificing flavor. Whether it's the home cooking or the cozy feelings, it's good to have these simple versions of the foods we Southerns grew up with.

Culture / Computers / Privacy

How to Be Invisible, Revised Edition: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy, Your Assets, and Your Life by J.J. Luna (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press)  

Fascinating...a regular field manual ... meticulously researched and very entertaining. – G. Gordon Liddy

There is a prevailing sense in our society that true privacy is a thing of the past. Sweeping changes since 9/11 have encroached upon personal privacy as never before. J.J. (Jack) Luna’s classic manual covers everything from driver's licenses and pizza deliveries to anonymous ownership of vehicles and real estate. Filled with vivid real life stories drawn from the headlines and from Luna's own consulting experience, How to Be Invisible is the perfect antidote. Luna reveals the shocking secrets private detectives and other seekers of personal information use to uncover information and then shows how to make a serious commitment to safeguarding oneself. Then Luna offers tested techniques to protect oneself from information predators as technology leaves ordinary citizens vulnerable to identity theft and lack of privacy. This revised edition includes sections on:

• Ensuring that pagers, cells phones and hand-held radios are secure.
• Protecting one’s laptop at home, at the office, and while traveling.
• Sending and receiving mail, taking deliveries, hiding one’s home address.
• Running an anonymous business from almost any location in the world.

Luna sold his outdoor advertising business in the Upper Midwest in 1959 and moved with his wife and small children to Spain 's Canary Islands (off the coast of West Africa ). Outwardly, he worked as a professional writer and photographer. Secretly, however, he dodged the Spanish Secret Police while working underground in an activity that was at that time illegal under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In 1970 Franco, yielding to intense pressure from the western world, moderated Spain 's laws. Luna was now free to come in from the cold. By that time, however, privacy had become an ingrained habit. In the years that followed he started up various low-profile home-based businesses, built them up and then sold them. He is currently an international consultant specializing in personal privacy and security.

Read this meticulously researched and highly entertaining book, learn its techniques...then vanish in plain sight! – Lt. Patrick Picciarellie, NYPD (ret.), bestselling author of Jimmy the Wags: Street Stories of a Private Eye

How to Be Invisible gives the smartest, sanest, and most practical advice on just how to stay out of sight in the real world. Buy this book if you value your privacy. – Nod Beaumont, author of Beat the Border and The Policeman Is Your Friend and Other Lies

How to Be Invisible is a revolutionary approach to personal security. Luna shows readers how to protect themselves from information predators. Whether readers just want to shield themselves from casual scrutiny or take their life savings with them and disappear without a trace, the book provides the information required.

Education

The History of the International Learning Styles Network and Its Impact on Instructional Innovation by Laura Shea Doolan (Mellen Studies in Education Series, V. 90: The Edwin Mellen Press) We are witnessing an age when networks of various kinds spring into existence regularly on the Internet. Most of these networks experience a brief period of viability, and then disappear like the "dot-com" companies. However, the International Learning Styles Network (ILSN) has prevailed for almost 25 years and expanded from a predominantly educational Network, comprised of Centers located in colleges and universities within the United States, to a world-wide Network, encompassing businesses and consultation Centers on four continents. The major emphasis of The History of the International Learning Styles Network and Its Impact on Instructional Innovation is to document the historical development of the ILSN.

Written by Laura Shea Doolan, learning-style specialist and assistant professor at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, the book describes a historical analysis of the International Learning Styles Network (ILSN) and its impact on instructional innovation. The book describes:

• How the Network evolved.

• The impact of the ILSN on instructional innovation.

• The ILSN model and guidelines to assist in the formation of future networks.

Multiple forms of data were examined from primary sources, including the directors of the ILSN Centers in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and from secondary sources, including former representatives of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), an ILSN Board member; and school administrators, professors, teachers, and students directly involved with the Network Centers.

A qualitative design using historiography was the cornerstone of the study. Data revealed how the ILSN expanded into a Network after St. John's University's initial sponsorship and the subsequent cosponsorship of the NASSP. The main factor for the directors' involvement with learning styles and the ILSN was that they believed this perspective was crucial in the fostering of learners' academic and work performances. Findings supported that the basic factor contributing to the expansion of the ILSN was the positive impact that learning styles had on the attainment of students' achievement and teachers' instructional goals.

Guidelines for the development of future networks include:

• Developing a partnership with organizations in the area of interest.
• Establishing bylaws to insure that, during the growth process, there is adherence to established guidelines.
• Encouraging commitment to quality and a strong research base pertaining to the network's foci.
• Documenting and publishing the effects of the organization to foster continued expansion.

From the data revealed, Doolan also developed the Distracter Theory addressing the leadership essential to sustaining and expanding networks.  

The construct of individual learning styles emerged in the 1960s with the work of Frank Reisman, who suggested that styles were determined at birth and the role of educators was to help students discover their own learning styles. Researchers recognized the importance of investigating the relationship between instructional strategies and each student's learning-style characteristics. Today, the basic tenet of learning-style theory is: Accommodation of students' individual learning styles in the instructional/educational process significantly improves academic achievement and behavior and promotes more positive attitudes toward learning.

Doolan says in the introduction “... since the time of this study, there is continued interest by additional national and international groups seeking to become members of this Network. When speaking with students, teachers, and so forth, I also observed that, once individuals recognized the reason for why people learn differently, they became more tolerant of others' diversities. I believe this is a crucial factor in expanding a ‘peaceful acceptance’ of the individual.” Doolan hopes that, after reading about the work conducted by these networking pioneers and their subsequent colleagues, other education stakeholders will do their best to better assist all individuals.

The History of the International Learning Styles Network and Its Impact on Instructional Innovation represents a unique contribution to research and scholarship; it provides a scholarly, historical analysis of the development of the International Learning Styles Network, which was a vehicle for the broad dissemination of learning-style theory, practice, and research. As instructors and teachers read The History of the International Learning Styles Network and Its Impact on Instructional Innovation, they may be empowered to identify the learning-style preferences that are best for themselves and others, and they may use these preferences in the teaching and learning process. And the model, guidelines, and theory coming out of this work may be beneficial to those people who are developing networks and are seeking reform.

Education

Successful School Change: Creating Settings to Improve Teaching and Learning by Claude Goldenberg, with a foreword by Michael Fullan (Teachers College Press)  

This highly readable book [Successful School Change] brings to light a reformer's agenda: raising expectations and student achievement, being accountable, creating a community. Goldenberg shows how these abstractions can take on meaning and achieve long term results. The work described in this fine book helps solve the mystery of improving schools. – Ann Lieberman, Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Drawing on 15 years of research and teaching in low-income schools, Claude Goldenberg provides a model of school change for those seeking to make reform happen in their school or classroom. Goldenberg, Professor in the Department of Teacher Education and Associate Dean of the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach, demonstrates the kinds of long-term planning and coordinated effort required to create lasting change. Offering a unique glimpse into the reform process, Successful School Change:

• Focuses on successful reform efforts in an elementary school in the metropolitan Los Angeles area serving a predominantly bilingual, Latino population.
• Details the partnership between school-based educators and university-based researchers working together over an extended period to improve academic achievement, primarily in language arts.
• Examines how to create a sustained, coherent, and focused school-wide effort aimed at improving identified student outcomes.
• Illustrates the everyday dynamics experienced by teachers, administrators, and students, including the many challenges involved in changing norms, beliefs, and practices and how those challenges were addressed to improve student learning.
• Concludes with a revealing but sobering chapter describing what happened after the project officially ended.

An accessible and moving story that carries the reader along with ever increasing interest and clarity, Successful School Change pushes the boundaries of what we know, and provides a powerful model for going to the next stage of reform.

Claude Goldenberg has done an extraordinary job of painting a complex and detailed picture of school improvement. For those of us concerned about making things better for children who are most at risk, this book is realistic, inspiring, and greatly needed by the educational community. – Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University

Education / Women’s Studies

Roads Taken: Women in Student Affairs at Mid-Career edited by Kristen A. Renn & Carole Hughes, with a foreword by Margaret J. Barr (Stylus Publishing, LLC.) While much has been written about new graduate students, new professionals and senior administrators in student affairs, scant attention has been paid to the issues of mid-career, particularly as they impact women.

Presented in Roads Taken are the stories of over twenty women, from widely different backgrounds, reflecting on their lives at mid-career. Women in student affairs contributed to this volume, describing the choices they have made and sharing the lessons they have learned, particularly the ever-present concerns about reconciling the demands of work and responsibilities to family and partners.

The contributors cover issues as varied as education and self-development, the dilemmas faced by dual career couples, the care of children and of aging parents, mid-career decisions and alternatives to traditional, linear career progression in student affairs administration. This volume focuses on issues that have particular and significant meaning for women: planning for the future, deciding about education and professional development, exploring the decision to have or not have children and the implications of that decision, and a series of other issues such as dealing with aging parents, loss of a job, and the future. The co-editors, Carole Hughes and Kristen Renn, synthesize the diverse points of view presented by the various authors and identify directions and issues for the future. Renn is Assistant Professor of Higher, Adult, & Lifelong Education and Coordinator, Student Affairs Administration Program, Michigan State-University; and Hughes is Associate Dean for Student Development at Boston College.

An excerpt from the foreword by Margaret J. Barr, past president of ACPA and NASPA: This is a book that you should read, think about, and share with your col­leagues. It is thought provoking, touches on a number of important issues, and makes us think just a little differently about the relationship between our shared profession in student affairs and the rest of our lives.

The choices each of us makes as we travel through life shape our present circumstances, our future life, and our past. Most of us attempt to make the choice involved, regarding which road through life to follow, on the basis of our own knowledge, experience, and skills. We are also influenced in that choice of the road by the knowledge and experience that others have shared with us. That is why this book is so important. It is filled with stories about the choices made by women at mid-career in the profession of student affairs. Each of the authors shares her experience and the reasons for the decisions she has made. We can all learn from their stories and the lessons they have learned and choose to share with us. This makes this volume a particular gift to women currently in mid-career positions in student affairs, women embarking on their personal and professional journey in student affairs, the partners of such women, their colleagues, and the individuals who supervise them.

Roads Taken is a book for women in student affairs. both those just starting out and those in mid-career who can gain insight as they read about what has worked and not worked for other women and feel supported that they are not alone.

Entertainment / Movies

Shrek: Warts by John Hopkins (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers) is a light-hearted behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Academy Award-winning movie and its sequel.  

The offbeat animated feature Shrek turned the traditional fairy tale on its ear and helped to usher in a new era in computer animation. From casts of zombies, traumatized puppets, and murderous teenagers to deal-making in Hollywood, Shrek is about following one's visions wherever they might lead. Shrek the movie, of course, features a big green ogre, his chatty sidekick Donkey, and the feisty Pricess Fiona. Shrek the book features behind-the-scenes information and trivia, and is filled with illustrations – concept art and character sketches, storyboards, character models, set and prop designs, and stills. Author John Hopkins joins the producers, directors, animators, writers, and production designers as they work through the painstaking process of inventing and animating an imaginary CG world from scratch. Hopkins, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, even manages to eavesdrop on the movies' main characters – Shrek, Donkey, and Princess Fiona, as well as newcomers such as Puss In Boots and Fairy Godmother – as they recount, in their own words, the trials and tribulations of a major production, cast and crew gossip, and the scenes that were left on the cutting room floor.

Shrek is a feel-good, entertaining book that chronicles the adventures in making the two movies. The book weaves all of the off-kilter humor and clever pop-culture references of the films into an enjoyable read for all ages. Crammed with information and terrific illustrations, it has enough Shrek lore to satisfy even the die-hard fan.

Health, Mind & Body / Religion

Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence: Christian Churches and the Global AIDS Crisis by Donald E. Messer (Fortress Press) is aimed to awaken Christian compassion in the coming years to the tragedy of the AIDS crisis.

More than twenty years into the global AIDS pandemic, the efforts of Christian congregations and denominations have been less than minimal. The worst health crisis in the world in 700 years, global HIV/AIDS epidemic is overwhelming in scale: 40 million people are infected worldwide (75% of them in Africa ); 7000 people die daily; each day 1600 persons are infected. Some 26 million people have already died.

''At this unprecedented kairos moment in human history,'' says author Donald E. Messer, ''God is calling the church to a new mission and ministry.'' Drawing on his own involvement in global AIDS education in Asia , Latin America , and Africa , Messer uses stories, basic factual information, and theological insights to motivate lay and clerical Christians to assume leadership and form partnerships with Christians around the world. Just as individuals must change their behavior to prevent and eliminate AIDS, so must congregations and church leaders. Compassion, not condemnation, is desperately needed, says Messer, Henry White Warren Professor of Practical Theology and Director of the Center for Global Pastoral Ministries at Iliff School of Theology, Denver . Financial resources for education and prevention programs are also urgently required from churches. Messer shows how churches can partner with ecumenical organizations, relief agencies, volunteer mission programs, healthcare programs, and other agencies to engage global AIDS directly and effectively.

Chapter 1 introduces the nature of the global emergency the church faces. Chapter 2 invites Christians to break out of thinking in "we-they" categories and to imagine oneself as HIV-positive. Chapter 3 notes that certain human realities, partic­ularly related to sex, are difficult for Christians to acknowledge, much less accept or tolerate; yet, understanding is required to address the AIDS pandemic. Chapter 4 struggles with stigmatization and discrimination as sins contrary to the will of God. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 cite specific challenges facing Christians who seek to pro­mote awareness, education, prevention, care, and treatment of per­sons living with HIV/AIDS. The final chapter outlines a vision of how Christians can respond to this global emergency and become partners in the ministry of hope and healing in the twenty-first century. An appendix and bibliography of helpful docu­ments conclude the volume.

A passionate and well-articulated call to mission, Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence demands answers to questions such as, why has the church failed to respond to the worst health crisis in 700 years? Similarly, why are Christians 'curiously silent and tragically apathetic' in the face of more than 7,000 deaths per day? ...

Messer's hard-hitting, plainspoken account will be the subject of study as men and women confront the truth that this is neither a 'liberal' nor a 'conservative' cause – rather it is a Christian cause. Their response in prayer, mission, service, and advocacy cannot come soon enough. – Rev. Robert Edgar, General Secretary, National Council of Churches of Christ

Health, Mind & Body

No More Knee Pain: A Woman's Guide to Natural Prevention and Relief by George J. Kessler, with Colleen Kapklein (Berkley Books) describes how women's hormones can affect their knees and provides a natural, pain-free 12-week plan for relief.

Knee pain affects millions of Americans – and women make up the bulk of sufferers. But while it is a woman's anatomy, physiology, hormones, and habits that will likely determine when and how her knee will fail, many doctors still treat a woman's knee like a smaller version of a man's knee.

No More Knee Pain presents the first knee program designed especially for women. Written by George J. Kessler, who has helped hundreds of women heal their pain and reverse degenerative problems, this is the definitive book on female knee pain. Focusing on the structural and hormonal issues that bring about knee problems in women, No More Knee Pain is a groundbreaking new approach that shows women how they can find relief without drugs or surgery.

Offering treatments for prevention and healing, Kessler, clinical instructor in medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and clinical assistant professor at the New York College of Osteopathic medicine; assisted by Colleen Kapklein, a writer specializing in health. Include in the book are information on:

• The anatomy of the knee

• How unbalanced hormones can take a toll on the joints and what to do about it

• What mainstream medicine offers women with knee pain and what it doesn't

• The importance of good posture

• Nutritional supplements

• What to eat to ease joint pain

• Exercise dos and dont’s

• Mind-body factors

• Alternative approaches

• Body mechanics, posture corrections, and knee exercises that really work – in just a few minutes a day

Filled with case studies, simple exercises and time-tested wisdom, No More Knee Pain provides readers the information they need to walk comfortably again.The book promises to have readers feeling stronger, healthier and in less pain within six weeks and pain-free in 12 weeks – if readers follow the regimen outlined.

 Health, Mind & Body

From Boys to Men: A Woman's Guide to the Health of Husbands, Partners, Sons, Fathers, and Brothers by Emily Senay & Rob Waters (Scribner)  The first book on the health of boys and men designed for women – the unsung heroes who make most families' health-care decisions – From Boys to Men dispels the notion that women are the weaker sex.

There is a shocking gap in health and longevity between males and females. From age fifty on, men are more likely to die from every leading cause of death than women; on average, men die 5.5 years earlier than women.

In one survey, researches found that one man in three had no regular doctor. One­-fourth of men said they would wait as long as possible before seeing a doctor if they felt sick, were in pain, or were worried about their health.

Women make three-quarters of the health care decisions for their families, according to the US Department of Labor. Women also do nearly 80 percent of the shopping in chain drugstores.

Women on the average can expect to make it to 79, while men can expect to live to 74. This picture is even graver for African American men who have a life expectancy of 68.

Perhaps the answer lies in social forces that teach men not to care for themselves, says author, physician, and CBS medical correspondent Emily Senay. Men's poor health is due in part to the fact that they are socialized to "tough it out" and "be a man," ignoring their own health and putting themselves at risk for accident and disease. Even in this modem age, when many women have demanding jobs outside of the home, they are still the appointed caregivers of their families. They take charge when family members get sick, push their husbands to go to the doctor, and urge them to kick unhealthy habits. Women do this not only because they love the men in their lives and are born with nurturing instincts, but also because no one else will do it and they don't want their husbands to die earlier than they should.

But they’ve never had a resource to help them understand and cope with the health issues of men and boys. Until now.

Through her own experiences and from viewer feedback, Senay realized that women are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of health information they must process when dealing with men's health issues and the challenges they face in overcoming male socialization. In From Boys to Men, she empowers women with the resources they need to make the best health care decisions and the tools to help men transition from being passive to active participants in the battle to better their own health.

Senay offers pragmatic information and anecdotes that follow males from conception through the arc of life. Mothers of sons will learn about the unique issues boys face as they grow, including:

• Health issues unique to baby boys
• The major health threats to boys – accidents and injuries
• Understanding the higher risk of learning disabilities, including AD/HD and other developmental problems
• Weight issues and body image
• Knowing how and when to discuss sexuality
• Helping teenagers take healthy risks
• Understanding the new world of sports, including pressure for early specialization.

Regarding the issues grown men face, Dr. Senay covers such topics as:

• Helping him change – how to work as partners to lose weight, improve diet, or quit smoking
• Helping him overcome denial, one of the biggest threats to men's health
• Solving bedroom problems
• Helping him lower cholesterol and blood pressure
• Recognizing and treating depression and stress
• Essential medical tests every man should have
• Snoring and the promise of rest

Mother, wife, daughter, and doctor Senay shares her readers' concern for the men in their lives – and provides the answers women have been waiting for. From Boys to Men is a call to action and a much-needed resource for concerned mothers, wives, and daughters. The book is written in a highly accessible style. Most areas are well covered, with the exception of guidance in helping the homosexual or bisexual son, brother, or husband.

Health, Mind & Body / Families

Home Doctor by Michael Peters, with a foreword by Adriane Fugh-Berman (A Dorling Kindsersley Book) is a practical guide to treating common complaints at home.

A holistic approach to health is increasingly popular among doctors and patients, and Home Doctor helps readers by providing all the information available to treat many common conditions at home. Practical and easy-to-use, it includes over 150 common symptoms, illnesses, and injuries, with advice on when readers can threat them safely and effectively and when to call a doctor. Written by Michael Peters, Consulting Medical Editor to the British Medical Association and a physician in private general practice, the book is divided into three sections:

1. Common Conditions: This section covers common conditions from fever to food poisoning, as well as conditions specific to men, women, and children. Articles provide clear, thorough descriptions of the conditions, detailed self-help advice, and traditional and nontraditional treatments.
2. First Aid: Photographs and step-by-step descriptions guide readers through procedures for treating minor first-aid situations and medical emergencies.
3. A-Z Drugs and Natural Remedies: Detailed information about over-the-counter medications, herbal remedies, and common household substances to help readers treat common conditions.

Home Doctor contains hundreds of practical tips and techniques for treating – and preventing – common symptoms and illnesses. Each condition is introduced with a short description, and circumstances under which one should consult a doctor immediately are conveniently placed first. For illnesses that can be safely treated at home, effective nonprescription treatments are recommended, as well as non-drug treatments such as peppermint oil for irritable bowel syndrome, feverfew to prevent migraines, and relaxation exercises for stress.The illustrations are a complement to the text and are helpful for demonstrating, for example, the technique for steam inhalation, how to stop a nosebleed, or how to get out of bed when one has back pain. The techniques for calming a baby with sleep problems or colic will be valuable to new parents. First aid is also covered, and a glossary of nonprescription treatments mentioned in the book is included.

Home Doctor is a useful home medical reference that contains a wealth of practical, easy-to-follow advice to turn to when any family member is sick or needs medical advice.

Health, Mind & Body / Self-Help

Winning Every Time: How to Use the Skills of a Lawyer in the Trials of Your Life by Lis Wiehl (Ballantine Books) Too often we argue our conclusions with­out the benefit of a premise, react from anger instead of presenting hard facts, feel defensive when sensing resistance, or fail to make calm, irrefutable counter­arguments. Explaining exactly what trial lawyers do and how they do it, Lis Wiehl explains how to use the skills of a lawyer in everyday situations – whether readers are trying to get a partner to take out the trash, the kids to do their homework, or the boss to come up with that raise.

"Access to the law means access to the law's techniques – the strategies of making your case," says Wiehl. "In Winning Every Time, I demystify the jargon of the law and explain the truth behind its complexities so that people can relate to the law and use it. The strategies that lawyers employ are ultimately empowering. They help us organize our logic, assess our audience, compose our passions, measure our arguments, and keep our focus on our genuine goals."

Drawing on years of trial experience, Wiehl, a prominent trial lawyer and a visible and highly regarded legal commentator and a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington 's School of Law , explains how to approach any situation calmly, rationally, and logically. Winning Every Time offers eight specific steps that are adaptable to all different kinds of advocacy,­ from articulating the point of the argument and gathering and presenting evidence to buttress it to rebutting counter-arguments and clinching a case with an effective closing argument:

• Know What You Want: The Theory of the Case – Outline the premise clearly and establish the objective accordingly.
• Choose and Evaluate Your Audience: Voir Dire – Bring the case to the person who "calls the shots" and know the perfect time and place to do so.
• Marshall Your Evidence: Discovery – Assemble all the facts that support the cause, even information that may challenge the objective.
• Advocate with Confidence: Making the Case – Present the opening argument and offer the evidence calmly and methodically.
• Counter the Claims: Cross-examination – Challenge the opponent's allegations consistently, but gently, through a series of "yes or no" questions.
• Stay True to Your Case: Avoid the Seven Deadly Spins – Keep the argument authentic by avoiding false inferences, hearsay, and subjectivity.
• Advocate with Heart: Let Me Tell You a Story – Shape the facts into a story with which people can connect emotionally.
• Sum It Up: The Closing Argument – Deliver a fervent and succinct summation of the theory and evidence ... and close the deal.

Winning Every Time emphasizes the stories of real people who have transformed their lives by following these eight steps. Says Wiehl, "The law, after all, is based on cases about real people and their stories. I am passionate about making the law approachable, understandable, and usable for ordinary people. My book gives readers the tools they need to handle life's challenges, debates, and controversies rationally, and to win at work, at home, as consumers, as partners, even as parents. Everyone who learns these simple steps will be well equipped to win the trials of their lives."  

This practical and very entertaining book isn't really about law at all, but about how to even the playing field – about how everyone else can use legal thinking to have that edge in life. – Dan Abrams, chief legal correspondent for NBC

Finally – there is something Conservatives and Liberals can agree on! Lis Wiehl's book will make you a winner! – Sean Hannity, Fox News Channel anchor, Hannity & Colmes

Don't give this book to your friends, colleagues, [or] loved ones. If you do, then they'll know the special techniques necessary to continually win arguments and convince you they're right. – Alan Colmes, Fox News Channel anchor, Hannity & Colmes

From my heart and head I love this book. It's fun, practical, and very real. With intelligence and humor, Lis Wiehl shows us how everyone can tackle life's challenges. – Rikki Klieman, legal analyst for Today, NBC-TV

Winning Every Time can guide readers with truly practical advice about how to make that case effectively – and win it hands down. Accessible, user-friendly, with result-oriented strategies, the book can help readers stay in command whenever life makes them feel as though they are on trial.

Health, Mind & Body / Aging

The Red Hat Society: Fun and Friendship After Fifty by Sue Ellen Cooper (Warner Books)  

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me

– from the poem Warning, by Jenny Joseph

Inspired by the poem, Sue Ellen Cooper, graphic designer and artist, bought herself a red hat. Soon it became her signature gift for friends turning 50. In 2000, Cooper and her posse formed the Red Hat Society, whose only rule is no rules – it was a play group encouraging woman over 50 to have fun, support each other, and find kindred spirits.

Why? Cooper believes middle-aged women have gotten used to going unnoticed. Her book The Red Hat Society describes how she is changing that. Believing that a woman's fiftieth birthday should be a time for celebration, not a milestone to be feared, when Cooper and her friends started going out to tea in full regalia (wearing a red hat and some purple is a must), the first chapter of the Red Hat Society was born. In just three years, the concept has spread like wildfire: there are now over three hun­dred thousand Red Hatters across the U.S.A., Canada, and around the world, adding an average of 40-50 new chapters EACH DAY.

Cooper explains: "We believe silliness is the comedy relief of life, and since we are all in it together, we might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together. Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next."

The Red Hat Society details the genesis of the Society and includes stories from members across the country. The book also discusses topics near and dear to Society members: marriage and children, grand-parenting, careers and retirement, aging, friendship, mothers and daughters, sisterhood in hard times, clothes, rituals, and how readers can start their own local chapters. And it talks about Pink Hatters – those who haven't quite hit that 50-year mark yet, but who want to become Red Hatters. They are allowed to join, but must don pink hats, and wear muted lavender shades until they "reduate" upon their 50th birthday and switch to full-fledged red hat regalia.

Red Hat Society members turn heads everywhere they go... The Society and their events have been profiled by The New York Times, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and other publications, and Cooper has been a guest on the Today Show.

If these middle-age revelers are over the hill, they're in denial. The Red Hatters get together monthly to be frivolous, have fun, and paint the town, well, red. – The New York Times
All across America, the high-spirited members of the Red Hat Society are banding together – and refusing to fade away ... the society celebrates the wisdom and freedom that comes with age. – Good Housekeeping

The Red Hat Society will be an essential item on every Red Hatter's wish list, and anyone who enjoys reading terrific stories, lessons learned, and wonderful friends will also snap up a copy. This is also the story of a cultural phenomenon and how one creative woman can come up with an elegantly simple, great idea.

History / Military / Vietnam

A Gift of Barbed Wire: America 's Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam by Robert S. McKelvey ( University of Washington Press) is a penetrating look at the lives of South Vietnamese officials and their families left behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. A former Marine who served in Vietnam, Robert McKelvey went on to practice psychiatry and, through his work in refugee camps and U.S. social service organizations, met South Vietnamese men from all walks of life who had been imprisoned in re-education camps immediately after the war. McKelvey's interviews with these former political prisoners, their wives, and their children reveal the devastating, long-term impact of their incarceration.

From the early years in French colonial Vietnam through the Vietnam War, from postwar ordeals of re-education camps, social ostracism, and poverty, to escape or emigration to the United States , this collection of narratives provides broad and highly personal accounts of individuals and families evolving against the backdrop of war and vast social change.

Most of the people interviewed for the book eventually reached the United States , some by the desperate route of the boat people fleeing Vietnam in unsafe vessels, others, after rigorous screening, through U.S. Government-sponsored programs. But even in the safety of the United States they had to begin anew, devoting all their remaining energies to survival.

Despite the horrors portrayed, these are tales of courage and successful survival in the broader human tragedy of war and its aftermath. McKelvey's skills as an interviewer and his knowledge of the Vietnamese community, especially the survivors, and their willingness to trust him with stories, which they usually hold closely, make A Gift of Barbed Wire both persuasive and cogent. They are also reasons why not many people in the world could undertake such a project. – Charles Holzer, University of Texas Medical Branch

A Gift of Barbed Wire is the only study of Vietnamese re-education camp experiences that includes in some detail the family members of those who were incarcerated and the effects – economic, social, and psychological – that imprisonment had on the whole family. – James Freeman, author of Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives

While crediting the courage and resilience of these families, McKelvey, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, holds a critical mirror up to our culture, exploring the nature of our responsibility to our allies as well as the attitudes that obscured the reality of war as "a grinding, brutal interplay of complex forces that often develops a sustaining energy and momentum of its own, driving us in directions that we neither anticipated nor desired.” A Gift of Barbed Wire may be seen as a searing indictment of our culture.

History / Middle East / Israel

Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb by Rodger Claire (Broadway Books) is the first authorized inside account of one of the most daring – and successful – military operations in recent history.  

You must be successful – or we as a people are doomed. This is a pivotal point in the history of Israel... – General Eitan, Chief of Staff, Israel Defense Forces, addressing the mission pilots

In 1981 a small group of Israeli pilots pulled off a daring military operations ever set in motion: the destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. Though the mission defied all odds, the air raid was a stunning success that crippled Saddam Hussein's ability to obliterate neighboring Israel.

The surprise attack shocked the world and changed history. Not only was the reactor decimated but, miraculously, all eight pilots returned home safely. For more than two decades details of the attack along with the identities of the pilots remained classified until journalist and it all in Raid on the Sun, the true story of one of the most remarkable military operations of all time.
Written with the full cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israel’s first astronaut and perished in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel, defying its U.S. and European allies, eliminated Iraq’s nuclear threat. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, Claire re-creates the tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the then-new F-16 fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000-plus-kilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligence’s black ops to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilot’s-eye view of the action on June 7, 1981 , when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula .

Raid on the Sun is an extraordinary look into the most secret, and perhaps the finest, air force on the planet. It is also a blistering indictment of the international arms industry that sell modern weapons to anyone with money. Raid on the Sun is required reading for everyone in the age of terror. – Stephen Coonts, author of Flight of the Intruder
A stunning eye-opener, shocking you with the realization of the enormous service the Israeli Air Force rendered the free world with its 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility. Claire went right to the source – the Israeli pilots who flew the mission – to tell in colorful detail the full story of this historic strike. – Walter Boyne, author of Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right, What Went Wrong and Why

Like a suspense novel, Raid on the Sun chronicles the gripping details, from the tense political climate of the period and Saddam Hussein's rise to power to the disorienting G-force effects the pilots endured as they rocketed up and away from Osirak's exploding dome. Filled with behind-the-scenes arms deals, international political games, near disastrous pilot error, and heroic sacrifice, Claire's account is an action-packed story of courage in the face of risk.

History / Canada

Victory in the St. Lawrence: The Unknown U-Boat War by James W. Essex (The Boston Mills Press) Except for the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor , those of us living in North America think of the Second World War as being fought far away. Few know that German U-boats prowled largely unchallenged up and down the St. Lawrence River , sinking unwary Canadian military and Allied merchant vessels in an attempt to stop the flow of goods, troops and armaments to war-ravaged Britain . Fewer still know that prior to the war, Hitler tried to purchase Anticosti Island , located at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, from a wealthy French chocolate-bar manufacturer.

Although much of the Second World War is well documented, missing chapters still surface even now, a half century later – stories of chilling events that might have changed the course of history. This is one of those stories, shocking in that it has not come to be widely known until now.

Victory in the St. Lawrence tells the riveting true story of how shortsighted government priorities and advanced German submarine technology allowed the Nazis to stalk shipping in Allied home waters. The book was written by James W. Essex who served with the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. Essex saw action in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters aboard the HMCS Prince Robert and the HMCS Uganda. His most exciting war duty, however, was spent patrolling the St. Lawrence River in 1942. Essex wanted to write this book for a long time, but was prevented from doing so by a fight with cancer which began shortly after the war. But in 1979 he brought together sailors, airmen and soldiers from across the U.S. and Canada to acknowledge those who were lost. He begins the book with a preface describing that event.

The book is filled with photographs from the war. It outlines the 28 ships torpedoed in the gulf, St. Lawrence River , and along Canada ’s costal waters between May 11th of 1942 and April 16th of 1945.

Victory in the St. Lawrence reveals how courageous, independent-minded Canadian heroes defended North America deep within its defenses.

History / United States

Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West by Michael A. Amundson (Mining the American West Series: University of Colorado Press ) provides the first detailed analysis of the four mining and milling communities at the center of the twentieth-century uranium booms: Moab , Utah ; Grants, New Mexico ; Uravan , Colorado ; and Jeffrey City, Wyoming.  

In Yellowcake Towns Michael Amundson brings boom towns to life with stories of local boosters who hit on uranium as their key to economic growth. Although many boasted of new refineries that provided hundreds of jobs or "Atomic Motels" and "Uranium Cafes" that epitomized their success, few towns realized the inherent problems of coping with major popula­tion swings, infrastructure worries, creeping federal dependency, or the health hazards of mill tailings and underground mines.

Amundson, assistant professor of history at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, follows the ups and downs of these uranium towns over a forty-year period from uranium's origins as atomic bomb material in the early days of the Manhattan Project and the 1950s boom to its use in nuclear power plants, the Three Mile Island accident, and the 1980s bust. He examines the interplay between ever-changing federal uranium mining policies and the uranium industry, and its effects on each community.

[Yellowcake Towns] provides us with not only an in-depth picture of the fluctua­tions of the demands for uranium over the previous half century but also a personal look at the health and economic implications on people and communities who supported such ventures at the behest of their government. – Utah Historical Quarterly

Two enduring themes of the American West are the boom-and-bust cycles of precious-metal mining and the federal government's controlling role in deter­mining land use. These themes come together in Michael Amundson's absorb­ing study of' how four mining towns developed and were eventually doomed (with enormous environmental conse­quences) by changing government priorities and the hazards of mining radioactive material." – Enterprise & Society

Yellowcake Towns provides a look at the supply side of the atomic age, and as such will appeal to historians of mining, community, and the West, as well as anyone interested in the story of atomic energy in the United States .

Home & Garden

The Bride’s Year Ahead: The Ultimate Month-by-Month Wedding Planner by Margurite Smolen, with photography by Carol Ross (Ronnie Sellers Productions)
With approximately 2.5 million weddings occurring each year at an average cost of $19,000 each, the need for a practical, efficient and easy-to-use planning guide has never been greater.

The Bride’s Year Ahead outlines the entire wedding process, starting one year before the wedding. Unlike other wedding planners that are arranged by subject, this book is organized in a progressive, month-by-month fashion that starts one year before the wedding. Written by Marguerite Smolen, former editorial director of New Jersey Bride magazine and now of Philadelphia Bride, this month-by-month countdown to the big event uses twelve tabbed sections to organizing everything from catering, guest lists and budgets to planning the honeymoon and sending thank-you notes. Each monthly chapter includes full-color photographs by wedding photographer Carol Ross, advice and timesaving tips, comprehensive guidance on what needs to be done, and assistance in planning, price comparisons and budgeting. Features of the book include:

• See-through, zippered pouches for storing business cards, receipts or brochures
• Perforated, detachable cards for each member of the wedding party
• Monthly to-do lists
• Full-color divider tabs with pockets for storage of menus, price lists, and estimates
• Planning and budgeting worksheets
• Cost-comparison charts for caterers, reception halls, florists and musicians
• Reminders and space for recording notes
• Tips for all types of weddings, including formal, informal, traditional, new-age, intimate gatherings and large extravaganzas

The month-by-month format sets the book apart from the majority of wedding planners which are organized by subject. The Bride’s Year Ahead provides a road map for planning the wedding in an easy-to-read manner. With its multi-ring design and photos from noted wedding photographer Carol Ross, the book becomes a keepsake for the bride.

Home & Garden

The House to Ourselves: Reinventing Home Once the Kids are Grown by Todd Lawson & Tom Conner (The Taunton Press) The trend is significant – approximately 70 million people in the United States have hit the half-century mark. Today's empty nesters are design-savvy and independent-minded, and with the money to do it, they are rewriting the book on architecture for the post-childrearing years. While earlier generations may have opted for traditional retirement homes, today's newly independent couples possess brave new ideas about where and how they want to live. They are creating homes that reflect the sense of individualism and quest for adventure that defined their youth.

Architects are responding with innovative solutions to the demand for homes designed for two but with room for more. The House to Ourselves, featuring hundreds of color photos and illustrations, covering renovations and remodels, brand-new homes, and even new types of communities throughout the United States , helps boomers explore a wealth of possibilities. Ideas vary from single-level designs to accommodate the physical needs of people as they grow older, to flexible open-floor plans that welcome visitors and allow space for plenty of socializing.

The twenty-one homes featured in The House to Ourselves offer design solutions for a variety of styles and geographic locations. From a sunny urban villa in Mexico to an island family lodge in Washington State, these homes abound with variety, invention, and creativity. In a renovated Rhode Island cottage, a walkway from the main house leads to a new two-story guesthouse for kids and grandkids. A Seattle beach house was designed to resemble a triple-decked ship. A Seaside, Florida home was built with a flexible floor plan that allows individual rooms or entire sections to serve as guest units to help cover costs.

The case studies presented here by Todd Lawson, architect and designer, and Tom Conner, home design writer and editor, are grouped into four main sections according to the homeowner's options, intentions, and pursuits:

• "Finding Our Place" explores the range of possibilities open to today's empty-nesters, from staying in the neighborhood to joining homes with friends and others from their generation.
• "Just the Two of Us" features houses devoted to independent couples who have decided to live at home together, with no one else in the house.
• "Separate But Together" looks at the creative ways in which parents can have the nest to themselves and still share it with visiting children, grandchildren, and friends.
• "Pursuing Our Passions" highlights homes designed around the interests, hobbies, and obsessions couples are finally able to explore once they have the dedicated space and time – whether it's one room or the entire house.

The homeowners and architects discuss the challenges they faced and the fresh solutions they found to help them create their ideal home.

Featuring 300 full-color photographs, The House to Ourselves offers inspirational ideas for the empty-nester home. Each house featured exemplifies the best design for the grown-up dreams we hold near and dear.

Home & Garden

The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement by Josiah Conder, with a foreword by Paula Pryke, with an introduction by Joseph Lapenta (Kodansha International) Josiah Conder, a graduate of the Royal Institute of Architects, came to Japan at the age of twenty-four as a British architect to play a role in the modernization of the emerging Japanese state at the time of the Meji Restoration. He served concurrently as a professor of architecture and a consultant to the Japanese government. Between 1878 and 1907 he designed over 50 buildings in the Tokyo area, which served as models to the rapidly industrializing nation. The many pupils he taught over the years at the Imperial College of Engineering formed the first generation of Japanese architects who built in the Western style. Ultimately, Conder was the central figure in the establishment of modern Western architectural and construction practice in Japan, and he remained in Japan for almost 70 years until his death.

Conder's writings on Japanese architecture and its allied arts had a tremendous influence abroad, appearing at a time when informed first-hand accounts of Japanese buildings and their environments by Westerners were still quite rare. His study of Japanese painting and flower arrangement led to the publication of the classic The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement, the 100-year-old Ikebana classic first published in 1891. The publication of this book was the first glimpse that Western readers had into the Japanese art of Ikebana or flower arrangement. With its descriptions of flowers suitable to each season and their possible arrangements, its categories such as "felicitous" and "ominous" flowers, as well as its many insights into ceremony and custom, The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement has a great deal to tell not only about Ikebana but also about Japanese culture. Paula Pryke, a Tokyo-based Ikebana scholar, provides opening commentaries to the book.

Richly illustrated throughout, and with sixteen pages of color pictures, this new edition of Conder’s pioneering work retains the period feel of the original. For modern enthusiasts of Ikebana or of more Western-style flower arranging, The Flowers of Japan and the Art of Floral Arrangement offers a fascinating insight into the sensibilities that helped form the art. In addition, a wealth of written and pictorial information on the various containers used­ – bamboo tubes, bronze vases, lacquer ware, and baskets – will appeal to those who have an interest in Oriental antiques.

Home & Garden

The Flooring Handbook: The Complete Guide to Choosing and Installing Floors by Dennis Jeffries (A Firefly Book) is the complete guide to choosing and installing floors.

Wall-to-wall carpet is no longer the only option for those who want to keep their flooring cost low.

According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, homeowners spent $130.4 billion on home improvement projects in 2003. A large portion of this figure went for flooring, as indicated by Home Depot's purchases of four flooring companies since 2002. For the millions of do-it-yourselfers, for homeowners who hire professional help, for flooring contractors, installers, and designers, The Flooring Handbook is packed with practical information.

This book is a user friendly, step-by-step guide to selecting and installing the best flooring for a specific room according to individual taste, budget, and level of expertise. To get started, Dennis Jeffries, internationally known and respected figure in the flooring industry, explains:

• How to assess the room – Readers learn to choose from the four basic types of floors: hard, resilient, wood, and soft floors.
• Planning, design and layout – From full-color photos of all the floor types, readers can make comparisons for the desired "look." Included are examples of how to lay out the floor include placing tiles in a dry run before installation.
• Preparing the site – The book covers how to repair a concrete subfloor, how to install on concrete or on a wood subfloor, ways to deal with moisture, and how to remove baseboards and moldings if necessary.

The Flooring Handbook covers all the major flooring materials. Each entry includes information on the level of installation difficulty, tools needed, floor design, what to watch out for, maintenance, advantages and disadvantages, specific preparations needed for each type of flooring, and clear instructions on installation. The following are examples of some of the different floor types, with tips and advice:

• Hard Floors – How to cut hard tiles; how to spread adhesive, space, grout, and seal tiles; all readers need to know about using ceramic, terra cotta, and mosaic tiles, as well as the use of slate, limestone, sandstone, and brick.
• Resilient floors – Using vinyl, linoleum, cork, rubber, and leather; what materials require storing in the room prior to installation; useful tips include heating up a resilient tile with a hair dryer before cutting.
• Wood floors – Choices include solid wood boards that are nailed or glued to the floor; prefinished or engineered wood boards that offer the look of wood at a cheaper price; laminated floors with a glueless "click" system; how to finish an installed wood floor or a recently sanded existing floor is explained.
• Soft floors – Choose between synthetic carpet and natural-fiber and learn techniques for cutting, seaming, stretching, and securing the edges; various types of pile from long pile to loop pile to soft and smooth velvet.

Other important features of The Flooring Handbook include full color photographs of finished rooms that demonstrate how various materials can work to the best effect in a home. Charts aid preliminary decisions, for example, one compares flooring choices for specific rooms, from entrance halls to living rooms to kitchens to stairs to bedrooms and others. Another chart shows relative levels of cost, expertise needed, and maintenance for each type of flooring.

The Flooring Handbook reveals the extensive variety of flooring options available today that can add function, beauty and comfort to any area of a home. This book is both a clear, detailed instructional guide and an idea book that helps insure that esthetic flooring choices are also practical. As such, it is a comprehensive reference for designers, decorators and homeowners.

Home & Graden / Crafts & Hobbies

Realistic Model Railroad Design: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Unique Operating Layout by Tony Koester (Kalmbach Books) is a step-by-step guide to creating a unique operating layout.

Designing a successful model railroad calls for much more than drafting a trackplan and arranging benchwork. Creating realistic towns, industries, and “work” for trains to perform can improve any layout, regardless of its size, scale, or gauge.

Withing the pages of Realistic Model Railroad Design, notable Model Railroader Magazine columnist Tony Koester offers insight into making plausible choices for the concept and construction of detailed model railroads. Photographs of his own layouts, and those of other respected modelers, illustrate his concepts throughout. Among the topics addressed in Realistic Model Railroad Design, readers learn about:

• Developing practical guidelines for a freelanced or prototype-based model railroad.
• Using graphics, paint schemes, equipment rosters, and naming conventions to create a unique, yet authentic identity for the model railroad
• Considering timeframe and geography on the layout.
• Creating a comprehensive model railroad design that makes construction, maintenance, and operation enjoyable.

Today's model railroaders expect a high level of prototypical detail in their models, as well as in their layout design and presentation, and they will get it in this book.

Upon opening the pages of Realistic Model Railroad Design readers find many helpful and insightful concepts to get them on the road to designing their own realistic model railroads. Using over 150 photos and 50 illustrations, Koester covers key topics in a straightforward style.

Home & Garden / Animal Care & Pets

Aquarium Fish Handbook: The Complete Reference from Anemonefish to Zamora Woodcats by Dick Mills (Barron’s)

• How do readers choose the perfect complement of fish for an aquarium?

• How can readers understand the nature and behavior of these slippery creatures?

Aquarium hobbyists looking to add variety to their tanks will find in Aquarium Fish Handbook color photos and concise textual profiles of more than 400 species of freshwater and marine fish. This book's easy-reference format points out key characteristics of each breed and gives information on its origins, physiology, and maintenance requirements. Each entry includes an at-a-glance guide that notes feeding habits and compatibility with other fish. The color photos are detailed to show markings and other distinguishing features. Major freshwater groups include

• Cichlids
• Characins
• Labyrinth fishes
• Catfishes
• Loaches
• Cyprinids and others.

Among the marine varieties are

• Angelfishes
• Damselfishes
• Blennies
• Pufferfish
• Eels
• Groupers
• Atlantic seahorses.

Whether readers are longtime keepers, looking to start an aquarium, or are simply fascinated by fish, Aquarium Fish Handbook is the ultimate fish breed handbook. This concise, full-color, visual reference volume merits a place on every aquarium hobbyist's bookshelf.

Home & Garden / Home Improvements

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Repair and Maintenance by David J. Tenenbaum (Complete Idiot's Guide To... Series: Alpha, Penguin Group ( USA ) Inc.)

When it comes to fixing things around the house,­ whether it means repairing a leaky faucet or unclog­ging a drain, most of us are all thumbs. But home repair is not rocket science, for example:

• Some paint has peeled. Why?

• A window refuses to slide. What's jamming it?

• The toilet is running. Is a valve stuck?

A bit of guidance goes a long way, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Repair and Maintenance urges readers not to waste money on a subcontractor. Many repairs are simple enough for ordinary readers to do themselves. David J.Tenenbaum shows readers how handy they are.

In this Complete Idiot's Guide readers get step-by-step instructions for completing common repairs­ without a contractor, comprehensive coverage of both interior and exterior repairs and maintenance, and a list of tools to have on hand – and instructions on how to use them. There are hundreds of photos and illustrations to guide readers through common repairs, and important safety tips to keep in mind while working. Tennenbaum also gives expert advice on where – and how – to set up a workable workshop and how to test, repair, and maintain ...

• Windows and doors
• Drywall and plaster
• Molding and tile
• Roofing and siding
• Decks
• Faucets
• Floors and steps
• Paint and masonry
• Heating systems
• Electrical switches and receptacles
• Plumbing
• Pilot lights and gas flames

Close enough may be good enough in horseshoes and hand grenades. In heart surgery and home repair, it helps to know what you are doing. Tenenbaum knows what he's doing. And that is why he has written an ideal treatment on the difficult topic of home repair. – Douglas Swayne, general contractor and carpenter

Tenenbaum has been writing about home repair and maintenance and practicing it for over 20 years. During this time, he has learned which tools readers absolutely need and which they can do without. He knows that selecting the right materials can make or break a project. And he knows when to call in the pros and when it’s not necessary; a can-do attitude can compensate for almost anything except expert guidance. Expert advice awaits in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Repair and Maintenance.

Home & Garden / Antiques & Collectibles

Standard Guide to 1:18 Scale Die-Cast Cars by Merry Dudley, foreword by Joe Kelly, Jr. (Krause Publications) Some words of advice: don't tell collectors of large-scale, die-cast automobile replicas that they collect toys.

They would argue they do not pay $100 for a limited edition automobile replica just to throw it in a toy box or give it to a child. These collectors demand attention to detail and authenticity and do not settle for toy models.

Driven by an explosion of popularity in large-scale, die-cast replicas among automotive enthusiasts and collectors, Merry Dudley, editor of Toy Cars & Models, offers the first reference of its kind in the hobby industry to aid collectors in identification and pricing. Standard Guide to 1:18 Scale Die-Cast Cars, devoted exclusively to large-scale models, catalogs 10 years of automobile replicas from more than 20 high-profile manufacturers. More than 1,000 full color photos depict a wide range of popular and collectible vehicles from the muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s to Formula One to contemporary cars.

This reference allows collectors to catalog, maintain and value their 1:18 scale die-cast collection. Manufacturers such as Eagle, Ertl, Mattel, GMP, Funline, Lane Collectables, Supercar Collectibles and Yat Ming are covered. Each chapter focuses a specific manufacturer and gives contact information and a brief history. Listings are alphabetically categorized according to marque and subsequently by year and offers photos, vehicle names, descriptions, stock numbers and values. Some accessories are also covered. Popular vehicles include Chevrolet, Dodge, Ford, Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Pontiac, Jaguar, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Nissan and Lotus.

No toys here ... scale automobile replicas. Standard Guide to 1:18 Scale Die-Cast Cars provides comprehensive coverage of the model car hobby without bias toward subject, manufacturer, material, or age. For discriminating collectors, the volume is the definitive resource for collectors who want to evaluate and update their collections. They can to get organized in no time .. . and fill out their wish lists for the holidays or for the next visit to the local hobby shop or car show!

Law

Private Property in the 21st Century: The Future of an American Ideal (In Association With the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy ) edited by Harvey M. Jacobs (Edward Elgar Publishing) Private property is central to American character, culture and democracy. The founding fathers understood it as key to the liberties America was designed to foster. However, over the last 200 years what one owns has evolved; ownership is different now than for an owner 200, 100, even 50 years ago. In Private Property in the 21st Century Harvey Jacobs has brought together an interdisciplinary, politically divergent group of contributors to speculate on private property’s future.

Private property’s form is crucial to contemporary debates in land use and environmental policy and management. For some, restrictions on private property are so severe as to threaten the very freedoms property is designed to protect. For others, the realities of life in the 21st century require property’s reshaping. A number of questions frame the book:

• Given that rights are evolving over time, how will they change during the present cen­tury?
• What social, technological and legal forces might structure that change?
• Is there a logical conclusion to this 'restructuring/erosion' of property rights?
• Is there any point at which society's assertions of its legitimacy goes too far?
• Are the ideals and principles of the Madison-Adams wing of the Founding Fathers about the relationship of land ownership to liberty and democracy still relevant in a world of urban wage earners, in contrast to the world of farmers, foresters and ranchers for which they were formulated?
• Does land-use and environmental planning policy undermine the American-democratic social contract?

These questions are central to land-use and environmental planning, law and economics and their answers are interdisciplinary, intersecting the intellectual and academic fields of economics, geography, his­tory, law, political science, public policy, and urban and regional planning.

The answers matter because of the political power of the property rights movement in the past, its continued push to further and deepen its agenda under the Presidency of George W. Bush, the real conse­quences for the management of landscapes, ecosystems and ecological resources, and the fact that they are key to understand­ing the nature of American society and governance. In addition, to the extent advocates of land-use and environmental plan­ning want or need to refute the arguments of the private property rights movement, and/or others whom the environmental community groups to­gether as 'anti-environmentalists,' it is the issue of private property which is most difficult and troubling.

These questions are addressed in different ways by the contributors to Private Property in the 21st Century. Contributors agreed to a set of preconditions: preparation of a paper outlining their thoughts on the key questions and a willingness to engage one another openly in dialogue. Under direction from the Lincoln Institute, the participants, as much as possible, represent a political spread, simplistically speaking, from liberal, moderate and conservative camps. Chapters and their authors include:

• Daniel W. Bromley, an economist, opens the volume with a philo­sophical exploration of the meaning of property in the American experience. He seeks to challenge some common understandings about the fixedness of property, and instead offers his assertion that property rights are a function of what he terms  ‘volitional pragmatism.’
• Jerold S. Kayden, a lawyer and city planner, is the first of three authors to explore specifically legal issues in property rights. He takes his task to be to speculate on the twenty-first century direction that the US Supreme Court might take with regard to property rights cases, by asking what lessons can be learned from the history of the court's jurisprudence in the twentieth century.
• William A. Fischel, an economist, asks why judges seem so wary of regulatory takings. In top-ten style, he offers a set of possible reasons (from number ten to number one) to explain a situation that to him seems paradoxical and illogical.
• Gregory S. Alexander, a lawyer, builds on the work of his 1997 award­winning book by taking note of a movement in legal thought and policy practice that he did not anticipate – that environmentally ori­ented legal scholars and activists seem to have embraced market-based solutions as the best strategy to achieve environmental goals. He sets out to understand this shift, and speculate on its durability.
• Robert H. Nelson, an economist and public policy analyst, shifts the focus of the volume – his issue is the twenty-first­ century future of local government in America. Swimming against the tide, he suggests the future for a governmental form many wish to pronounce as outdated can be robust, especially if it begins to act more like a form of private property.
• Donald A. Krueckeberg, an urban planner, asks some questions about the property tax system and its relation to notions of property and entitlement. For him, the challenge is about the right of non-profit organizations to be tax-exempt, and thus  treated as in possession of special, non-taxable forms of prop­erty.
• Ann Louise Strong, a lawyer and city planner, brings an international perspective to the topic. Drawing on her 1990s research in Australia, New Zealand, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, she asks some questions about the future of property for those who have not had access to it. One suggestion is that the interest and desire for property is more universal, and less country-specific, than it is sometimes understood to be.

In the final chapter, the editor, Harvey M. Jacobs, Professor, University of Wisconsin , Madison , Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, an urban planner, pulls together Private Property in the 21st Century. Drawing from the contributions of the chapters and the spirited debate that occurred when the contributors came together, Jacobs speculates on the future of private property – legally, politi­cally and socially.

The re-emergence of private property as a critical issue of social conflict within US policy and politics is explored in this comprehensive volume. Scholars, students, and professionals of urban and regional planning, geography, law, natural resources, environment, real estate, and landscape architecture will all find Private Property in the 21st Century of interest.

Law

The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and Its Aftermath by Richard J. Joseph (Syracuse University Press) offers a new and provocative interpretation of tax history and its surprising significance in current corporate debates.

• Why do congressional critics want to "pull up the income tax by its roots?"

• Why do we have an income tax in the first place – especially if its roots are no longer viable and the tax no longer serves its intended purpose?

• What are the roots of the tax system anyway, and are they, in fact, still viable?

The Origins of the American Income Tax seeks answers to those questions in the long-forgotten archives of tax history. Drawing on extensive Congressional records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book reveals how the fundamental ideas underlying our present system of income taxation evolved during 1893-1895, leading to enactment of a broad-based income tax in 1894. That initial law was intended to create a fair tax system based on the principle of "ability-to-pay." With an eye for detail, Richard J. Joseph, senior lecturer in federal income taxation at the University of Texas at Austin, explores ways in which this system would serve as a model for future income tax schemes. He explains how global and domes­tic changes rendered tariff taxation passé. And he demonstrates how significant aspects of that early law, despite its swift demise in the case of Pollock v. The Farmers' Loan & Trust Company, inspire our current federal taxation system.

This book marks the culmination of several years' inquiry into the social ori­gins of the American income tax. The Origins of the American Income Tax was written in response to the cries on the part of some congressional critics to “pull up the income tax by its roots”, and attempts to shed light on the original intent, rationale, and effect of the early income tax and thus to stimulate discus­sion and debate on the philosophical underpinnings of our present tax system.

Excerpt from the book:

In conducting this inquiry, I initially consulted the Congressional Record for 1913. It was in that year that the Sixty-third Congress enacted a permanent tax on individual incomes. This tax, merged with a corporate tax instituted in 1909, laid the foundation for our modern system of income taxation. I soon discov­ered that relatively little is revealed in the way of why Congress wanted to insti­tute a broad-based tax on net income. Indeed, I learned, the central issue in the debates of 1913 was not the impending shift to a new tax base, but rather the degree to which rates should be progressive.

Joseph writes engagingly and The Origins of the American Income Tax makes the origins of tax law accessible to both lay persons and tax scholars. Its descriptions of corporate taxation, rarely if ever divulged before, are highly relevant today.

Literature & Fiction

Understanding Thomas Mann by Hannelore Mundt (Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature Series: University Press of South Carolina) offers a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction of one of the most renowned and prolific German writers.  

In addition to analyzing Mann’s most famous works, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Hannelore Mundt introduces readers to lesser-known works, among them Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and The Black Swan. In close readings, Mundt illustrates in Understanding Thomas Mann how Mann’s masterly prose captures both his time and the complexities of human existence with a unique blend of humor, compassion, irony, and ambiguity.

Mundt, professor of German and adjunct professor in women’s studies at the University of Wyoming, takes readers chronologically from Mann’s literary beginnings in 1894 to his last novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. She considers the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche on the emergence of Mann’s literary voice, his conflicted feelings about his bourgeois background, and his life as Germany ’s representative writer in the Weimar Republic and in exile. Mundt places Mann’s works in the realistic and modern traditions and discusses his recurring thematic concerns – the individual’s rebellion against oppressive bourgeois conventions and anti-humanistic principles, the need for an unremitting questioning of authority and ostensibly absolute truths, and the antagonism between individualistic freedom and social responsibility. In light of the recent publication of Mann’s diaries, disclosing his homosexual inclinations, Mundt also identifies the textual strategies he adopted for revealing and simultaneously masking his secret sexuality.

In Understanding Thomas Mann Mann emerges from Mundt’s analysis as a writer who plays with opposing perspectives in his fictional renderings of both the alienated individual and Germany’s cultural and political history. Mundt suggests that the openness of his works, paired with his deep insights into human existence, explains his stature as a literary figure whose importance extends across the globe.

Literature & Fiction

Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film by Martin Halliwell (Ashgate Publishing House Limited) traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Focusing particularly on visual images, Images of Idiocy argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Part I covers idiocy in the nineteenth century (Romantic and Victorial Idiots, Madame Bovary, The Idiot), Part II talks about Idiocy and Modernism (The Secret Agent, Kaspar Hauser, Of Mice and Men), and Part III covers Idiocy after World War II (Wise Blood, Waterland, Such a Long Journey).

Martin Halliwell, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester, provides a lively discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are too narrow.

... an important work theoretically and in terms of cultural self-reflection. Halliwell's impressive and interesting treatment of idiocy in fiction and film draws connections among different authors and directors to evaluate the often paradoxical representations of the idiot in various cultures, artistic genres, and time periods. – Sheila Kunkle, Professor of Social Sciences, Vermont College of the Union Institute and University

Martin Halliwell's engaging study of the idiot in literature and film moves with great assurance from the enlightenment "wild child" and the innocent romantic idiot to the ambiguous postmodern "spazzing" of Lars von Trier; from Conrad and Hitchcock to Dostoevsky and Kurosawa. Attentive to the varying historical and discursive contexts inhabited by the figure of the idiot, the book offers in particular, a suggestive account of the role of the linguistic outsider in twentieth-century cinema and culture. – Timothy Armstrong, Reader in Modern English and American Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, Images of Idiocy offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its special place at the intersection of science and culture.

Literature & Fiction

The Forayers, or the Raid of the Dog Days: Selected Fiction of William Gilmore Simms by William Gilmore Simms, edited by David W. Newton, with an introduction by John Caldwell Guilds (The Simms Series: University of Arkansas Press) The best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced. – Edgar Allen Poe

Historical novelist William Gilmore Simms first published The Forayers, or the Raid of the Dog Days in 1855 at the peak of his reputation and ability. It was the sixth book in his series of eight Revolutionary War novels set in the South. Featuring characters like Hell-Fire Dick, a hardhearted, foul-mouthed looter under Tory protection, the novel describes events around Orangeburg , South Carolina , before the Battle of Eutaw.

…Full of striking adventures racily narrated. For conveying vivid pictures of the war in the south, during the Revolutionary struggles, the series of volumes to which this work belongs, may be said to be unmatched in our literature. – Graham’s, January 1856

It is cause for rejoicing that another volume… is now added to the University of Arkansas Press ’s distinguished series. I cannot imagine a more important editorial and a publishing project in the field of nineteenth-century literature. With good texts available for the first time in a century or more, it’s possible for critics, scholars, students, and general readers to study, understand, and re-evaluate this most neglected and underrated of American writers. – James B. Meriwether, McClintock Emeritus Professor of Southern Letters, University of South Carolina

Edited by David W. Newton, a noted Simms scholar and professor of English at the State University of West Georgia, the book gives general readers of literature a chance to discover Simms. For politically-oriented readers, The Forayers, or the Raid of the Dog Days is an opportunity to take oneself back to the Revolutionary war era reading the politically subversive literature of that time.

Literature & Fiction / Poetry

Subject Matter: Poems by Baron Wormser (Sarabande Books) Alice Fulton’s praise of Baron Wormser as an "unabashedly American poet" still rings true in this sixth collection, as does Sydney Lea’s view that Wormser has the gift to "speak, not sloganistically but literally, for us all." What will surprise readers is that each poem accomplishes all of this in only fourteen lines—each loose sonnet simultaneously deft, analytical, and wry.

In the tradition of works such as Robert Lowell's Notebook, Wormser uses this form to concisely pursue a wide range of topics. In Subject Matter the sixty-one poems range in tone from fierce to wry, from tender to brisk, from quizzical to evocative, just as the topics range from tattoos to Buddhism, from truck driving to Israel, from global warming to orgasms. What all the poems share is a willingness to pursue uneasy truths, a willingness to encounter how deeply the public realm touches the private realm. Wormser, Poet Laureate of Maine, 2000, teacher at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, is known as a narrative/dramatic poet. In Subject Matter he uses that impulse to generate "sonnets" of great energy, as they enact the argumentative compression for which the sonnet is justly famous.

Louis Simpson observed that Wormser has written poetry that "is an answer to those who say that contemporary poetry doesn't speak of important matters or that it is obscure."

Wormser sets his tone – vigorous, irreverent, smartass.... At their best, Wormser's poems have the mordant humor, urgency, and dread of Hemingway's short stories. They're the real thing. – The Hudson Review

Subject Matter offers poems that are utterly accessible and deeply intelligent. They can be read again and again as they celebrate the means of poetry, what Wormser calls in his poem "Anecdotes", "the beneficence of a minor spell."

Literature & Fiction / Western Adventure

Cherokee [ABRIDGED] by Donald Clayton Porter, read by Lloyd James, 4 cassettes, Approximately 6 hours(The White Indian Series #10: Americana Publishing, Inc.) In this tenth title in the White Indian Series, Cherokee, western adventure writer Donald Clayton Porter continues the saga of Renno, the Seneca. His grandson, Ghonkaba, has sacrificed his heritage to support the American patriots, and now Ghonkaba must lead his renegad Seneca band to a new homeland. The future lies in the lush Tennesse valleys of the Cherokee.

But fighting still rages on this wild frontier, as a British agent inflames the Choctaw and Creek. Only Ghonkaba, in a daring contest of strength and skill, can convince the proud Cherokee to welcome his people as brothers, while war drums signal the start of a new and deadly battle for this beautiful land. Strangers in a hostile land, the Seneca must prove their worthiness or perish. Treachery threatens to destroy their dreams, and only the dauntless courage of Ghonkaba, the defiant passion of an Indian maid, and the noble love of a young warrior can create a new brotherhood bound by honor and by blood to fight for freedom.

Read by Lloyd James, the stirring adventure Cherokee is also available in CD and as a paperback reissue from Domain.

Literature & Fiction

Some Great Thing by Colin McAdam (Harcourt, Inc.) This is the story of a city, Ottowa in the 1970s: a cold, colorless city, and of the men who made it.

Jerry McGuinty, introverted, a plasterer-turned-builder: "Thirteen neighborhoods, five thousand roofs, thirty thousand outside walls, and a rock-hard pair of hands," he tells us. "That is what I have built." McGinty is a self-made man whose wife likes a drink far more than she likes him. Eventually, he becomes one of the most powerful developers of suburban Ottawa .

Simon Struthers, a man of inherited wealth, a bureaucrat, charming, vapid, "awful Simon, handsome, disgraceful, fascinating, ruthless," who carries self-absorption to new heights. Struthers has all the trappings of success, but fills his deep longings with women. He is a man who is beginning to feel age eroding his promise until he becomes desperate to accomplish some great public works project.

With their different careers and successes, these two strangers seek to carve out their own happiness – Jerry with his wife, Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues. But their interests collide when Jerry decides that his ultimate achievement is to build a golf course in a zone protected from development, and Simon wants to construct the largest wind tunnel in the world, a place for testing "any building material subject to natural force."

Love can be suffocated by the drive to succeed, and individuals crushed by greed and progress.

Fusing his housing narrative with a thoughtful exploration of the dynamics of home, Colin McAdam, first-time novelist, delves into relationships – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. Only when both men realize what they have to lose does the narrative bring them and the story crashing together.

With skill, energy, resourcefulness, humor, and compassion for these broken characters, McAdam juxtaposes these lives to create a thoroughly contemporary world of ambition and desire, power and corruption. And the utterly blinding effects of love. Some Great Thing is one of the most thrillingly original novels in years.

Outdoors & Nature / Birds

North American Owls: Journey Through a Shadowed World by Jim Burns (Willow Creek Press) takes readers on a journey of discovering owls during his travels across the United States. Burns’ two rules of owling – that owls never appear when and where they are expected, and that owls always appear when and where they are least expected – set the tone for this excursion into the world of owls. The essays are combined with full-color images of these elusive birds, and details on each bird's habitat, range, behavior, breeding, nesting habits, calls, and migration are included. And as these birds are so often heard and not seen, an audio CD is part of the package, showcasing the calls of these mysterious birds.

Widely known and appreciated in the birding world, Burns has been photographing birds for over 20 years, and he has been published in Birding and Birders World, and for the past five years has been writing photo quizzes and an Arizona's Special Species feature for the Cactus Wrendition, the publication of the Maricopa Audubon Society in Phoenix. To create North American Owls, Burns has sought out and found each species of owl, and he shares his encounters, his epiphanies, his frustrations, and most impor­tantly, his learning about the amazing world of owls.

Other books will give you facts about owls. This one gives you facts, and superb visual images, and even more: the mystery, the poetry, the symbolism, the sheer magic of these extraordinary birds, from a man with deep knowledge of his subject. Thanks to Jim Burns for a vivid, visceral, wonderful book. – Kenn Kaufman, author of Birds of North America, A Field Guide to Advanced Birding

The stunning photography and engaging and dramatic text in North American Owls, focused on the 19 species of North American owls, will excite readers and stir their impulses to grab the binoculars and head out into the night in search of these incredible and elusive birds.

Outdoors & Nature

When the Wild Calls: Wilderness Reflections from a Sportsman's Notebook by Jack Kulpa ( Taylor Trade Publishing) Recently anointed “the master of the short outdoor essay” by no less than Gray’s Sporting Journal, Jack Kulpa picks up where his award winning book True North leaves off, somewhere in the Wisconsin woods where “the calling is a simple and uncomplicated thing, but like the mists of a brooding bog it can also be riddle-cryptic deep, and filled with mystery.”

The new collection in When the Wild Calls, drawn from work that appeared in such magazines as Field & Stream, Sports Afield, and Sporting Classics, contains thirty-two essays organized into four parts: “Lakes and Streams,” “Forests and Fields,” “Tail Feathers and Backlash,” and “Home from the Hill” – these essays have a little something for every kind of huntsman, fisherman, or nature lover. While the essays address a variety of topics, each is inspired by what Kulpa refers to as “the silent places where we have heard the wild calling.” To quote Kulpa again: I may not know many things an outdoorsman should know, but of this much I am certain: Wherever there are trees and rocks, fields and water, silence, solitude, joy and wonder, there, too, I'll hear the wild calling. It's as much a Mars response to the natural world as it is the quality of a place. It's what I feel in casting a line or taking a shot, and suddenly remembering what spirit really means.

Kulpa's collection vividly conveys the hundreds of moments that serve as a signpost in an outdoorsman’s life. Set amid the wilderness lakes and coniferous forests of northern Wisconsin, where silence is vast and solitude is teeming, When the Wild Calls guides  readers to a different and more intimate understanding of the wilderness and man's place in it. Any great outdoorsman will appreciate this collection of essays on fishing and hunting, no matter what region of the country they roam. The author's descriptions of nature, as well as his pursuit of the ultimate catch or kill will bring up fond memories; readers will feel as if they are alongside the soggy creek bed or hiding in the blind waiting for the next great adventure.

Philosophy

Contemporary Continental Thought by Stephen H. Daniel (Pearson Prentice Hall) [The] selections [in Contemporary Continental Thought] approach current continental philosophy starting from critical social theory, and continue to highlight the social-political contributions. This is a unique conceptualization among textbooks. – David Michael Levin, Northwestern University

Contemporary Continental Thought is an anthology whose focus on recent continental philosophy is unique because it brings together in one volume:

1. An overview of critical theory, structuralism, French feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism.

2. Brief introductions to (and representative and accessible selections by) twenty important figures along with their photographs.

3. Commentary on the more than thirty readings.

Stephen H. Daniel, philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, focuses on twenty authors who epitomize seminal work in the seven categories of contemporay continental thought: critical theory, psychoanalytic structuralism, feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. Each chapter discusses the philosophies of individual thinkers. Using accessible, representative readings from their works, each chapter provides guidance for understanding specific points of the selections and relates the movements in recent continental thought.

Daniel saw a need for this course: university philosophy programs have for some time offered courses in existentialism that treat Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, and Sartre as representatives of a popular and, for the most part, accessible mentality. However, it became apparent that the doctrines of Heidegger and even Sartre could not be understood without some familiarity with phenomenology; and retrieving the intricacies of Hegel, Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty shortened the amount of time instructors could devote to the very writings that had drawn students to the course in existentialism.

The development of continental philosophy especially since the 1960s soon made it apparent that a different kind of course was needed. In creating the course, Daniel chose breadth over depth for two reasons. First, because a great deal of exchange and commentary characterizes the work of current continental thinkers, it is fruitless to consider them in isolation. Second, the pedagogic elevation of major figures or works – and  the margin­alization or exclusion of others - undermines the effort in current continental phi­losophy to include literary authors, artists, and social theorists. Admittedly, the constraints of ordinary course planning require that some selection be made; but by leaving out Lacan, Kristeva, Adorno, Althusser, Gadamer, or Deleuze, he would have legitimated the narrowing of focus which they and their more well-known counterparts had rejected. As Daniel has observed in modern philosophy courses, students who are unim­pressed with Descartes or Kant as exemplars of philosophical orthodoxy are often the ones who get excited by Condillac or Vico, precisely because these latter thinkers do not fit easily into the rationalist, empiricist, or idealist categories.

Daniel thinks that it is a mistake to expect that students will understand or appreciate the continental philosophers if they are thrown solely into original sources, but without plunging into original sources they can hardly appreciate how current continental philosophers draw attention to the linguistic and material character of thought. In Contemporary Continental Thought he therefore has included general background discus­sions or overviews of significant strategies, movements, and thinkers of current continental philosophy. Before each of the readings he has added notes that high­light some of the main points developed by the author. The readings themselves have been selected either because they capture the spirit or main ideas of the writer and are relatively straightforward or are now considered central in understanding the writer's overall thought. In some cases they are short essays, in others they are selections from longer works. Together they provide readers a sense of the character and con­cerns of continental philosophy in the past forty years.

In contrast to the approach in other currently available anthologies, Contemporary Continental Thought makes two points. First, in arranging thinkers and movements in groupings, Daniel emphasizes that there are scholarly reasons to associate these thinkers. Second, despite the widespread assumption that strategies such as deconstruction, poststructuralism, and postmodernism all refer to roughly the same thing, it is important to differentiate these movements from one another. Any effort to provide a taxonomy or schema for these views may contradict the spirit of exchange that informs all of them, but for someone who initially confronts current continental philosophy, it is better to get a good sense of a position, even if it is later needs qualification.

Contemporary Continental Thought is intended for anyone who wants to understand the major ideas and thinkers of current continental philosophy, and that means getting clear on the real differences of critical theory, structuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. It is a collection of readings, which provides a sense of the variety and depth of these thinker's positions. It is accessible and timely, with excellent selections that address a variety of issues, and it is the only text of its kind on the market.

This is a well conceived volume. The editor (Stephen Daniel) is judicious and well advised in his selections of texts. – Dennis J. Schmidt, Pennsylvania State University

I feel that Stephen Daniel's text is essentially a "first", a long-needed effort to gather together these sources in Contemporary Philosophy... this text is ambitious and well needed. It fills a gap in the textbook field, and the author demonstrates a true command of the material within the anthology. – David Stegall, Clemson University

Philosophy / Politics / Social Sciences

The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen (Chelsea Green Publishing Company)  

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions. – Primo Levi

As readers of the acclaimed A Language Older than Words can attest, Derrick Jensen is a public intellectual of rare abilities. In The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen sets the bar as high as possible, examining the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture – from modern slavery and corporate misdeeds to manufacturing disasters and the destruction of the natural world.

Jensen takes no prisoners. Interweaving political, historical, philosophical and deeply personal perspectives, Jensen argues that only by understanding past horrors can we hope to prevent future ones. Exploring the lines of thought and experience that connect the atrocities of our culture throughout history, Jensen leads us on an extraordinary journey from early twentieth-century lynchings in the United States to today’s death squads in South America .

The Culture of Make Believe deftly weaves together history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology. Jensen focuses in on the dangers of abstraction and the economics that result from our viewing people and things as sources of profit and elements in systems. Therefore he chooses to look at the particular, telling many stories in great detail. He has the ability to forge these events into an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structures of Western culture.

What he comes up with is

• The valuing of production over life.
• Racism, hatred of women, and contempt for nature.
• A world in which hatred and destruction come easily.

He finds that the sources of the values that permeate our society are in imperialism, slavery, the rise of global capitalism, and the ideologies of possessiveness and consumerism.

Jensen's solution is a return to the simple life, perhaps much like that of the hunter-gatherers, yet he knows that such a turn must be "the end of civilization." At the end of the preface, Jensen writes: “This book is a weapon. It is a gun to be put into the hands of all of us who wish to oppose these atrocities, and a manual on how to use it. It is a knife to cut the ropes that bind us to our ways of perceiving and being in the world. It is a match to light the fuse.”

The Culture of Make Believe is as impeccably researched as it is intense, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking. What begins as an attempt to reconsider the nature of hatred soon explodes into a reckoning with the very heart of Western civilization.

The Culture of Make Believe is a masterpiece. - Frances Moore Lappe

Read this book. Get it for everyone you care about. - Inga Muscio

Politics / History / Military Intelligence

Strategic Intelligence: Windows into a Secret World: An Anthology edited by Loch K. Johnson & James J. Wirtz (Roxbury Publishing Company) provides the first compre­hensive set of readings in the field of intelligence studies. Loch K. Johnson and James J. Wirtz's an­thology spans a wide range of topics, from how the United States gathers and interprets informa­tion collected around the world to comparisons of the American intelligence system with the secret agencies of other nations.

The text addresses a wide range of material in­cluding: (1) the meaning of strategic intelligence; (2) methods of intelligence collection; (3) intelli­gence analysis; (4) the danger of intelligence politi­cization; (5) relationships between intelligence offi­cers and the policymakers they serve; (6) covert action; (7) counterintelligence; (8) accountability and civil liberties; and (9) intelligence as practiced in other nations.

The text also contains valuable pedagogical fea­tures including: (1) the thirty-six classic articles on in­telligence by leading experts; (2) nine thorough, chapter-length introductory essays by editors Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security and Wirtz, professor and chair of the De­partment of National Security Affairs, Naval Post­graduate School, Monterey, California, which serve as a helpful "road map" for the reader; (4) charts and figures on intelli­gence organization and leadership; and (5) a select bibliography.

Part I. Intelligence In The United States: An Introduction

1. The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community – An Historical Overview by

Aspin-Brown Commission staff member Phyllis Provost McNeil. This history of the U.S. intelligence community traces how today's intelligence institutions, while shaped by the Cold War, are based on an American tradition of supporting foreign and defense policy with clandestinely acquired information.

2. The Quaintness of the U.S. Intelligence Community: Its Origin, Theory, and Problems by Thomas F. Troy, a CIA veteran. This overview of the evolution of the U.S. intelligence "community," offers some insights into why it is so difficult to get various intelligence agencies to set aside their own agendas and work toward improving the overall intelligence picture available to policy­makers.

3. The Use and Limits of U.S. Intelligence by Frank J. Cilluffo, who has chaired two committees on homeland defense, Ronald A. Marks, a former officer at the CIA and former intelligence counsel, and George C. Salmoiraghi, attorney and re­search associate with the Global Organized Crime Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. This discussion of the "new terrorism" explains why the intelligence community was not well prepared to meet the new threat, exemplified by the September 11 terrorist at­tacks.

Part II. Intelligence Collection

4. CIA and Its Discontents by Patrick R. Riley, the nom de plume of a former case officer in the CIAs Directorate of Operations. Riley explores whether the CIA can cope with all the intelligence requirements placed on it since the end of the Cold War and calls for a more discriminating list of targets for intelligence collection.

5. Re-examining Problems and Prospects in U.S. Imagery Intelligence by John M. Diamond, who covers national security, for­eign policy, and intelligence issues for the Washing­ton Bureau of the Chicago Tribune. A perennial problem of intelligence collection is how to acquire useful knowledge from the glut of information gathered by spy machines and human agents. This article focuses on how to cope with the flood of photographs (or images) that pour back to the United States from surveillance satellites.

6. The Satellite Gap by Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington. A researcher in the National Security Archives in Washington, D.C., Richelson warns of an impending gap in U.S. surveillance satellite coverage, as one generation of "birds" begins to wear out and fall to earth without another generation ready to replace them in space.

7. The Time of Troubles: The U.S. National Security Agency in the Twenty-First Century by Matthew M. Aid, managing director in the Washington, D.C., office of Citigate Global Intelli­gence and Security. America's largest intelligence organization, the National Security Agency, is beset with a variety of bureaucratic problems according to this expert on signals intelligence, who recommends improvements in management and outreach, as well as technological remedies.

Part III. Intelligence Analysis

8. Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable by Richard K. Betts, Leo A. Shifrin Professor of War and Peace Studies in the Department of Politi­cal Science at Columbia University. This history of diplomatic and military affairs is riddled with instances when intelli­gence analysts failed to provide timely warning of what was about to unfold. Betts pres­ents a strong explanation of why intelligence failures are envitable, as well as insights into the myriad challenges that analysts must overcome to offer useful estimates of fu­ture events.

9. The Importance of Open Source Intelligence to the Military by Robert D. Steele, president of Open Sources, Inc., of Oakton, Virginia. Steele describes various types of information available on the World Wide Web and explains how these sources can he exploited by intelligence organizations to supplement the classified information they traditionally rely upon as a basis for their estimates.

10. A Policymaker's Perspective on Intelligence Analysis by Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill, who served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Direc­tor for European and Soviet Affairs on the National Security Council staff from 1989-90, and Jack Davis, a former CIA analyst, currently with the CIA's Sherman Kent Center. Policymakers must focus on the pressing issues of the day, leaving little time to peruse finished intelligence products. Blackwill offers the reader a glimpse into the lives of policymakers and analysts as they interact.

11. Intelligence Estimates and the Decision-Maker by Shlomo Gazit, a major general in the Israeli army. Gazit highlights the importance of establishing what he describes as a "reciprocal rela­tionship" between analysts and policymakers and ways to bridge the gap that exists be­tween them.

12. CIA's Strategic Intelligence in Iraq by Richard L. Russell, professor at the Near East­South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, the Na­tional Defense University. This report on the CIAs performance prior to the first Gulf War gives analysts high marks for accurate estimates of Iraqi intentions and capabilities and the performance of U.S. forces in battle.

13. Early Warning Versus Concept: The Case of the Yom Kippur War 1973 by Ephraim Kahana, a senior research associate in the National Security Center at the University of Haifa and a faculty member in the Political Science Department in the Western Galilee College. This study of Israeli intelligence performance prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur war de­scribes how the analytic framework that dominated Israeli perceptions of events in the fall of 1973 led both analysts and officials to misinterpret information about the threats

they faced.

Part IV. The Danger Of Intelligence Politicization

14. The Politicization of Intelligence       by Harry Howe Ransom, professor emeritus in political science at Vanderbilt University. This overview of how politicization occurs within the intelligence community suggests that it is inherent in the production of intelligence, because information is crucial to "aiding and preserving political power.”

15. Intelligence to Please? The Order of Battle Controversy During the Vietnam War by James J. Wirtz. In this account of a dispute that occurred within the U.S. intelligence community on the eve of the 1968 Tet offensive, Wirtz explores charges made by Samuel Adams, a CIA analyst, that a conspiracy existed to prevent accurate information about enemy troop strength from reaching senior members of the Johnson administration.

16. Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers’ ‘Pandering’ by H. Bradford Westerfield, recently retired as Damon Wells Professor of In­ternational Studies and professor of political sci­ence at Yale University. Westerfield describes the controversy surrounding the 1991 nomination of Robert Gates as Director of Central Intelligence, who was disliked by many analysts because they believed that he pressured them to produce finished intelligence that supported White House policy preferences.

Part V. Intelligence And The Policymaker  

17. Intelligence and National Action by Michael Herman, a leading British intelli­gence scholar. In this introduction to the role played by intelligence in shaping diplomacy and military action, Herman suggests that many things can influence the making of policy in peace­time and war, not just information.

18. Tribal Tongues: Intelligence Consumers, Intelligence Producers by Mark M. Lowenthal, assistant director of Central Intelligence for anal­ysis and production. Lowenthal suggests that the different bureaucratic cultures of the policymaking and intelligence communities often form a significant barrier to a close relationship between the consumers and producers of intelligence.

19. Building Leverage in the Long War: Ensuring Intelligence Community Creativity in the Fight Against Terrorism by James W. Harris, senior analyst for Central Technology

In this call for intelligence reform in the wake of the September 11 tragedy, Harris highlights the role elected officials can play in shaping the intelligence community to meet the terrorist threat.

Part VI: Covert Action         

20. Interfering With Civil Society: CIA and KGB Covert Political Action During the Cold War by Kevin A. O'Brien, a former research associate with the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies and currently a senior analyst for RAND Europe. The Cold War was in large part a subterranean battle between the intelligence services of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, as carried out by their premier intelligence services: the CIA and the KGB. O'Brien examines the political dimension of covert actions undertaken by these two intelligence behemoths.

21. Covert Action: Swampland of American Foreign Policy by Senator Frank Church, who led the 1975­-76 Senate inquiry into allegations of CIA abuses and served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Church finds in the excesses of the CIA abroad the symptoms of an illusion of American omnipotence that entrapped and enthralled the nation's presidents through­out the Cold War.

22. Covert Action Can Be Just by James A. Barry, who served as deputy director of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. Exploring the use of covert action from the point of view of just-war theory, Barry establishes benchmarks for judging the morality of this controversial form of secret foreign policy. He eschews highly invasive operations but advances an ethical justification for certain forms of covert action.

Part VII. Counterintelligence

23. Cold War Spies: Why They Spied and How They Got Caught by Stan A. Taylor, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, and Daniel Snow, a published economic espio­nage author. Why do some people commit treason against their own country? Taylor and Snow examine this question and find that the answer is simple enough: for money.

24. Bane of Counterintelligence: Our Penchant for Self-Deception by Tennent H. Bagley, who served as deputy chief of the CIA operations. Bagley claims to have found the counterintelligence enemy and the enemy is us: or at least the penchant of intelligence bureaucracies to avoid the reality that they may have been penetrated by a hostile intelligence service.

25. OSS and the Venona Decrypts by Hayden B. Peake, adjunct professor at the Defense Intelligence College in Washington. Examining the Soviet "Venona" cables intercepted by U.S. Army intelligence during the Cold War, former CIA officer Peake finds evidence of KGB and GRU infiltration of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

26. Counterintelligence: The Broken Triad by Frederick L. Wettering, retired CIA operations officer who managed clandestine operations in Europe and Africa for more than three decades. An expert on counterintelligence formerly with the CIA, Wettering sees U.S. counterintelligence as a discipline in disarray and in need of radical reform.

Part VIII. Accountability And Civil Liberties          

27. Intelligence: Welcome to the American Government by Gregory F. Treverton, who served as vice chairman of the Na­tional Intelligence Council, and is currently with RAND. Treverton explores the merits of viewing intelligence organizations as a regular part of America's government, as subject to constitutional safeguards as any other department or agency.

28. Covert Action and Accountability: Decision-Making for America's Secret Foreign Policy by Loch K. Johnson. Johnson examines the specifics of congressional oversight and its implications for co­vert action.

29. Unleashing the Rogue Elephant: September 11 and Letting the CIA Be the CIA  by Frederick P. Hitz, inspector general of the CIA from 1990 to 1998, a lecturer in public and inter­national affairs at Princeton University. In hopes of maintaining accountability without stifling the effectiveness of intelligence officers, intelligence reformers and anti-reformers have debated the proper level of supervision of the CIA. Hitz argues that the leash on the CIA is too tight and suggests how to improve effectiveness without eroding civil liberties.

30. Ethics and Intelligence by E. Drexel Godfrey, Jr., who served in the Intelligence Directorate of the CIA from 1957 to 1970, as well as the CIA's director of current intelligence. Godfrey maintains that even in the dark domain of intelligence one must have certain limits of restraint – at least in nations like the United States that have long displayed a concern for morality in the making of foreign policy.

31. Another System of Oversight: Intelligence and the Rise of Judicial Intervention by Frederic F. Manget, with the Office of Legal Af­fairs at the CIA. The judicial branch of government is a latecomer to the world of intelligence, but, as Manget notes, it is now very much a part of that world as the courts provide yet another check on intelligence abuse.

32. Congressional Supervision of America's Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee by Loch K. Johnson, former assistant to Senator Frank Church. Johnson reviews the experiences of that investigation and gauges the contribution made by the Church Committee.

Part IX. Intelligence In Other Lands

33. The Heritage and Future of the Russian Intelligence Community by Robert W. Pringle, adjunct professor with the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky. In this postmortem of the KGB, Pringle describes how it kept Soviet citizens in line and protected the regime from both internal and external political threats. He also describes the difficult task facing the Russian government as it creates new intelligence organizations from the remnants of the KGB.

34. The Fall and Rise of France's Spymasters by Percy Kemp, author of novels and articles about Islam, geopolitics, and espio­nage. Following the upheaval that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, Hemp explains how the French government realized that it needed a compe­tent intelligence community to cope with emerging challenges.

35. Controlling Intelligence in New Democracies by      Thomas C. Bruneau, who teaches in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, and is director of the school's Center for Civil-Military Relations. Bruneau describes an issue that is often overlooked in the literature on transitions to democracy: the reform of intelligence organizations and their role in fledgling democracies.

36. Intelligence and Policy by Sir Percy Cradock, who served as British Ambassador to China (1978-84) and Chairman of the British Joint Intelli­gence Committee from 1985 to 1992. Cradock assesses the performance of Brit­ish intelligence since World War II.

Loch Johnson and James Wirtz have produced a vitally important volume on the future of strategic intel­ligence. At a time when U.S. and other intelligence services are adapting quickly to the new threat envi­ronment, in part by returning to the basics of collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action, this volume offers historical parallels and contemporary discussions about the challenges of doing so. Drawing upon traditional and sometimes controversial experts, this book covers the rich intelligence landscape and incorporates updated discussions on ethics and accountability, politicization of intelli­gence, and even a section on intelligence in other lands. One of the richest volumes on intelligence in the past decade. – Kevin O’Connell, Director, Intelligency Policy Center, RAND

The editors have done a masterful job of selecting truly edifying pieces for this anthology. The approach is logical and clear, and the editors' introductions to each section are indispensable for making sense of the essays that follow. – Edward Schatz, Southern Illinois University

Directed at students, the collection of articles in Strategic Intelligence covers the range of topics in intelligence. The readings are written by renowned experts, and each article is pref­aced by a brief, framing introduction written by the editors.Taken together, they provide a deeper understanding of the field of intelligence than has yet been available – they are much needed and will be well received.

Politics / Philosophy

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt with an introduction by Samantha Power (Schocken Books) was hailed as a classic by the Times Literary Supplement when it was originally published in 1951.

Arendt considered herself a public intellectual, and her works continue to be relevant today, as they illustrate and explore fundamental questions about good and evil, the role of the individual in society, and the nature of politics. Arendt's investigation of totalitarian movements – from the rise of anti-semitism in Europe in the 1800s to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – represents one of the most important studies of its subject ever written.

Nothing in the nineteenth century – indeed, nothing in human history – could have prepared the world for the idea of political domination achieved by organizing the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all humanity were just one individual. Arendt believed that such a development marked a grotesque departure from all that had come before.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt sought to provide a historical account of the forces that crystal­lized into totalitarianism: The ebb and flow of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism (she deemed the Dreyfus Affair a dress rehearsal for the Final Solution) and the rise of European imperialism, accompanied by the invention of racism as the only possible ration­alization for it. For Arendt, totalitarianism was a form of governance that eliminated the very possibility of political action. Totalitarian leaders attract both mobs and elites, take advantage of the unthinkability of their atrocities, target "objective enemies" (classes of people who are liquidated simply because of their group membership), use terror to create total loyalty, rely on concentration camps, and are obsessive in their pursuit of global primacy. But even more presciently, Arendt understood that totalitarian solutions could well survive the demise of totalitarian regimes.

Combining history, political theory and philosophy, Arendt examines how totalitarian regimes use propaganda and terror to create and maintain the state, how individuals transform into masses, and how isolation helps dictators create the foundation for total domination.

I'm more convinced than ever that this book, conclusively devel­oped out of your clarity of vision, represents a major break­through for our political world, the first of its kind amid all the current talk of totalitarianism. Every politician ought to read it and understand it. If another author should follow you and put what you have grasped into a logical structure that is simple and easy to teach, one will still always have to go back to the source to participate in that power that enables others to see. – Karl Jaspers, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, on the German publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1915.

In a time when questions of regime power are foremost in the world community, Arendt's  work remains vital and critical reading. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power, The Origins of Totalitarianism remains an essential  book for understanding the barbarity of the twentieth century.

Politics / Social Sciences / Law

Identity and Global Politics: Theoretical and Empirical Elaborations edited by Patricia Goff & Kevin Dunn (Palgrave Macmillan) Scholars of international relations have recently renewed their attention to the concept of  identity. We see assertions that identities are relational, fluid, constructed, and multiple. The renewed interest has been both exciting and challenging, especially as scholars attempt to design empirical research projects that give prominence to identity but that are also sensitive to its complexity.

In Identity and Global Politics, editors Patricia Goff, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Utah, and Kevin Dunn, Hobart and William Smith College, draw together essays written by scholars in the field of international relations (IR) from a variety of regional, methodological, and theoretical perspectives to confront the challenges of identity-centered analysis. The contributors seek to elucidate the general meaning and methodological implications of the commonly stated, yet largely unexamined, assertion that identities are relational, fluid, constructed, and multiple.

Of particular interest to IR scholars working on identity is an effort to avoid assuming that identity is primarily and inextricably tied to the nation-state. But there are concerns that the use of the word “identity” may come at a cost; these are perhaps best articulated in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s article “Beyond Identity” in which they suggest moving beyond the term identity entirely.

However, Goff and Dunn propose unpacking the term “identity” in order to grapple directly with the conceptual ambiguity in order to increase intellectual clarity and improve methodological understanding. These are the goals of this volume, conceived at the 2000 International Studies Association conference.

Identity and Global Politics advances the international relations literature on identity by providing a sustained analytical reflection on the four features of identity that we now embrace as given: alterity; the fluidity and dynamism of identities; their multiplicity; and their constructedness. Moreover, the chapters combine empirical studies with self-conscious reflections on the methodological choices that the authors make to complete an identity-centered analysis.

An unpacking of the term identity packed with illustrations from tango to transnationalization. A welcome addition to IR's identity debates in the classroom and beyond. – Professor Cynthia Weber, Lancaster University

This timely book is a major event in scholarship in identity theory and global politics. Goff and Dunn have assembled an outstanding ensemble of established leading scholars of identity theory as well as a number of highly promising junior scholars. Their collected essays offer the reader essential theoretical insights in addition to wide-ranging original empirical research that will illuminate scholars interested in international relations theory, comparative politics and area studies as well as anyone interested in the salience of shifting social identities in a globalizing world. – Dr. Rodney Bruce Hall, Academic Director, Oxford University, Foreign Service Programme & University Lecturer in International Political Economy

Political Science / Philosophy / Anthropology / Religion / Islam

An Islamic Reformation? edited by Michaelle Browers & Charles Kurzman (Lexington Books) Over the last two decades we have seen a vast number of books published in the West that treat Islamic fundamentalism as a rising threat to the values of secularism and democracy. In the last decade scholars began proclaiming an existent or emerging “clash” between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or in the case of Benjamin R. Barber, “Jihad and McWorld.” More recently, some scholars have offered another interpretation. Focusing on the work of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, these scholars have begun to argue that what we are witnessing, in Islam contexts, is tantamount to a reformation.

An Islamic Reformation? attempts to evaluate the claim that a reformation is going on in Islam through the work of emerging and top scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy, anthropology, religion, history, and Middle Eastern studies.

Questions of interest include:

• Are we witnessing a growth in fundamentalism or the emergence of an Islamic reformation?
• What does religious practice in this region reflect?
• What is the usefulness of approaching these questions through Christian/Islamic and West/East dichotomies?

This book, edited by Michaelle Bowers, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University , and Charles Kurzman, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , brings together scholars with expertise in modern Islamic thought and practice to evaluate the idea of an Islamic Reformation. Contributors include Michaelle Browers, Fred Dallmayr, Dale F. Eickelman, Nader A. Hashemi, Salwa Ismail, Charles Kurzman, Felicitas Opwis, Mark Sedgwick, and Ernest Tucker. They assess the character and impact of various reformist trends in the Middle East and North Africa .

An outstanding, timely, original, and highly focused analysis of the theories and prospects of an Islamic reformation – a refreshing, intimate, well-informed, and insightful account of the most significant current debates among Muslims everywhere. – Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, School of Law , Emory University

Unique in its focus and scope, An Islamic Reformation? represents an emerging vanguard in the discussion of Islamic religious heritage and practice and its effect on world politics.

Politics

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America , the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani (Pantheon Books) In this look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: How did this happen?
Mamdani dispels the idea of ‘good’ (secular, westernized) and ‘bad’ (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are ‘good’ Muslims readily available to be split off from ‘bad’ Muslims masks a failure to make a crucial political analysis of our times.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim argues that political Islam emerged as the result of its modern encounter with Western power. Focusing on the reasons Islam has become politicized, Mamdani illustrates how the American government's indirect, post-Vietnam-era sponsorship of terrorist leaders in Indochina and Africa began as a way of dealing with the perceived threat of spreading Soviet influence in these regions. He discusses how America's rigidly supportive policies toward Israel have fueled the problems in the Middle East. And he explains that the West, with a distorted political analysis of Islam and its activities, continues to dangerously skew its response to them.

The terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America ’s embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam . Mamdani, a third generation East African of Indian origin, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, writes with  insight about the Reagan years, showing America’s embrace of the highly ideological politics of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan , the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the moral equivalents of America ’s Founding Fathers. The era of proxy wars has come to an end with the invasion of Iraq . And there, as in Vietnam , America will need to recognize that it is not fighting terrorism but nationalism, a battle that cannot be won by occupation.

This provocative and thoughtful inquiry raises hard and serious questions. It is a valuable contribution to the understanding of some of the most important developments of the contemporary era. – Noam Chomsky

Mamdani strips open the lies, stereotypes, and easy generalizations on which U.S. policy toward the Muslim world is founded. Dismaying but essential reading. – J.M.Coetzee

Mamdani's conclusions appear as incontrovertible as they are provocative. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim takes a critical look at both Islam’s and America's position in the world today and raises tough questions about what has happened and may very well continue to happen around the world in relation to U.S. foreign policy, terrorism, and the rise of contemporary political Islam. Best case scenario: the book will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.

Politics

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky, translated by Max Eastman (Dover Publications, Inc.) A republication of one of Marxism's most important texts, The Revolution Betrayed explores the fate of the Russian Revolution after Lenin's death. Written in 1936 and published the following year, this brilliant and profound evaluation of Stalinism from the Marxist standpoint proph­esied the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent related events.

The effects of the October Revolution led to the establishment of a nationalized, planned economy, demonstrating the practicality of socialism for the first time. By the early 1930s, however, the Soviet workers' democracy had crumbled into a state of bureaucratic decay that ultimately gave rise to an infamous totalitarian regime. Leon Trotsky employs facts, figures, and statistics to show how Stalinist policies rejected the enormous productive potential of the national­ized planned economy in favor of a wasteful and corrupt bureau­cratic system.

This Dover unabridged republication of The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going..., first published by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. in 1937, was translated by Max Eastman. Six decades after the publication of this classic, the shattering of Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe has confused and demoralized countless political activists. The Revolution Betrayed offers readers of every political persuasion an insider's view of what went wrong.

With hindsight, it is remarkable how thoroughly Trotsky understood the course the Soviet Union was taking and how well he predicted the disastrous consequences that would follow. Readers interested in the history of Stalinist Russia should take a look at The Revolution Betrayed – Trotsky offers a detailed analysis and critique of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Reference / Education

Peterson's CLEP Success 2005 by Peterson’s Publishing (Peterson’s Publishing) is designed to help students boost their test scores on all five CLEP general subject exams.  

In order to score high on CLEP exams, as well as on other tests that students have to take, it is important to work out certain strategies before taking the exam. Some of these include:

• Know how much time students have on each test.
• Understand the directions.
• Understand the question formats.
• Start with the easy questions, and then try the harder ones.
• Decide whether to guess or not.
• Practice under simulated situations.

These test-taking strategies and other topics are covered in Peterson's CLEP Success 2005. The five subject areas covered in the book are English composition, the humanities, mathematics, the natural sciences, and social sciences/history. Each chapter of this updated edition of Peterson’s CLEP Success begins with a pre-test, offers a subject overview, and ends with a post-test. It contains two full-length practice tests for each of the five general subject exams. Each test includes answer keys and full answer explanations.

Special features of Peterson's CLEP Success 2005 include:

• In-depth review for each subject.
• Hundreds of practice questions.
• Flexible study plans.

Peterson's CLEP Success 2005 also includes test-taking tips and techniques and a bonus CD-ROM with two additional full-length practice tests for each subject.

The book provides a balance of practice, review and strategy so students can improve their scores and make their study time count.

Relationships / New Age

The Love Relationship Formula: Predicting Romantic Success With Astrology by Christine Rakela (Llewellyn Publications) If a secret formula for a good relationship exists, full-time professional astrologer Christine Rakela has discovered it.

Based on eighteen years of research and thousands of astrological chart comparisons, The Love Relationship Formula relates a way to identify the strengths and chal­lenges of any romantic relationship. The fifteen factors specified in Rakela’s formula reflect the "perfect relationship." The more combina­tions that two people have in common, the better the match. Missing factors point to areas readers can work on to improve their relationships.

Readers can create their own charts or use the enclosed CD-ROM program to evaluate their relationships. Even without exact birth times readers can get a picture of relationship dynamics. Rakela, certified professional astrologer, also teaches astrology-savvy readers how The Love Relationship Formula may be applied to composite charts, marriage charts, first meeting charts, and solar and lunar return charts.

Tips for identifying the best times to meet someone special or improve a current partnership are included. And readers also learn how to release emotional blocks, get in touch with feelings, understand love, and confront old belief patterns. Charts of celebrity couples and examples from the author's astrolog­ical counseling practice are discussed to show how The Love Relationship Formula works in real life.

In this book, the author shares her formula to finding and maintaining lasting romantic happiness. Geared toward astrologers and those familiar with the specialized language of astrology and its relationship with mathematics, The Love Relationship Formula details the numerous combinations for male/female compatibility.

Religion & Spirituality / Health, Mind & Body

The Inner Journey Home: The Soul's Realization of the Unity of Reality by A. H. Almaas (Shambhala) The world's great spiritual traditions recognize that direct knowledge of the soul can lead to an understanding of the nature of the cosmos and even the Divine.

For over two decades, A. H. Almaas, pen name of Hameed Ali, has been exploring these questions by developing the Diamond Approach, a spiritual path that draws on the insights of Sufism, Buddhism, Gurdjieff, and other wisdom traditions, and combines them with the empirical lessons of modern psychological research.

According to Almass, as explained in The Inner Journey Home, in the contemporary West we find ourselves in a world in which the soul or self, the world or cosmos, and Being or God, are understood to be separate aspects of reality in two senses: first, in the scientific, religious, and philosophical dis­courses of the day, and second, in the actual experience of the modern person. Regarding the latter, the actual experience, some part of the alienation of the self from Being, and the sense of being a separate entity in a world of entities, is a result of ordinary egoic development. The alienation from the sense of Being or the divine is particularly prevalent and thorough­going in the modern Western world; this is due to a worldview that not only separates the areas of self/soul, world/cosmos, and Being/God, but almost universally does not question or investigate such separation in the spirit of truth that has been such an important part of our cultural history.

The Inner Journey Home moves toward an understanding of the fundamental unity of reality. Almaas’ approach is not a theoretical one based on an externally defined discovery of unity, as for instance the whole-systems approach that is so significant and valuable in some current scientific discussion. Although these discussions are important and resonant with hs understanding, his discoveries come from a systematic investigation of the nature of reality starting with the direct knowing of the nature of self or soul. This revelation leads, as in the great spiritual and philosophical traditions, to an understanding of the nature of the cosmos and the nature of Being or the divine.

The Inner Journey Home has two elements: first, mainly in the first half of the book, is a detailed discussion of the nature of the self or soul. Second is an overview of the path of the soul's journey to the realization and embodiment of Being, as developed in the Diamond Approach. Almaas discusses this journey in terms of five dimensions of Being, clarifying understanding of both normal and enlightened awareness, and how they relate to each other. The book refers to the inner journey discussed to this point as the journey of ascent, in which the soul ascends the various subtle dimensions of Reality.

To complete the story of the soul's path the book also discusses the journey of descent, in which the soul integrates the ground of true nature, with its five dimensions, into everyday life, which brings the soul to a real­ization of nonduality. This book presents the larger view of the Diamond Approach, its metaphysical underpinnings, its overall structure, and its metapsy­chology. Thus The Inner Journey Home can be used as the central organizing presentation of the Diamond Approach.

Since this book is a presentation of the structure of the path of the Diamond Approach, the main body of the book does not refer to other teachings, and does not quote other authors. But since some readers prefer scholarly references, and connections with other teachings and sources, they may prefer to read the endnotes and appendices in the order given in the text.

The book contains several appendices. Some develop ideas in the book and endnotes in more detail and with greater technical precision. Some address questions and themes that are tangential to the main body of the book but nevertheless amplify and develop its meaning. Some apply the Diamond Approach to other fields or areas, and some attempt to relate his understanding to other fields or cast them in the language of other fields or teachings. This book is not a rigorous philosophic treatise or an attempt to prove any theory or idea scien­tifically or logically. Even though the book utilizes philosophic discus­sions, logical reasoning, and scientific findings and procedures, it presents a teaching that developed experientially, as the expression of an inner transformation of consciousness that the author has under­gone, as have some of his associates and many students who have participated in the teaching.

This profound book offers a visionary understanding for anyone who wishes to know and traverse the territory of the psyche and the soul, the spiritual and the psychological. Almaas is among our wisest and most illuminated teachers, and this is one of his masterworks. – Jack Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

We can think of no more significant voice in the transpersonal field than A. H. Almaas. – Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, authors of Personality Types

The Inner Journey Home constitutes Almaas's most comprehensive and nuanced presentation of the Diamond Approach to date. Weaving systematic inquiry into personal experience, Almaas plumbs the soul's various structures and levels while also providing an overview of the soul's journey to its goal: the realization of a vision of reality in which self, world, and God are unified.

Religion & Spirituality / Occult

The Earth Chronicles Expeditions: Journeys to the Mythical Past by Zecharia Sitchin (Bear & Company, Inner Traditions International) is Zecharia Sitchin's autobiographical recounting of a half century of investigative expeditions to unravel the enigmas of ancient civilizations and their gods.

• Was Troy a Greek poet’s fiction or a real place where heros battled and died?

• Was there an Atlantis, or was the tale an allegorical myth?

An eminent Orientalist and Biblical scholar, Sitchin is distinguished by his ability to read ancient Sumerian clay tablets and other ancient texts. For the first time, Sitchin, author of the bestselling The Earth Chronicles series, reveal his foundational research and adventurous expeditions including vivid accounts of explorations in Greece , Thera, Crete , Egypt , the Sinai, Israel , Jordan , and Mesoamerica .

Sitchin's expeditions take readers from the Yucatan peninsula to the isle of Crete to ancient Egypt and the lands of the Bible as he explores the links between the Old World and the New World . His expeditions resulted in the evidence for his conclusions that ancient myths were recollections of factual events, that the gods of ancient peoples were visitors to Earth from another planet, and that we are not alone in the solar system. He collected evidence which led to the conclusion that there were archaeological cover-ups concerning Olmec origins in Mexico and ancient UFO artifacts in Turkey . Other quests send him through the holy sites of Jerusalem , Jordan , Syria , and Lebanon in search of evidence of extraterrestrial gods in the artifacts and murals of these ancient civilizations. In the course of his investigations Sitchin became convinced of the veracity of the Bible.

The Earth Chronicles Expeditions shows the behind-the-scenes findings in museums and archaeological sites, and contains 60 color and 159 black-and-white images from the author's personal archive, including previously unpublished photographic evidence of UFOs in biblical times. The book is a historical and archaeological adventure into the origins of mankind and a guidebook for those who wish to visit the numerous sites and museums covered in the book.

Religion & Spirituality / Philosophy

God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism by Jonathan Kirsch (Viking Compass)

• What would the world be like today if classical paganism had been tolerated rather than persecuted?

• Would we face the current threats of terrorism and war?

In God Against the Gods, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Kirsch, book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, broadcaster and adjunct professor at New York University, shatters the commonly held belief that polytheism was an unmitigated evil. Kirsch shows how the world of classical paganism was in fact based on religious liberty and diversity and how the advent of monotheism brought—in the name of true belief—holy war, crusades, martyrdom, and inquisitions.

For readers of James Carroll, Karen Armstrong, and Bernard Lewis, God Against the Gods is a fascinating look at the roots of today's most violent and disturbing conflicts. It examines the rise of monotheism and the fanaticism it has engendered. In contrast to polytheism, which entertains the idea of many gods and many ways to worship them, monotheism is based on the conviction that a single god exists and one's own rituals and practices as the only proper way to worship the one true god. The "true believer" in monotheism has no tolerance for those who hold other beliefs.

God Against the Gods tells the dramatic story of two men in the fourth century who – each acting out of his own personal passions – changed the history of the world. With a storyteller's gift for bringing history to life, Kirsch chronicles the battle between the Roman emperor Constantine, a shrewd politician who led a revolution in the name of monotheism and his nephew, Julian the Apostate, who, converting to paganism after his entire family was killed by Christian emperors, sought to work a counter-revolution in the name of polytheism.

This is an accessible and engaging study that will challenge some facile religious assumptions, but does so creatively and constructively. By showing the dynamic underlying the development of monotheism, Kirsch shows what is involved religiously in the belief in a single focus of divinity, and his book tells us a great deal about the religious imagination and its ongoing struggle for meaning and value. – Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God

Exposing another way in which the Western world hides its head in the sand, God Against the Gods is an eye-opening epic of the struggle between monotheism and polytheism in the ancient world, revealing monotheism’s dark side and polytheism’s bright one, and illuminating the ancient roots of today’s most bloody conflicts as well as the cherished idea of religious liberty. While the book breaks no new ground in the scholastic world; and more than half of it examines the point at which monotheism prevailed over polytheism in the West, the end of the Roman Empire, the book will still stand as brilliant and controversial, mainly because the story is told in a clear-headed manner and comes as a surprise to many readers.

Science / Mathematics

General Topology by Stephen Willard (Dover Publications, Inc.) Among the best available reference introductions to topology, General Topology is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Written by Stephen Willard, University of Alberta, this is a Dover unabridged republication of the edition first published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts, 1970.

The volume gives balanced treatment to two broad areas of general topology, continuous topology and geometric topology. The first, continuous topology, centers on the effects of compactness and metrization, is represented here by sections on convergence, compactness, metrization and complete metric spaces, uniform spaces, and function spaces. The second, geometric topology, focuses on the connectivity properties of topological spaces and provides the core results from general topology that serve as background for subsequent courses in geometry and algebraic topology. This core is formed here by a series of nine sections on connectivity properties, topological characterization theorems, and homotopy theory.

The chapters are divided into sub-topics that progress from introductory notes on essential set theory through subspace, products, compactness, separation and countability axioms, compactifications, and function spaces. Many of general topology's standard spaces are introduced and examined in the generous number of related problems that accompany each section – 340 in all.

General Topology’s value as a reference work is enhanced by a collection of historical notes for each section, an extensive bibliography, and an index. The book is intended as both a text and reference and is paced slowly at the beginning to be an aid to students new to topology.

Social Sciences / Women’s Studies

Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century by Anita Harris (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group). Who are the girls of the future? Confident, driven, and sexy, they rule TV and the pop charts, are featured on the covers of top magazines, and score the winning points in professional sports. Young women in the twenty-first century appear to have the world at their fingertips. These lip-gloss-wearing, credit-card-toting, can-do girls – and their less socially privileged counterparts – are intensely scrutinized. Under constant surveillance by the media, teachers, and their parents, the future girl is a vessel for modern-day desires, frustrations, and fears.

In Future Girl, Anita Harris explores the idea of the “new girl,” analyzing how and why young women have become the focus of this unprecedented attention. She explodes the myth of girlpower and describes how girls are actually participating in society from a global perspective. Harris, Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, formerly a Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York, analyzes key areas central to all girls’ lives such as school, work, agression, sexuality, consumption, and power.

Harris builds her argument by making connections between current representa­tions of young women, the material conditions within which they live, and the new ways they are able to challenge both of these. The intense interest in young women as the vanguard of the late modern social order has re­sulted in an expansion of the places they are seen and heard. The problem­atic effect of this move has been an increase in the regulation of their lives through a proliferation of sites where their biographical projects can be observed. Young women's roles in the class/race system of globalized capi­talism are secured through this new kind of regulation. However, this pub­lic focus on young women has also generated new strategies for social critique. Many young women express resistance to their part in the production of the new socioeconomic order through an activism that works by evading surveil­lance. Many respond to their visibility with skepticism; they seek new kinds of political engagement and communities to confront the seductive lure of unlimited self-making and to develop a critique of the future girl.

Chapter 1 demonstrates how and why young women have emerged as the central subjects of discourse about how to prevail in a late modern world. They have come in for particular kinds of attention through two contrasting narratives, one about girls’ power and the other about the difficulties they encounter. These discourses position young women as either “can-do" or "at risk" girls. They show how success, personal effort, and self-invention have become linked together in the project of surviving in a risk society. Through these discourses young women are disciplined into creat­ing their own successful life trajectories and taking personal responsibility if they fail. Harris explores the can-do and at-risk positions in relation to young women as workers, consumers, and mothers. She demonstrates how a normative image of the girl for our times both relies on and shores up class and race stratifications that persist despite the discourse of meritocracy.

Chapter 2 looks more closely at the construction of young women as successful in education and employment. It examines the impact of the loss of the full-time youth labor market and the new emphasis on flexibil­ity and skill development for young women. The chapter argues that young women are often perceived as beneficiaries of the new world of work and training but that this picture changes radically when a diverse range of young women's experiences is taken into account. Harris demonstrates the enormous expectations placed upon them to seize all the opportunities offered by deindustrialized and globalized labor markets, and how only a small minority of young women are structurally located in ways that make this possible. The economic shifts that characterize late modernity have had deeply divisive effects on young women, particularly in the world of work. This stratification has enormous benefits for the new economy, as it has enabled differently advantaged young women to take up positions that must be filled at opposite ends of the labor market. At the same time the accompanying narratives about choice, self-invention and opportunity ensure that stratification and disadvantage become reconfigured as merely individual limitations of effort or vision, to be addressed through personal strategies alone.

Chapter 3 explores the ways in which young women are invested in as sym­bols of ideal citizenship at a time of profound change. Harris argues that as a conse­quence of globalization, new patterns of migration, the retreat of the state, the shift toward privatization and marketization and a sense of uncertainty, no­tions of citizenship are increasingly in flux. Young women are constructed as the ideal new citizens to manage these conditions when they are imagined as economically independent, as "ambassadresses" for their nations, and as suc­cessful consumers. The neoliberal discourse that has accompanied deregula­tion and deindustrialization merges well with a version of girlpower that emphasizes self-invention and individual economic empowerment.

Chapter 4 explores some of the most significant spaces in the lives of young women. It suggests that even while they appear to be everywhere, the spaces they are expected to occupy have become more regulated. Schools, workplaces, and centers of leisure are all central to young people's constitution of self in late modernity. In these sites new kinds of surveil­lance and vigilant attention are used to construct educational, profes­sional, and consumer success as normal and possible for all young women and to manage and punish failure as individual inadequacy, through such means as at-risk programs and new policy regimes. In addition, Harris argues that another significant space for young women in late modernity is the overhauled welfare and justice systems that use new punitive measures to discipline them for "failure."

Chapter 5 examines the idea that young women are not only perceived to be seen everywhere, but heard everywhere as well. Harris discusses the prolifer­ation of research, texts, policies, and programs concerned with girls' voices. She explores the possibility that this new emphasis on eliciting young women's voices constitutes a kind of surveillance. She considers the ways in which young women's private selves and their "authentic voices" are made subject to display and regulation through a renewed interest in enhancing youth participation and eliciting youth opinions. Young people are encouraged to speak up and be heard, but this process often fails to result in enduring political change. The chapter explores what French social theo­rist Michel Foucault describes as the "incitement to discourse" as it is played out in a confessional culture that encourages young women to speak out. The conventional approaches to young people's participation and the strategies undertaken to encourage youth involvement are also analyzed from this perspective. Harris suggests that both youth voice and youth involvement have become strategies for the regulation of young women.

The overmanagement of the spaces of girls’ lives, the incitement to dis­play their life projects, and the appropriation of their discourses have seri­ous implications for young women's capacity to enact alternative, more complex, and critical subject positions beyond success and failure. These increased regulatory practices surrounding young women have made it difficult for them to express political resistance in conventional ways.

Chapter 6 explores young women's new possibilities for making commu­nity, evading surveillance, and building activism. Harris explores how young women find new places and strategies for politics that undermine and challenge investments in and uses of girls. As we shall see, young women have complex and ambivalent relationships to the normative discourses and practices about their success and power. Shaping and legitimizing the future girl is a constant struggle, the site of which is young women’s subjectivities, and the outcome of which is far from guaranteed. What is thus partly at stake in this investment in and regulation of girls is the consent of young women who may be critical of the effects of economic rationalism and individualization on their lives, particularly in terms of the negative consequences for their labor market opportunities, family opportunities and community and civic engagement. Their ability to find other ways and other places to develop such a critique, in spite of the compelling nature of the discursive space of success (and its flipside), is therefore also an important part of the story that Future Girl has to tell.

An outstanding book, a wonderfully rich analysis of the changed landscape of growing up female in the Western world. It deserves to be read widely inside and outside of the academic community. – Angela McRobbies, Porfessor of Communications, Goldsmiths College, London

Lively reading and first-rate scholarship, Future Girl is an original and important analysis of contemporary girls. Anita Harris locates the politics of girlhood within the shifting contours of risk society and the emphasis on future achievement as dependent on individual choice and responsible self­making. Harris also situates current scholarship on citizenship, spaces of regulation, and voice alongside girls' multifaceted opportunities and con­straints in risky times. – Nancy Lesko, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Future Girl provides a fresh and original perspective on what it means to be young and female at the beginning of the new millenium.

Social Sciences / Criminology / Culture Studies

Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture by Brian Jarvis (Pluto Press) From the excesses of Puritan patriarchs to the barbarism of slavery and on into the prison-industrial complex, punishment in the US has a long and gruesome history.

In the post-Vietnam era, the prison population has increased tenfold and the death penalty has enjoyed a renaissance. Few subjects in contemporary US society provoke as much controversy as punishment. In this context, Cruel and Unusual aims to offer the first comprehensive exploration of the history of punishment as it has been mediated in American culture.

This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary survey constructs a genealogy of cruelty through close reading of novels by Hawthorne and Melville, fictional accounts of the Rosenberg execution by Coover and Doctorow, slave narratives and prison writings by African Americans and the critically neglected genre of American prison films. Chapters include:

1. The Birth of a Prison Nation
2. The Scarlet Letter and the Long Forever of Puritan Punishment
3. Reading the Rosenbergs : The Public Burning and The Book of Daniel
4. Punishment, Resistance and the African-American Experience
5. The Whip, the Noose, the Cell and their Lover: Melville and Masochism
6. Inside the American Prison Film
7. Image Burn: A Minority Report on the Future of US Punishment

Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, psychoanalysis and Foucault’s influential work on discipline, Brian Jarvis, lecturer in American Studies at Loughborough University , examines a range of cultural texts, from seventeenth-century execution sermons to twenty-first century prison films, to uncover the politics, economics and erotics of punishment.

From the introduction:

In 1921 the LAPD arrested Upton Sinclair for reading aloud the Declaration of Independence in a public space. This might be read as a paradigmatic moment in the long history of punishment in North America. The mythology of the Land of the Free can be seen as an ideological smokescreen designed to obscure the systematic deprivation of liberty and infliction of punishments, both cruel and unusual.

Cruel and Unusual unmasks a fundamental conflict between legends of liberty and the secret, silenced histories of sadomasochistic desire, punishment for profit and social control. Shocking and controversial, this study brings to mind the locked-down, sadistic mental health facility in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s not surprising that it took someone ‘outside the box’ to see clearly this contradiction in American culture.

Social Sciences / Anthropology

Stories, Myths, Chants, and Songs of the Kuna Indians by Joel Sherzer, illustrated by Olokwagdi de Akwanusadup ( University of Texas Press ) The Kuna Indians of Panama, probably best known for molas, their colorful appliqué blouses, also have a rich literary tradition of oral stories and performances. Stories, Myths, Chants, and Songs of the Kuna Indians presents and elucidates the variety of their creations.

One of the largest indigenous groups in the South American tropics, the majority of the Kuna (about 70,000) reside in Kuna Yala, a string of island and mainland villages stretching along the Caribbean coast. It is here that Joel Sherzer, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin , lived among them, photographing and recording their verbal performances, which he explains are representative of the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the oral literary traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America .

This book is organized into three types of texts: humorous and moralistic stories, myths and magical chants, and women's songs. While quite different from one another, they share features characteristic of Kuna literature as a whole, including appreciation of their environment and a remarkable knowledge of their plants and animals; a belief in spirits as an important component of their world in curing, magic, and aesthetics; and, especially, great humor and a sense of play.

Vividly illustrated by a Kuna artist, Olokwagdi de Akwanusadup, and accompanied by photographs that lend a sense of being present at the performances, the texts in Stories, Myths, Chants, and Songs of the Kuna Indians provide readers with a unique aesthetic perspective on this rich culture while preserving an endangered and valuable indigenous oral tradition.

Social Sciences / Sociology

Sociology (Short Introductions) by Nicholas Abercrombie (Polity Press)

Of all the many books of this kind this is easily one of the most compelling. It is beautifully written – clear, alluring, and very readable for students. – Charles Lemert, Professor of Sociology, Wesleyan University, Connecticut

People are naturally curious about their social world. They ask themselves why they are still not married in their thirties, why there is so much crime on the streets and whether their work is really so much more rushed and intense than it used to be. These questions are not just the staples of everyday thought and conversation. They are also routinely the subjects of public pronouncements by politicians, journalists and anybody else who has the power to express their opinions to the public.

Sociology is the intellectual discipline that seeks to provide answers to such questions by the deployment of argument and evidence. In doing so it often queries basic assumptions that we all make about our social world, and therefore it has the capacity to upset settled or conventional opinions.

Sociology is an invitation to engage in this endeavor. Written by Nicholas Abercrombie, Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster, the book is intended for existing students of sociology, for those who are considering taking a course in the subject and for those who are simply wondering what sociology can tell them that they do not already know.

The book is organized into chapters, each of which is a discussion of a question that anybody might well ask themselves. The pace of discussion varies across chapters, giving detailed accounts of particular studies that seem to be successful while going fairly quickly over other areas. Chapters and subtopics include:

1. The reality of everyday life

2. Who do we think we are?
   Jazz and hash, the social construction of identity, identity and belonging, identity as difference, identity and social change

3. Who do we love?
   Intimacy and romance, partnership, private love, friendship, the self

4. Who do we talk to?
   The wider family, local communities and neighbors, associations, social networks and social health

5. Is work a curse?
   What is work? The organization of work, changing work

6. Does inequality matter?
   Inequality of condition, systems of inequality, social class, opportunity

7. Why don't things fall apart?
   The problem of order, coercion, common values, altruism, exchange and trust

8. Has the magic gone?
   Measurement and calculation, efficiency and control, moral decline and disenchantment

9. What can sociology do for you?

Abercrombie says that the book is an attempt to answer the question he has been so often asked: what it is like to teach and research in sociology? Sociology tries to describe how sociologists think, and what is distinctive about the sociological habit of mind.

Abercrombie invites readers to an intel­lectual world that is exciting, but rather than taking an analytical or theoretical approach to the qualities of mind that are distinctive to sociology, he illustrates them by showing how sociologists tackle problems that relate directly to people's lives. He shows what sociologists can say about questions that are  important and how their analyses can illu­minate and enrich the conduct of everyday life to everybody's benefit.

Sociology fulfills its purpose to intrigue readers, to draw them in, treating a set of questions that are interesting.

Transportation

The Western River Steamboat by Adam I. Kane, with a foreword by Alan L. Bates (Studies in Nautical Archaeology Series, No. 8: Texas A&M University Press) The first Western steamboat was built in 1811 in Pittsburgh , and thousands more were constructed in the years before the Civil War. The steamboat launched the West toward agricultural and industrial prosperity beginning, but its creation – by trial and error rather than by blueprints, which weren't available at the time – generated little technical literature. Decades of incremental changes created a distinctive watercraft, and the steamboat became perfectly suited to the conditions of the Western rivers, transforming the West from a wilderness into a place of economic significance.

Although steamboats no longer regularly cruise the rivers of the West, hundreds of steamboat wrecks lie deep in the sediment of the Mississippi Basin from as early as the 1830s. Well-preserved due to lack of light, oxygen, and water movement, their cargo holds may together contain the most complete collection of nineteenth-century material culture in the country. Upon excavation, archaeologists found the Bertrand and Arabia, heading to mining towns in Idaho and Montana, stuffed with imported wines, fashionable clothing, and gourmet foods, dispelling the notion that these societies were crude and uncultured. And yet with so much remaining to learn, writes nautical archaeologist Adam I. Kane in The Western River Steamboat, steamboat archaeology is still very much in its infancy. In the book, Kane, who serves at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum , traces the development of this once commonplace vessel. Kane describes the importance and impact of the steamboat in American history and complements his historical analysis with clear, concise technical explanations of the construction and evolution of Western river steamboats. Kane fills in the gaps in steamboat history by providing detailed information on steamboat structure, engines, boilers, hull construction, and machinery; and discussing excavated sites.

Using photographs, drawings, charts, and nineteenth-century sources to help readers visualize the early steamboats and the study of their remains, Kane explains how rivers dictated hull design, how wrecks happened, why stern wheelers replaced side wheelers, how hogging chains kept hulls from buckling, and why safety valves were of little use when untrained engineers regularly overloaded the boilers anyway, risking disaster.

The Western River Steamboat provides the first archaeological synthesis of a growing and demanding aspect of the field of nautical archaeology. With a combination of thorough research and archaeological analysis, Kane provides both archaeologists and historians with an amazing new research tool – a reference manual that no steamboat researcher will be able to do without. – Annalies Corbin, East Carolina University

The Western River Steamboat closes many of the gaps between 1811, when the first steamboat ran on the Western waters, and 1853, when the federal government began to inspect steamboats and their officers and to keep records of their proceedings. Analysis of the historic mine of steamboat history that lies in and along the banks of our Western rivers will be vastly expedited thanks to Adam Kane. – Captain Alan L. Bates in the book’s foreword.

Anyone intrigued by the vessel that changed America's West, in addition to those studying historical or nautical archaeology, maritime history, or cultural resource management, will find The Western River Steamboat of interest. Technical transportation historians will appreciate Kane’s concise explanations of the construction and evolution of Western river steamboats.

Women’s Studies / History / Culture Studies

Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women from Salome to Madonna by Wendy Buonaventura (Da Capo Press) From the earliest times, dance has been inextricably linked with women's sensuality. And, not coincidentally, it has been eyed with mistrust – generally by men – throughout history, from Salome to modern dance heroines like Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan.

It was only when I, a dancer myself, began delving into the subject that I realized to what extent female dancing has been regarded as confrontational and subversive. The more I explored, the more fascinated I became by this aspect of an activity which enables us to release pent-up energy and express ourselves in a language beyond words. I discovered that in every culture restrictions have been placed on women dancing, even in private. And the social position of women who went out and danced for a living was precarious. – from the Introduction

With heroines like the gypsies who created the flamenco, Something in the Way She Moves is far from a conventional history. Wendy Buonaventura brings us – from Buenos Aires, where immigrants created the tango – to Paris where laundresses "borrowed" their clients' petticoats to dance the cancan. Alone the way, we learn how dance can both reflect and shape female sexuality. From the Spanish dancer Caroline Otero who wowed them in the Folies Bergere (known as “the Andalusian Volcano,” she was said to have “the whole of the Orient between her legs”) to the writer Colette whose second career as a dancer took off when she kissed her female lover on-stage, we come to see the myriad ways sensuality can be expressed through movement – and how threatening it can be to those standing still. As Buonaventura, dancer and choreographer, explains, "Even the waltz was thought too scandalous and banned from ‘polite’ society in its early days." And still, today, the classical ballerina wears a tutu – "a  stiff halo around her knickers, which keeps her partner well away from her pelvis."

On a Flamenco Dancer with Duende – or Soul: At a festival in Spain I once met a flamenco dancer who was in her seventies. Half her teeth were missing, she smoked like a chimney and had the body of a woman who clearly enjoyed her food. But she was a demon onstage! In the dressing-room after the show I told her I thought it was amazing that she was still performing at her age. Her eyes glinted dangerously as she looked at me. "Let me tell you a secret, my dear,” she said, leaning across the table. "When you dance, there is no such thing as old age."

Buonaventura describes, for the first time, in lush prose, the world of dance through women's eyes. She moves gracefully across cultures, from the delicious tango of Buenos Aires... to Chicago and New York, where African Americans cakewalked, Charlestoned, and shimmied into the public eye, creating "jazz" dance. Here is a tale rich with anecdotes, such as the New Jersey girl picked up by police during the Roaring Twenties for dancing the Turkey Trot on her lunch hour. Something in the Way She Moves is a book for lovers of dance and lovers of history alike, an engrossing intro­duction to a little known side of a cultural legacy – a book for anyone intrigued by the sublime, sexy, and downright surreal ways we find to strut our stuff.

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