Vital Friends
Tom Rath
Gallup Press, New York
1595620079 $22.95
Annie Slessman
Reviewer
While Tom Rath worked on a study of the homeless, he found that homelessness occurred most often in people whose relationships with friends and family had collapsed. Seeing a real need for a blueprint for identifying and building upon existing relationships and developing new ones, he wrote this book.
I must admit that I put off reading this book since I felt I had little to learn. I am fortunate to have a wealth of friends. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I had a lot to learn about the maintenance of those friends and definitely had a lot to learn about making new friends. I loved a quote by President Franklin D. Roosevelt used in this book. It was written the day before his death. "Today, we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships." As Rath suggests and apparently President Roosevelt knew, the art of creating great friendships is somewhat of a science.
Rath states that studies revealed we spend one-third of our time with friends as teens. As adults that number is reduced to ten percent. I find it a wonder that we, as adults, establish new friendships given the low percentage of time spent of the process.
It is suggested in this work that your most important friend is your spouse or life partner. I know this to be a fact in my own case. My husband is the first to overlook my shortcomings and the first to celebrate my accomplishments.
A great deal of this work is dedicated to friendships established at work. There are suggestions by Rath that Corporate America does not encourage this type of friendship. In fact, many have regulations forbidding such friendships. Yet, Rath provides statistics to prove that people are happier and more productive workers if they have made friends among their co-workers.
A listing of eight vital roles is provided to identify the various types of friendships. They are listed and defined as – Builder, Collaborator, Champion, Connector, Companion, Energizer, Mind Opener and Navigator. I found that personally, my friendships fit into almost all of them.
There is a website where you can take the Vital Friends Assessment Test. But don't bother going there until you buy this book. Your very own special I.D. number is provided with the purchase of each book and you cannot access the website without that number.
I would suggest you purchase this book. You will find reasons to pat yourself on the back for the right things you are doing to maintain your own friendships. We all could use a pat on the back. An investment of $22.95 is cheaper than a tank of gasoline and will this book will take you farther down the road.
Tom Rath is the author of How Full Is Your Bucket and has spent twelve years with the Gallup Organization. He has a psychology degree from the University of Michigan and is current working on his masters at John Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Washington D.C.
Tosca's Paris Adventure
Abby Wasserman
Conflux Press
P.O. Box 12445, Marina del Rey, CA 90295
0978541502 $15.95
Barbara Jean Hicks
Reviewer
If you like quirky, you'll love TOSCA'S PARIS ADVENTURE. Where else could you find a family composed of a pear, a leek, and a cat?! In fact, this delightful tale of a small cat lost in a big city is inhabited solely by walking, talking fruits and vegetables and their pet dogs and cats. The concept sounds wacky but works wonderfully, due in large part to author-illustrator Abby Wasserman's matter-of-fact narration and the charming ink and watercolor paintings that accompany the simple text.
The unlikely trio, Poire, Poireau and Tosca, arrive in the City of Lights on holiday expecting adventure—and getting a bit more than they bargained for. They start out doing the sorts of things any tourist family might do: enjoying croissants and café au lait at a sidewalk café, looking for antiques at the flea market, buying a bouquet from the local flower seller. Then Tosca meets Basho, a friendly French tabby who invites her to watch a puppet show in the park.
Before her parents realize she is gone, Tosca has wandered off to explore the wonders of Basho's Paris—only to be trapped on the roof of Notre Dame for the night. While Tosca sleeps peacefully under the stars, Poire cries herself to sleep and Poireau sits up most of the night waiting for news of their missing cat. Finally, with the help of a gallant string-bean police sergeant and a prescient sweet potato fortune teller, the pair are reunited with Tosca, who has continued her adventures completely oblivious to the panic she has caused.
Tosca's actions are so like a curious child's in a new and exciting place, and the garden-grown couple's emotions so like the parents of a missing child, that one is quite willing not only to suspend one's disbelief in the premise, but to revel in the suspension. I am reminded of an incident from my own childhood, in a time and place much more innocent than these, when without telling anyone I walked home from school to a friend's house instead of my own. Like Tosca, the thought never entered my mind that my parents would be frantic and have the local chief of police out looking for me!
TOSCA'S PARIS ADVENTURE, in addition to being an enchanting tale to share with preschoolers and primary children, is a good jumping-off place for a discussion about safety issues when families travel together. The story also introduces general multicultural issues and some basic French vocabulary. Included in the end notes is a complete side-by-side translation of the English text into French, a glossary of French terms, and a review of the famous Paris sites Tosca visits. But the quirky characters and beautiful, Matisse-like illustrations are the draw that will bring readers, young and old, back to this charming and whimsical book over and over again.
The Stones Cry Out
Sibella Giorello
Fleming H. Revell
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
9780800731601 $14.99 www.revellbooks.com
CeeCee McNeil
Reviewer
How can no one see two men fall to their deaths in front of a building where hundreds are holding a protest rally? This and other questions need to be quickly answered before FBI agent Raleigh Harmon is forced to close the case, unsolved. But with problems stacking against her, is her love for her hometown and her added expertise in geology enough to solve the case?
Debut author Sibella Giorello plots a clever, atmospheric murder mystery that is sure to stump even the more seasoned mystery buffs. Giorello's knowledge of criminal investigation and geology forensics had me on several occasions reading the author's bio to see if she was a former investigator. Giorello's scenic portrayal of Richmond, Virginia made me appreciate a city steeped in American history.
By the time I found out who-done-it and why-they-did-it, Raleigh Harmon's flawed but endearing character whittled a space in my heart making me hopeful for a sequel. Secondary characters were developed just enough to help carry the plot to a satisfying ending. This book's a keeper!
Better Than Chocolate
Bruce Golden
Zumaya Otherworlds
3209 S. IH 35 #1086, Austin, TX 78741-6905
9781934135464 $14.99
Darlene Santori
Reviewer
Though it takes off with a bang, Better Than Chocolate, at first, may seem a bit hackneyed. But keep reading and you'll see it's the understated satirical tone of the book which makes it anything but a cliche. There's more going on here than just a search for a cop-killer, and the discovery of a conspiracy that threatens all humanity. There's a subtle undertone of gonzo social commentary.
The book's vibrant characters are both larger-than-life and true to it. Golden seems to populate his tale with stereotypes, but then breathes new life into them by turning those stereotypes on their ear. Some of the characters may seem whimsical at times, but their actions are always plausible. It's a delicate balance of parody and punchy realism, but one which Golden pulls off.
There's the celebrity talk show host known as "America's Favorite Virgin," a lusty, hard-nosed San Francisco police inspector, and his new crime-fighting partner, a Marilyn Monroe celebudroid. Yes, the film icon comes to life in Better Than Chocolate as one of several celebrity androids created for commercial purposes, to look and act like their originals. Comic juxtaposition often ensues when Marilyn's original programming seeps into her police work. And, as with most artificial intelligences, Marilyn begins to evolve beyond what her creators intended. Though along the way, she proves an annoyance to Inspector Noah Dane, their relationship evolves as well.
This book is a lively, fun read—it keeps you turning pages and wanting more. Its tone reminds me of David Brin's Kiln People, but, unlike that novel, Better Than Chocolate is more people-driven than plot-driven. However, the plot is there, and it's a dastardly one that strikes at the heart of mankind. And, if you don't already know what's better than chocolate, you'll find out as Golden's quirky cast of characters leads you through this science fiction who-dunnit (or, more accurately, who's gonna do it) towards a comically sexy climax.
Thirst
Mary Oliver
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
9780807068960, $22.00, www.beacon.org
Elaine Winer
Reviewer
Thirst ,Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mary Oliver's new collection of poetry, celebrates nature, as is usual with this lauded poet. In "Making the House Ready for the Lord," she says to the uproar of mice, the fox, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, (but really to the Lord who she speaks to all morning and afternoon): "Come in, Come in." A deer nuzzles her hand in the forest; a snake looks her in the eye and, in leaving, slithers over her bare foot. Flowers, trees, ponds, birds, she is part of all nature, and she worships God through celebrating his creatures.
She says in "Messenger":
"My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work…..
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
Oliver's work, her loving meditations on God's world, has made her one of the best selling poets in America. But since she lost her life's companion of over 40 years in 2005, the poet seems to be seeking to fill the emptiness left by death by investigating a new path. Instead of worshipping God through celebrating his world, in a sense worshipping him at second hand, one senses; in these forty-three poems, a burning thirst for the presence of God himself.
These two states of worship, the meditative and the transcendent, are defined with grandeur and subtlety in the poem "Six Recognitions of the Lord":
…Then I enter the place
of non-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud…..
…We have
lived so long in the heaven of touch,
and we maintain our mutability, our
physicality, even as we begin to
apprehend the other world. Slowly we
make our appreciative response.
Slowly appreciation swells to
astonishment. And we enter the dialogue
of our lives that is beyond all under-
standing or conclusion. It is mystery.
It is love of God. It is obedience.
She has gone from the beauty of the world (the body, the heaven of touch) to an apprehension of another mystical world "inside the cloud." It is "the dialogue of our lives" she says, and she mentions this dialogue, or conversation, again in the book's epilogue. In the title poem "Thirst," she says:.
…Oh lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers, which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.
There is much, much more in Thirst than this search for a higher spiritual world. Like Bach (and with Oliver's poetic excellence one can make such comparisons) there's a lot of joy mixed in with the worship, Oliver sings children, nature, animals, (how else talk about Christ, but to consult the little donkey that carried him to the cross?) Beauty of the natural world and its inhabitants fill almost every page.
She attempts to ameliorate her sadness, using her dog Percy like a small, hairy bandage. Percy belonged to both Oliver and her life companion, to whom this collection is dedicated (a photograph taken by Ms. Cook is on the cover.)The two had named the dog together, and Percy is ill now. We should have named him William, Oliver says, since Wordsworth almost never died. She adds, we must laugh a little at this rich and unequal world.
There are only a few poems that touch on her loss. In "Heavy" she says:
That time
I thought I could not
Go any closer to grief
Without dying
I went closer and I did not die.
In: "The Uses of Sorrow":
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Or " Letter to ---":
You have broken my heart.
Just as well. Now
I am learning to rise
above all that, learning
The thin life...
But Mary Oliver, that ecstatic poet, could never live the "thin life."
Perhaps the conflict, or dialogue, inherent in this book is best defined in the epigraph she includes on page ix. It comes from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."
In Thirst, Mary Oliver seems to be considering the flame recommended by Abba Joseph as a way of solving the emptiness death has created in her life. I hope it will not take the place of the small warm coals of sunflowers and hummingbirds she had elected as her life's work. Having just lost my husband of 54 years, I consider myself somewhat of an expert on grief, and I opt for the hummingbirds.
Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History, and Everyday Life
Neil Gillman
Jewish Lights
Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, Box 237 Woodstock, VT 05091
1580232493 $21.99
Dr. Fred Reiss
Reviewer
The late Rabbi Ted Cook in his book Thought Starters tells the story of an American Indian being given a guided tour of New York City. While walking along Fifth Ave., he stopped and asked his guide if he heard the sounds of a singing bird. The guide listened and said no. The Indian pointed to the thirty-second story of a building across the street. The guide squinted and sure enough he saw the bird.
"That's amazing," said the astonished guide.
The Indian then took a quarter out of his pocket and threw it to the ground. The people along the street stopped and immediately begin looking around on the pavement.
The Indian smiled at his guide as he said, "You hear what you want to hear."
Rabbi Neil Gillman would have us see and sense the signs of God everywhere. His book, Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History, and Everyday Life, is an anthology of sixty short homilies and exegeses. About one-third of the book comes from material that previously appeared in his tri-weekly column in The Jewish Week, where he writes as the voice of Conservative Judaism; the remainder is new material. The book is divided into four parts. Each discourse begins with an observation about life or some tension he perceives in the biblical portion of the week.
Gillman acknowledges, in the first section of the book, "Seeing God," that faith and doubt exist in a dynamic relationship. He observes that in the age of science and reason, God is absent too frequently from our lives because we are conditioned to see what we expect to see, and writes that, "The way to God is not through rational argumentation but rather through experience." In fact, he argues that we ought not to ask "where is God?" but rather "when is God." God is experienced at deeply moving moments, not just in hallowed places.
In part two, "Images of God," Gillman asks questions about the historical interaction between God and the Jewish people. God tests us, do we ever test God? How does the Covenant bind God to the Jewish people? What does it mean that God is both a punishing God and a forgiving God, and is preemptive repentance really necessary? Why does it seem that Jews always have to jog God's memory? When Gillman explores the question, can God ever be angry, he is haunted by God's order to the Israelites in Numbers 31, to wreak vengeance on the Midianites and in Deuteronomy 25, to blot out the memory of the Amalekites. Yet, the Jews were slaves in Egypt over 400 years, but there are no long-term biblical pronouncements against the Egyptians. Through exegesis, he concludes that God's anger is anthropopathic imagery. It is the Jewish people who are actually angry for the way they were treated by these two nations. For Gillman, anger is good because he abhors its opposite, indifference. Anger, not apathy, moves us to action.
Part three, called "Revelation and Law," is the most erudite of the four sections. In it, he relates the interrelationship between the Covenant, law, legend, and theology. Creation, according to the author, is tantamount to bringing order out of chaos. Revelation is an individual experience: how one relates to Judaism depends on his or her understanding of what happened on and around Mt. Sinai. Gillman concludes that Judaism, through its laws, provides a fundamentally ordered world by giving boundaries to daily life. Theology, then, and not catechism, is the center of the Jewish religion. In one discourse, he notes that the Commissioner of Baseball has near absolute authority to decide what is in "the best interests of baseball," and compares this to rabbinic authority. There is one baseball commissioner, but now there are several branches of Judaism and many voices of authority. He cautions that history shows that denouncing any one branch as being excluded by God, and thereby lacking authority, places the entire religion in jeopardy.
In the final part, "Suffering, Death, and Redemption" we read that Job is punished so that God can win a bet with the devil and the Jews suffer slavery in Egypt for over 400 years, but there is no biblical evidence that the Jewish people deserved this fate. Yet, elsewhere the Torah (Five Books of Moses) says that following the right path leads to life and blessings. Torn between biblical law and life experiences, Gillman concludes that the Bible is not a single book, but a library of books, and "one does not expect all books in a library to agree with one another." He clearly recognizes that the idea that the good suffer and the bad might not is a deep mystery for which there is no easy resolution. In the section on death, Gillman tells the story of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who died in 1972. In his last days, Heschel give an interview that was later shown on the Jewish Theological Seminary's Eternal Light program. When asked what will happen to him after he dies, he brushes aside the question, saying that he has too much to do during his lifetime, "he is prepared to let God worry about what will happen." When asked what message he has for the young listeners he answers, "Remember there is meaning beyond the mystery, and that it is our responsibility to shape our lives as if they were works of art."
Traces of God is written like a helix, a spiral staircase. As we move higher and higher we are still able look down and see the same things, but we see them from a different vantage point. For example, Gillman discusses the story of the binding of Isaac in two separate sections. In "Seeing God" he asks and answers how Abraham knew that it was God who commanded him to make Isaac a sacrifice and not just a delusion or even Satan. In "Images of God" Gillman notes that Abraham did not utter a word of protest at God's command to kill Isaac because Abraham needed to test God as well. "If God was to be reassured about what kind of man Abraham was, Abraham also needed to reassure himself as to what kind of god this God was."
Traces of God is a book to be read and digested slowly. Each homily raises fundamental questions about Jewish theology and personal beliefs. But more than that, peoples of many faiths can benefit from its theological questions and discourses because the material in the book is based on the Old Testament, ancient scrolls shared as holy books by other religions. In fact, in our age of speed and instant gratification, any time spent reflecting on who we are and what is our relationship with God and with the world is time well spent.
Mothering Mother
Carol D. O'Dell
Kunati, Inc. (USA)
6901 Bryan Dairy Road, Suite 150, Largo, FL 33777 USA
9781601640031 $19.95
Gail Rae Hudson
Reviewer
During a freshman college course in literature, one of my erudite professors suggested that novels dealt in truth more thoroughly than essays (Loren Eisely notwithstanding) because "truth is in the detail"and fiction contains profound, rather than reported, detail. I recall this as I set out to review "Mothering Mother", a recent addition to the Caregiver Memoir genre. It is Carol O'Dell's observation of narrative technique that is responsible for the sense of truth that soaks this book. Make no mistake, care giving memoirs have become a genre unto themselves. Online Journaling has, no doubt, hugely affected this development, although one of the initial in the recent wave of caregiver confessional published journals, "Elegy for Iris" by John Bayley, began as one of the offline variety. "Mothering Mother" by Carol O'Dell, is one of the newest and brightest (literally; the cover is a masterful eye catcher)offerings.
O'Dell's book is of the "old journal" school. My understanding is that these vignettes were fashioned from handwritten entries in a journal she kept while her family embraced her mother during her mother's final years. I'm not familiar with whether the contents of an elder caregiver blog have yet been published. I mention that O'Dell's book originates from a journal because its organization is part of the reason the book is successful. It's easy to pick up and put down; perfect for caregivers. I've often suspected that books written "for caregivers"don't actually reach caregivers, who have little time for reading unless it's of the technical variety. This book may actually make it to caregivers because of the ease of its organization.
I wish I could say, for the purposes of this review, that I'm familiar with this fast growing genre and can compare offerings. I'm not. I'm a full time, in home companion/caregiver to my Ancient One mother. I write about our journey at "The Mom & Me Journals dot Net". I don't read much about caregiving because it's what I do and what I write about. I probably won't read about elder caregiving until I'm no longer doing it. Even then, though, I'll probably favor reading about something else. I would not have read this book, probably wouldn't even have known about it, except for a series of coincidental mentionings and sendings. I can't say that if I hadn't read it I would have been ignorantly bereft of enlightenment. I'm glad I read it, though. Ms. O'Dell is a keen and unembarrassed observer of her situation with her mother. There's just enough history to impart understanding but not so much as to give a reader cause to wonder if the author is nursing a grudge through her writing. In addition, O'Dell's writing is tight and flows well. O'Dell's mother's character and, eventually, her own and those of her husband and daughters, shine through. I did not identify O'Dell's mother with my own. It was easy to differentiate circumstances and challenges, as well. I was grateful for this. The book allows a caregiver to absorb experience without comparing experiences.
Some cover blurbs are hailing the intimacy and honesty of this book. I'm a regular reader of a few more than a few online caregiver journals and I'm used to brutal caregiver honesty, expressed well and with inspiration, so I can't say any new frankness borders are crossed in this book. It is nice, though, to read a caregiving book that is not overtly or covertly instructional or obviously "meant" to be inspirational. I've often thought that, if I ever consider compiling a publishable memoir out of my online writings about my journey with my Ancient One mother, I would wait until some time after she was dead to compile it and consider publication. Carol O'Dell did exactly this in "Mothering Mother". She did not, however, disguise the immediacy and urgency in some of her earlier vignettes in order to serve later direction, which is refreshing. It's easy to follow O'Dell's journey to eventual peace with all facets of her final journey with her mother. It is reassuring for a caregiver who knows she will be taking this journey to read about it ahead of time. As well, O'Dell is peculiarly unsentimental about her experience, including in retrospect. She does not overtly discuss specific strengths that were developed as a result of her journey with her mother, but in the latter two parts of the book O'Dell's changes are clear and clarifying.
Would I recommend this book? I have, to specific audiences. Although I pressure myself to avoid caregiver literature, I'm glad I was introduced to this book. I think it would be particularly helpful to caregivers who are braving contentious parent-child relationships in order to honor to their elders. I believe this book would also be eye-opening for those who have a caregiver within their extended family network such as O'Dell, who is, I imagine, the epitome of sandwiching the generations, a process to which she refers as a "vise grip".
At the very least, browse it at a library or bookstore. The vignettes are neat and short. I timed myself: 1 to 1.5 minutes apiece. Better yet, click into "The Mom & Me Journals dot Net" at http://themomandmejournals.net/ and search the title of Carol's book. You'll be led to a couple of posts that quote directly from her text and discuss my caregiver/reader reactions. Plenty of opportunity to do some free reading while deciding whether to purchase or check out the book.
Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
Carol D. O'Dell
Kunati Inc.
2600 Skymark Avenue, Building 12, Suite 103, Mississauga, Canada L4W 5B2
9781601640031 $19.95
Janet Paszkowski
Reviewer
Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir is an engaging and emotionally accessible work of creative non-fiction—a series of narrative vignettes depicting the emotionally trying time Mrs. O'Dell spent caring for her mother in her final days of Parkinson disease and the onset of Alzheimer's.
Remarkably, Mrs. O'Dell wrote her heartfelt words in near real-time, while the daunting task of caring for her mother simultaneously churned her emotions and interrupted the myriad of responsibilities she was already juggling as a wife and mother to her own family.
Throughout the book, as Mrs. O'Dell openly details her private challenge of learning how to mother her mother, the reader is made to feel they are right beside her, experiencing what she is experiencing, as illustrated in the following excerpt portraying the moment when her mother's Alzheimer's progresses to the point where she fails to recognize her only daughter . . .
"Where's Carol?" Mother asks, sitting at the dining room table after dinner.
"I'm right here, Mother." I call from the kitchen as I feed the dogs.
"No, not you–the other Carol."
"Well, I'm the only one there is." This is new, I'm used to her not knowing other people, but until now, I was in the safe zone.
The audience for Mothering Mother reaches beyond the obvious population of the growing number of readers comprising the 'sandwich generation', boomers taking care of both their own children and their elderly parents. This moving chronicle of one woman's experience of mothering her mother taps into the very core of our greatest fears of illness, infirmary, abandonment, and death. It conveys a universal truth about the way people think, act, feel, and it does it with honesty, humor and love, exposing the author's emotional strengths and weaknesses in near real-time. This book is more than a memoir; it is an accomplished debut work of creative nonfiction.
Inherit the Land: Jim Crow Meets Miss Maggie's Will
Gene Stowe, author
Carl A. Sergio, illustrator
University Press of Mississippi
3825 Ridgewood Road, Jackson, MS 39211
9781578068647 $35.00 www.upress.state.ms.us 1-800-737-7788
Mary Dixon
Reviewer
In a reportorial account of a tug-of-war for an acreage and the possessions of two white women between a hundred of their cousins and their designated inheritors (a black man and his daughter), Gene Stowe, an experienced journalist, has used events surrounding an historical trial, set in the Jim Crow South, to create an historiography which both criticizes racist attitudes and celebrates the courage of persons who refused to be tainted by them. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, civil right's gains for black Americans were severely inhibited. White politicians passed laws, later termed Jim Crow laws (named after a racist depiction, in minstrel shows, of an uneducated black man), that limited black persons access to white facilities and hindered their ability to advance or to participate in white society in any way. Stowe's book, Inherit the Land, is an account based on his critical analysis, evaluation, and selection of trial transcripts, personal testimonies, newspaper accounts and other sources. He depicts a conflict that involves civil rights, in this case, the right of two white women to bequeath their property to black persons and the right of the black inheritors to receive the property.
According to noted historians Will and Ariel Durant, historiography is an industry, an art, and a philosophyian industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of the materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment." (The Lessons of History, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968, p.12.) Stowe's account is an historiography that has revealed a mass of information about participants in the trial, about the trial itself, and about data surrounding the persons and locale. He has then artfully rendered the information into a story that facilitates an informed evaluation that calls into question perceptions about the ?Jim Crow? South, and the people who lived in it. His literary portrayal of the events of this trial moves forward with breadth, taking into consideration the existing attitudes and stereotypes that circulated among a white hierarchy that included racism exhibited by either a paternalistic condescension or an outright hostility toward black people. In Stowe's account, the prejudice that the two white sisters had to be crazy to consider black people as their heirs is played against the conviction that ?the natural relationship in this case crossed the color line (259). In this remarkable story, kinship is possible between people of different races, even in the Jim Crow South.
Stowe's historiography painstakingly reveals the motives and background of the litigants on both sides, and in his descriptions, and in the accompanying photographs, and drawings by Carl A. Sergio, the participants and the place are manifested. He draws the reader into the scene, into the courtroom, and into the family relationship between the two white women and their black heirs. If his story lacks emotive content in other respects, such as in its limitation, as a non-fiction historical account that prohibits access to the thoughts of the characters, it is still able to draw an empathetic response from the reader toward the situation and loneliness of the white women by its intelligent rendering of facts and events. Stowe, in his conviction that all events and facts must be interpreted, has used this story to convince his readers that there were people who could rise above the stereotypical conventions that have dominated previous conceptions about the Jim Crow South. He wants the reader to aspire to the courage of a personal commitment to do the right thing, like the white women in the book who ignored color lines because of their sheer goodness.
Stowe challenges both the ethos that people are subject to the times in which they live, and a simplistic view of historical events that paints all participants with one brush. His story clearly separates those who were blatant racists and those who were ordinary people, like the members of the jury, who saw beyond the color issue and decided the case impartially. He challenges the conventional view that all white Southerners of this period were aligned with either an anti-black sentiment or a patronizing superiority toward blacks. In this particular story, Stowe frames the complexities of racial relationships as he describes the events, people, and the local political climate. He spikes the narrative with a philosophic understanding of the intricate nuances of any relationship and the varying interpretations of any event. To explain the events in the lives of the two white women and the trial that challenges their will, Stowe has collaged details about the prevailing attitudes of white separatists, background information about treatment of black persons, including lynchings and documented injustices, alongside the courageous acts of some white Southerners whose indifference to color startled many of their contemporaries.
Authentic source materials abound in Stowe's work and his narrative lends itself to a scholarly interpretation of the real struggles that affected both black and white persons in the era after the civil war. His documentary evidence will provoke new discussions about the social structure of the Jim Crow South, and the anomalies that challenge a perception that all white Southerners were part of a collective identity that manifested itself in some form of racism. Stowe has created both a reliable portrayal of an historical event, because it is intricately balanced with detail and incident, and a meaningful philosophic interpretation, because it is weighted with an appreciative perspective of the impact of ordinary persons who were able to circumvent the cultural biases that governed their time.
The Pesthouse
Jim Crace
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
1745 Broadway, 22nd floor, New York, NY 10019
9780385520751 $24.95
Michael Frechette
Reviewer
Go East, Young Man…Then West
As of late, several authors have been in a post-apocalyptic mood, and Jim Crace is among them, whose recently published new novel, The Pesthouse, certainly follows suit. Unfortunately for Crace, his novel is one the most recent in this current trend, and it seems overshadowed by works such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Will Self's The Book of Dave (critics and reviewers have already noted the similarities, especially to The Road). Nevertheless, The Pesthouse has its own unique place among the rest, recounting the journey east of Franklin and Margaret as they try to escape an anarchic America of the future that has been completely deindustrialized by geological shifts. The elements that define contemporary American society – rule of law, agricultural abundance, thriving urban centers, and advanced technological sophistication – have been eradicated, and the book's futuristic Americans are living in a primitive world where they fear starvation and unexpected death. As a result, those who are able have started the journey east to the shore, where it is rumored that immense ships will deliver hopeful Americans to the promised land of Europe or elsewhere to start anew. In this brilliant inversion of manifest destiny, Crace offers readers the ideological antithesis of westward expansion; he vividly imagines America's last days, where people empty the country rather than fill it, where those in search of opportunity, unlike their ancestors, have to travel east instead of west.
The story begins with the death of an entire riverside community, Ferrytown, whose opportunistic inhabitants have been making money delivering travelers from one side of their river to the other. The mass deaths occur almost instantaneously during a single night due to toxic fumes that are released as the land shifts, a geological reality of this future world that hints at what kind of natural disaster might have eliminated contemporary society. In the next chapter, Crace backtracks to several days before this tragic incident, where one of the novel's main characters, Franklin, has started his journey to the east coast with his brother Jackson. With Franklin staying behind to nurse an injury, Jackson goes on ahead to Ferrytown only to meet his ultimate demise. In the meantime, Margaret, a Ferrytown inhabitant, ironically escapes the communal death when she contracts the fatal "flux" and must shave her head and live in an isolated hut called the pesthouse uphill from the town. Eventually, Franklin makes his way towards Ferrytown, discovers the pesthouse and its very ill inhabitant, and uncharacteristically decides to risk his safety and stay with her until she is well.
From this point, the novel assumes the form of a fast-paced, well-plotted adventure story. During their journey east, Margaret and Franklin, two virtual strangers, become united against the hardships of the country's landscape and approach something resembling love, even though they are separated for a time. In the midst of their travels, Franklin is kidnapped and enslaved by a gang of violent men, while Margaret inadvertently becomes the surrogate mother for another family's baby. Once near the east coast, she falls in with a group of extremists known as the Finger Baptists who believe that metal is evil. Their leaders, the Helpless Gentleman, in a comical inversion of the Protestant work ethic, refuse to work since it ultimately leads to metallic industrialization, which they believe led to the downfall of America's prior civilization. Eventually, Franklin and Margaret are reunited near the coast only to discover in Joad-esque fashion that the promises that lured them east have major qualifications. Since only men are typically allowed to make the journey across the sea, the beaches are filled with abandoned children and mothers, mothers who prostitute themselves to foreign sailors to earn enough money to survive. Not wanting to split apart, Franklin and Margaret resign themselves to a life in America and like their ancestors, journey back west across the landscape to carve out a life for themselves, a sentimental touch to an otherwise bleak vision of the country's future.
Crace's prose is very eloquent and verges on the poetic at times, and his use of Old Testament imagery, which is often associated with American journey stories, is appropriate. In fact, one instance of this particular imagery is actually somewhat humorous and very telling in its convolution of American and ancient Jewish history. Margaret is holding a penny, now just a relic of America's glorious past, rubbing the tails side and feeling "the tiny seated floating man within, the floating man who, storytellers said, was Abraham and would come back to help America one day with his enormous promises" (23). In America's future, President Lincoln has become just as mythic as Abraham of the Old Testament, almost detached and "floating" away from American history itself. Nevertheless, Margaret's vague knowledge proves that historical continuity still exists, however tenuous, and that these future Americans are still the inheritors of a great tradition. Even at the end of the novel, the protagonists choose not to leave but instead strike out west back across the landscape: "Going westward, they would go free" (255). Such a conclusion might be confusing to readers who are left wondering if the novel is a harbinger of prophetic doom or if this patriotic ending should have the final say in determining the book's ultimate aim. After an entire novel of eastward travel, Crace ends his text with a reaffirmation of westward expansion, a tradition that most of novel seems to undermine. In this reviewer's opinion, though, the ending is the trump card, and the novel's message is clear: whatever troubling fate lies ahead for America, its vast landscape will always lend itself to a spirit of freedom through westward journeying, a spirit that no apocalypse or degree of anarchy can eradicate.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
Lewis Wolpert
W. W. Norton & Company
9780393064490 $25.95
David Roemer
Reviewer
Lewis Wolpert reveals two personas in this book. One persona is reasonable and makes thoughtful statements about evolution and beliefs. The other persona is obnoxious and irrational—the proverbial village atheist. This is an example of the bad persona:
I am committed to science and believe it is the best way to understand the world. I am an atheist reductionist materialist. I know of no good evidence for the existence of God. (p. x)
Wolpert knows the evidence of God's existence and discusses the evidence throughout the book. In an ongoing act of self-deception, Wolpert fails to recognize the evidence and admit that it is there. More than truth, reason, and integrity, Wolpert loves the methodology of science to the point of succumbing to the gratifications of scientism, whatever they are.
In the New York Times on February 19, 2006, Leon Weiseltier called scientism "one of the dominant superstitions of our day." Wolpert spends a whole chapter on the beliefs of scientists and touches on every possible false belief (e.g., confabulations), but does not even mention this aberration. However, it may be this article Wolpert is thinking of when he says:
It is now asserted by some that science itself is the modern superstition. (p. 159)
Is Wolpert is confabulating the word science whenever he sees the word scientism? Science is only one mode of inquiry. Scientism is an excessive and irrational reliance on this branch of knowledge. Another method of inquiry is philosophy, which is what Wolpert is doing when he explains the difference between scientific beliefs and non-scientific beliefs and extols science as "the best way to understand the world."
The good persona uses the following quote as the epigraph for Chapter 2 and expands on the insight:
This act of mind has never yet been explain'd by any philosopher. (David Hume 1739)
The word belief, while freely and widely used to account, for example, for causes in the previous chapter, is nevertheless not easy to define. Neither philosophers nor scientists have been successful. David Hume, my hero philosopher, said of belief that he regarded it as a great mystery. (p. 23)
Conscious knowledge of simple facts is also a mystery. Consider, for example, knowing that this page is white. It means more than that light is entering the eye and a signal is going to the brain. It means an awareness of the whiteness of the page. What is it? What are ideas and abstractions? What is the relationship between ourselves and our bodies? What is self-consciousness? The mind is indeed a mystery, and man is an indefinability that becomes conscious of its own existence. Plain common sense tells us human beings are embodied spirits and evidence of God's existence.
Continuing with quotes that show Wolpert at his best:
There is a strong motive for explaining any phenomena that affect us in causal terms, an ingrained need to organize the world cognitively—both the external world and the internal world. (p. 3)
Thomas Aquinas couldn't have said it better. Human beings have a drive to know and understand everything. It is this drive that causes us to think that the universe is intelligible and that everything has a reason, explanation, or cause. The assumption of the intelligibility of the universe has served us well in science, and we are inclined to hope that we can understand our own existence. Science by itself cannot make our own existence intelligible because human beings transcend matter.
The method of inquiry that makes our existence intelligible is metaphysics: the study of being as being. We can partially understand the mystery, indefinability, and spirituality of our intellect and will with the metaphysical insight that we are finite beings and that we were created by an infinite being.
Creation is a form of causality, and the reasonable Wolpert rejects Hume's empirical understanding of causality:
David Premack, a psychologist, has pointed out that there are two classes of causal beliefs. One, as Hume suggested, is based on one event being linked to another, and can be called weak or "arbitrary", for there need not be any obvious connection between them, like switching on a light. Animals can learn connections by the pairing of events through this process of associative learning. The other, which is uniquely human, is strong or "natural" causality, and is programmed into our brains so that we have evolved the ability to have a concept of forces acting on objects. (p. 27)
In fact, Wolpert goes beyond this limited understanding of causality as force by endorsing the ideas of Jean Piaget:
Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist whose studies on the development of thinking in children have been very influential, held that the development of infants' understanding of their environment was the result of their active manipulation and exploration of objects, and that they constructed reality through converging lines of sensory and motor information. One source of their understanding of causes came from the infants' own actions: the actual experience of producing a movement plays a key role. (p. 35)
Wolpert is saying that our understanding of causality is rooted in our experience as infants of free will. Since many a "reductionist materialist" say free will is an illusion, the good Wolpert is taking a different point of view than the bad Wolpert.
Another example of his rejection of the limiting assumptions of hardcore materialism is the following quote:
More generally, as David Hume made clear, there is no experience of "self" as something distinct from our body. (p. 33)
If the self was distinct from the body, then there would not be one being—man—but two beings: the body and the self. The unity of man is the insight that caused medieval philosophers to abandoned Greek dualism—the idea that body and soul are two separate substances.
The following quote shows that Wolpert understands the importance of conceptual thinking in the evolution of human beings:
It was Kenneth Oakley in 1949 who wrote "Modern civilization owes its form to machine-tools, driven by mechanical energy; yet these perform in complicated ways and use only the same basic opertor as the simple equipment is the tool-bag of Stone Age man: percussion, cutting, scraping, piercing, shearing, and moulding." He also made clear that the men who made tools such as the Acheulian hand axes must have been capable of forming in their minds images of what they were trying to achieve. "Human culture in all its diversity is the outcome of this capacity for conceptual thinking…" This original idea of Oakley is at the core of this book. (p. 71)
Self-consciousness is the ability human beings have to turn in on themselves and catch themselves in the act of their own existence. The following quote brings the concept of self-consciousness into the study of evolution:
It has been suggested that the opposability of the thumb, and the associated wondrous dexterity, completely transformed our ancestors' relationship with external objects. This relationship could have promoted human consciousness, as the manipulation of objects became a self-conscious activity; once the individual becomes an agent operating on external objects in numerous different ways, causal beliefs are involved. (p. 77)
Now for the bad Wolpert:
Religion is almost always regarded by its believers as a way of obtaining help from supernatural powers, possibly from a god. Miracles can win further adherents, and the Bible has many examples, not least the dividing of the Red Sea to allow Moses and the Jews to cross. However, as David Hume argued, no miracle should be believed in unless the evidence was such that it would be miraculous not to believe in it. (p. 123)
Mr. Wolpert is paraphrasing a direct quote from David Hume that he already shared with his readers on p. 85, so impressed is he with the quote's relevance and insight. Hume's argument against religion is puerile because it discusses miracles in general, rather than the particular miracles that are part of our salvation history.
Examples of historically established miracles are the exorcisms and healings of Jesus, the founder of Christianity. His miracles are reported in all four Gospels and the Q document. The Jewish historian Josephus referred to Jesus as "a doer of wonderful works" and even anti-Christian sources refer to Jesus as a magician. It is irrational to admit Jesus was a Jewish prophet and deny that he performed miracles because at the time Jesus lived miracles were generally believed to happen. The historical Jesus includes what Jesus did and how Jesus was perceived by his contemporaries.
Since Wolpert is not interested in the historical Jesus, his quoting Hume on miracles is gratuitous and ambiguous. Presumably, Wolpert was trying to say that God and Moses did not really part the Red Sea and that God and Jesus did not really cure anybody. This is consistent with his view that God doesn't really exist. Since the bad Wolpert is a "reductionist materialist," he does not think human beings really exist either. All that really exists for the confused Wolpert is whatever particle physicists say exists.
Wolpert apparently identifies with Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588), forgetting the different circumstances. Hobbes lashed out at his contemporary critics as follows:
For if a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him supernaturally and immediately I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it. It is true that, if he be my Sovereign he may oblige me to obedience, so as not by act or word to declare I believe him not; but not to think otherwise than my reason persuades me…For to say that God hath spoken to him…in a dream, is no more than to say he dreamed God spoke to him… (p. 131)
What would God have to do to make Wolpert believe? Wolpert tells us:
Of course, it is possible for God to easily reveal to scientists his current existence: God only has to perform, publicly, one or two miracles, for good evidence to be provided. This evidence could, for example, be quite simple, like turning a lake into good red wine, or providing an instant cure for cancer. Such miracles would almost certainly lead to religious beliefs among the skeptics. (p. 216)
Oliver Sacks, famous for Awakenings, told the following story about a 50-year-old patient that thought he was twenty because of a spinal cord damaged by alcohol abuse. With shame and regret, Sacks said that he handed the man a mirror and asked him if this was a 20-year-old man. His patient was horrified and cried out that he must be crazy. Fortunately, the patient soon forgot what had horrified him and he calmed down.
If a powerful angel changed a lake to red wine, it might neglect to keep the public from going crazy. God would not neglect anything. When God performs miracles and reveals things to us, people believe exactly what God wants them to believe. Faith is a gift from God. While Christians summon their fellow humans to believe, there is no obligation to believe as Hobbes thought. Nobody is criticizing Wolpert for not believing, and there is no need for him to defend himself.
Miraculous historical events, such as the Easter experience, are just part of the story Christians tell in their summons to nonbelievers. That Jesus was a Jewish prophet is a large part of the story as is the idea that Jesus saved mankind for meaning. There is another reason to believe: When nonbelievers explain why they don't believe they always give bad reasons.
A Place Called the Bla-Bla Cafe
Sandy Ross
SLR Productions
18375 Ventura Bl., #217 Tarzana, CA 91356
0977722708 $15.00 www.bla-bla-cafe.com
Rose Glavas
Reviewer
Have you ever wondered where entertainers like Robin Williams, Billy Crystal or Sting started their career? If you have, then 'A Place Called the Bla-Bla Cafe' is for you!
The author, Sandy Ross worked in the Bla-Bla Cafe where she co-booked the shows with owner Albie Hora. At the same time she worked as the Entertainment Director for the Los Angeles Performing and Folklife Festival under Artistic Director Warren Chistensen. Ross takes a nostalgic walk down memory lane of this period of time through writing 'A Place Called the Bla-Bla Cafe'.
The writing style used is friendly and easy to read – and also make you feel as you are really there at the Bla-Bla Cafe. I think we all have at least one memory of a special place that this book will remind us of.
Ross has divided the book into three sections: one covering history, the other memories (of various entertainers), and the final section giving a variety of tables with performers and staff listed there.
The history section includes a description of how the Cafe started, the heyday period, and it's last days. Some of the entertainers covered in the memories section include Maxine Sellers, Al Jarreau, Gene Nelson and Debby VanPouke. The final section includes: Table I covers the Cafe Performers from 1971 through to 1980; Table II covers Hard-Rock (Heavy Metal and Punk) band list; Table III Blabettes (1971 through to 1978); and finally Table IV covers the Bla-Bla Cafe staff from 1971 up until 1982. There is also a memorial at page 239 recognizing various important people in this lovingly written walk down memory lane.
'A Place Called the Bla-Bla Cafe' is a title that would suit a person that was interested in the entertainment culture and that wanted an insiders personal experience of the industry. This is a warmly written and welcoming look into the development of not only this cafe, but of a special place to be discovered and also to discover. It would be a welcome addition to your library if you have an interest in music or the entertainment industry (particularly if you are 40 or over).
The Thief Queen's Daughter
Elizabeth Haydon
Starscape (Tor Forge)
Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
9780765308689 $17.95
Stacie Penney
Reviewer
Summary: A young Nain explorer, Ven Polypheme, begins his second quest at the king's request -- What is the history of an artifact inherited from the previous king? Ven's search starts in the Gated City, on Market Day. Will the mystery be solved before the day ends and Ven is trapped inside?
The Take-Away: As stated, this is a second in the series, but Haydon doesn't spend unnecessary time with the previous story. I didn't feel like I was missing out by not starting at the beginning. Ven's circle of friends must have been established in the first book, however, and it's a vast circle. The variety leads me to believe that this will be a longer series with good adventures.
The target audience is young adult, however, it has the feel to the book as the first Harry Potter titles did. Fun, adventurous, but easily developed into something more. This is a series I would keep my eye on, depending on how the stakes are raised in the next book.
One of my favorite characters was McLean, a StorySinger who knows the histories, songs and stories of various people of the land. His role is minor, but he is interesting. McLean is completely trustworthy; StorySinger take an oath to never lie. I'm hoping that this is a set-up for a future book.
Beauty of Souls
J. Byron Lasko
iUniverse
2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512
9780595398768 $13.95 www.iuniverse.com
Steve Golightly
Reviewer
J. Byron Lasko's Beauty of Souls is a novel of the best sort. It is a book that entertains, mostly through snappy dialogue and characters who spring to life on the page. But more than that, it is a book that makes you think. Unless you are the most hardened nihilist, the most narrow of realists, this book will make you consider metaphysical and spiritual possibilities you never imagined before.
The story is narrated by Jim Armond, the glib owner of a small ad agency in New York. Jim's defense against the world, and as a cushion for his past, is humor. He just can't resist cracking a joke, no matter how dire the circumstances. And when you find out just how dysfunctional, how absolutely horrid his family was, you'll wonder that he's not Robin Williams on a speed binge. Discounting violence, Jim's family makes the Mansons look like "The Brady Bunch."The book opens, and indeed mostly takes place in, a bar owned by Jim's best friend, Louie. Louie has tenuous connections to the mob, and he peppers his conversation with references to "The Godfather," a movie he seems to know by heart. He is tough and gritty, but in an old-pal-from-the-neighborhood kind of way. He's honest and true to his friends, as is Jim, and it is Louie's difficulty paying off a debt to a mobster named Nicky Tuna that provides the catalyst for the story.
Jim's life, too, teeters on the verge of failure. Both his marriage and his business are on the rocks, and while these seem like cliches, Lasko is able to make them appear both fresh and genuine. In fact, through deft characterization, he manages to take another story involving a neighborhood in New York and turn it into something original. And, he manages to combine two elements that make this a uniquely unconventional story. One night, after a few too many Dewar's on the rocks, Jim meets a stranger named Jack. It's not giving away too much to say that Jack is a manifestation of Jim's higher self, a part of his consciousness connected to the greater consciousness of the universe, and thus to God. Stories of this sort generally take place in Nepal or a far province of China, but Lasko plops it down in a New York neighborhood of working stiffs and people just trying to get by. And he makes it work.
This, however, is only the beginning, for Jim meets another manifestation of a different part of his consciousness, and this one is female. And, in one mind-blowing scene, Jim actually jams with Jesus Christ himself, who likes to play jazz piano and wants people to call him "Josh."
This may all sound a bit out there, but believe me, when you read it you'll think it really happened.
And maybe it did. On his website, Lasko says, "... the psychic, spiritual and personal experiences I write about in Beauty of Souls are all real." He's known people "... who are highly evolved both spiritually and intellectually and who live and work right in our midst." I don't know about others, but I find it comforting to know that some people might represent a link to a different plane of existence. This reality of mortgages and pain and bars and coworkers can't be all that there is.
Anyway, Jim is forced into action -- or is he? He stands by his friend, Louie, and in doing so meets Angelina Parish, who just might literally be his soul mate. Complications arise and a deadline looms, with dire consequences if Nick Tuna doesn't get his money.
Thankfully, there are no outlandish car chases, no unrealistic shootouts where a waitress suddenly knows how to use a semi-automatic weapon. There is, however, a final showdown. I won't give anything away, though I wished it had ended a bit more ambiguously. After all, in real life, there aren't absolute winners and losers.
Google And The Myth of Universal Knowledge
Jean-Noel Jeanneney
translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
University of Chicago Press
1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
9780226395777 $18.00 www.uchicago.edu 1-800-621-2736
Jim Sullivan
Reviewer
This is a brief essay between hard covers written by the President of France's national library, the Bibliotheque nationale. When in 2004 he learned of Google's project to bring 15 million of the world's over 100 million books published throughout the centuries, to the public over the Internet by digitizing the volumes and making them available through its search engine, Jeanneney was surprised and generally pleased.
Those books to be used for the project would come from the University of Michigan and Stanford University along with many from the Weidner Library at Harvard and the New York Public Library. Moreover, the Bodleian Library (with works published before 1900) at Oxford, England would be cooperating, too.
Jeanneney, however, soon realized some concerns. Would the books digitized be only or primarily of authors who wrote in English? What about those of the French, the other 25 European Union (EU) nation's works in their languages, and others in the non-English- speaking but Western world? Were they to be overlooked or at least only minimally included, resulting in their ending up very low on the search totem pole of reference on whatever subject was being searched for on the Internet?
The first fear was an obvious one based on the library sources being used, Michigan, Stanford, et al. The second point was all too quickly experienced when a search was done on the Google project, partially completed by then, under European writers' names.
"At the Bibliotheque nationale," writes Jeanneney, "we had fun seeing what could be found by typing in the names Victor Hugo [French writer], Dante [Italian], Cervantes [Spanish], and Goethe [German]. We found that only English-language publications were offered. (To be fair, for Hugo--oddly--a publication in German was listed). Granted, in the French version of the pilot site, things have somewhat improved, our escapades having perhaps triggered an effort to digitize a number of well-known Francophone works. But the problem was shunted elsewhere, and Internet users were not given the means to understand the general workings of the system. In February 2006, for example, a search for Cervantes on the Spanish site of Google Book Search (book.google.es) curiously brought up five works in French, followed by three books in English, before, in ninth place and final position, there appeared a collection of excerpts from Don Quixote in the author's own language."
So, Jeanneney wrote his essay, first appearing in a French periodical, about his concerns that the EU language books would be overlooked or downgraded, even if unintentional. His essay caused an uproar in the EU nations. Consequently, it led to an EU-wide project of its own to digitize books from their countries and in their nation's languages for the Internet. The various governments came up with the seed money for the digitization project. Of course, private funding had to be found, too. And so the EU project began and is ongoing.
Since then, the Google project, covering most books in English is continuing, too, but has been modified in scope and direction though the basic thrust has remained the same.
Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the author, a professor before becoming President of the Bibliotheque nationale in 2002, has penned several books of history. He has also served as chief executive with Radio-France and Radio-France Internationale among many public positions he has held, including a cabinet post, from 1991 to 1993, in Francois Mitterrand's government. Recommended.
Sprouts The Miracle Food
Steve Meyerowitz
Spoutman Publications
PO Box 1100, Great Barringon, MA 01230
9781878736048 $12.95
Tammy Biondi
Reviewer
Steve Meyerowitz, AKA Sproutman, has helped the environment, saved money, cured allergies, asthma and other health conditions and fed hundreds with his self-proclaimed "miracle food": sprouts. So, it's no wonder he has come to be known as a sprouting superhero. In his book, Sprouts the Miracle Food, Meyerowitz passes along some of the sprouting knowledge which he has accumulated through several decades of producing sprouts of every imaginable variety, right in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment.
Meyerowitz is, as one might guess from the shiny green Sproutman costume he is wearing in his author photo, a zealous advocate for the growing of sprouts by everyone, everywhere. His book certainly will further his cause: nearly every aspect of sprouting, form selecting seeds, to growing, storing and determining medicinal properties and nutritional value of various spout types is detailed in this book.
Although portions of this book focus on subjects such as pesticides, water quality and composting (Meyerowitz is also the author of The Organic Food Guide and Water the Ultimate Cure), which are only marginally related to small-scale sprout production, most of the book is dedicated to outlining Meyerowitz's simple, inexpensive, efficient method for growing an abundance of sprouts in small spaces, such as home kitchens. This method is based on using various natural fiber baskets and bags as containers for growing sprouts. According to Meyerowitz, growing simple sprouts such as lettuce requires only seed, counter space, 1-2 minutes of watering per day, normal indoor daylight, 5-10 day's time, a bamboo basket and a plastic bag-like greenhouse. In his words, that's "all it takes to have something most people will covet--an alternative source of fresh food."
What is notably lacking in this book is a good list of sprout recipes, or at least more detailed suggestions for foods and meals that are extraordinarily enhanced by the addition of sprouts, for those of us who haven't fully hopped onto the raw and whole foods bandwagon. Although there are probably many excellent sprout recipes in Spoutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook, another book by Meyerowitz, the closest thing to cooking/recipe tips that I could find in this book is a mention of "snacks from sprouted peanuts, hummus dip from spouted green peas, Chinese sautes from mung, adzuki and lentils, even sprouted wheat pizza!" and a few allusions to foods such as "Sunflower Sun-Cheese. Of course, Meyerowitz's affection for sprouts seems to be such that he would have trouble imagining any meal that wouldn't be enhanced by a sizeable dollop of sprouts.
Emphasizing the nutritional and medicinal benefits of sprout consumption seems to be at the center of Meyerowitz's persuasive argument for sprouting. He backs up some his health claims with scientific data from sources such as the USDA and the National Cancer Institute. Other claims lack citations and are most likely drawn from the vast pool of anecdotal information regarding natural foods and medicinal herbs. However, what is likely to appeal to most readers of this book isn't the hardcore health information and raw data that is presented. It's Meyerowitz's clear presentation of technical information: his instructions are clear, specific and concise. In fact, much of this book reads like an instruction manual for sprouting. It is easy to wish that Sproutman's kitschy enthusiasm were displayed more prominently throughout the book. The "Questions and Answer with Sproutman" and the "Sprout Oath" which includes a pledge to "stick to my roots, serve and be served [and] be sproutful and multiply" showcase some of the Sproutman persona, more of which would almost certainly enhance this book.
All in all, Sprouts the Miracle Food is a well-researched, informative book that is sure to be a useful guide for health or environmentally-conscious folks who are looking for ways to produce their own healthful foods. After reading this book, readers will almost certainly want to try growing and eating sprouts, although most people still won't want to dress like a sprout. That's something that's probably best left to Spoutman anyhow.
Afrika's Bookshelf
Hope & Desire
Theresa E.Grant
Publish America
PO Box 151, Frederick, MD 21705-0151
9781413758603 $16.95 www.authorsden.com
Jennifer Greene, a young impressionable girl, dreams of going to New York to become a fashion designer. Her father dies suddenly, her mother marries his best friend, and Jennifer is forced to put her education aside to care for her younger siblings, juggle a nine-to-three job and is expected to perform household duties. She gets a second job and earns more money in hopes of pursuing her dreams, but her sister, a feisty school dropout, steals the money and runs off to New York. Jennifer gets another chance and goes to New York, only to be lured into becoming a housekeeper for Joe Morgan, a horse rancher, who tricks her into marriage. She finds herself saddled to a stubborn, old man twice her age, who refuses to let her go. She escapes, falls in love, and finds herself a suspect for murder.
Ms. Theresa E. Grant has been a writer for ten years. She has studied her craft with The Long Ridge Writers Group, Universal Class, Writers of Maryland, Writers Digest, and American Writers & Artist Institute. Ms. Grant's major influences have been her teachers, other published writer, and her husband, Dr. Warren H. Grant. She is the author of several books and member of the Black Writers' Guild.
Hope & Desire is an excellent story written, by Ms. Theresa E. Grant, about young woman Jennifer who puts your life on hold for the sake of her family. It is full of everyday episodes that families go through career changes, struggles, sorrow, pain and faith. The title of the book speaks for itself and carried out throughout its entirety. I was particularly drawn to the book because of its title and cover which was designed by Published America.
Rating Five Stars
Ready for Love
Timothy Gladden
PublishAmerica
PO Box 151, Frederick, MD 21705-0151
9781424164127 $14.95 www.loveandartmovement.com
Ready for Love takes you on a thought-provoking journey through love and relationships. It highlights the good and bad, the highs and lows of love in all its many forms. After reading a verse you may be tempted to reminisce and see yourself inside the words. You can sense and feel the passion in each verse…The pain behind every simile and joy within every metaphor. It will take you away from reality into a poetic world of love and emotion that you will not want to leave. It reminds us that love isn't perfect, but assures us that it is wonderful.
Ready For Love is an interesting title for a book. It is a typical question that anyone would ask themselves before entering a relationship. I think that Timothy did an excellent job portraying and demonstrating this in his book, Ready for Love, both the good and the bad. The poems that are highlighted within the context of Timothy's book, Ready for Love, are thought-provoking and insightful. The poems that struck me the most in Ready for Love were I only wonder,
At first sight, and When I see the sun. I also was fascinated how Timothy began each poem with an inspirational message.
Ready for Love was published by Publish America in January 2007 and consists of 72 pages. The cover design was created by Publish America and is done very creatively almost in an abstracted manner. I think for this being Timothy's first collection of poetry to the world, it is an excellent product. Congratulations Timothy on your first book of poetry, Ready for Love. Look forward to reading your next one.
Five Stars Rating
A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain
Nataki Suggs
Xpress Yourself Publishing
9780979250095 $10.95 xpressyourselfpublishing.org
A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain is available at
-xpressyourselfpublishing.org
- amazon.com
- Karibu Books
A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain depicts Nataki Suggs' struggle of confronting the truth about her past, illustrating how she was able to find stability and hope after she truly found God. Her relationship with God created a stable foundation for her to continue climbing the ladder of success, confirming there is nothing she can do without Christ. Even when she could not see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, she found that at the end, there was God's promise of freedom. Line by line, allow your heart to experience the hope that can be captured when there seems to be none. . . A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain
A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain was published by Xpress Yourself Publishing in June 2007 and consists of 80 pages. The cover and Interior Designed by The Writer's Assistant.
A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain was dedicated to every teenager "who feels that they are forgotten, misunderstood or mistake," says Nataki. A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain is filled with stories and poems based on Nataki's personal experiences and journeys. I believe that Nataki did an excellent job in presenting her message. Both her stories and poems were very thought provoking, emotional and heart warming.
I like the way that her book, A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain was broken up into a story and poem to make it even more interesting for the reader. It was a very easy read. I think that anyone who has experienced what Nataki has experienced will relate very much to what has been underlined within the contents of her book, A Life Beyond Limits: Overcoming Private Pain. Congratulations Nataki on overcoming your pain, at the end of every journey or struggle, we all get back up again! Nataki, indeed represents the very same depiction and theory.
Five Stars Rating
Afrika Midnight Asha Abney
Reviewer
Atwood's Bookshelf
Major Voices: 19th Century American Women's Poetry
Shira Wolosky
The Toby Press
P.O. Box 8531, New Milford, CT 06676-8531
1592640400 $14.95 www.TobyPress.com
"Major Voices: 19th Century American Women's Poetry" showcases the work of 10 female American poets - most of them quite notable in their own time but rarely considered or anthologized since. Observing 19th century America through the lense of its female poets is an intriguing experience: many of the poems included here delineate the social issues of the time in a powerfully immediate - and of course, poetic - way.
For instance, Francis Watkins Harper's account of a slave auction in "The Slave Mother" contains more stark emotive power than many other contemporary narratives:
His lightest word has been a tone
Of music round her heart
Their lives a streamlet blent in one-
Oh, Father! Must they part?
They tear him from her circling arms
Her last and fond embrace . . .
Lydia Huntley Sigourney - the first professional female poet in America - takes respectful notice of the diminishing Native American in her poems "Indian Names," "Our Aborigines," "Indian Girl's Burial, "and "Funeral of Mazeen." "Funeral of Mazeen," portrays the end of a royal lineage (that of the Mohegan Nation) and invites the reader to observe the profound sadness of a great nation in decline:
With the dust of kings in this noteless shade,
The last of a royal line is laid.
In whose stormy veins that current roll'd
Which curb'd the chief and the warrior bold;
Yet pride still burns in their humid clay,
Though the pomp of the sceptre hath pass'd away.
Most 19th century American female writers could not comfortably balance marriage and the writing life so some chose to simply avoid matrimony. Phoebe Cary, whose poems delineate matrimonial difficulties in a humorous and pointed way, was one of these single writers. In her poem, "Kate Ketchem" (get it?), she notes the foolishness of marrying for monetary reasons:
He married her for her father's cash
She married him to cut a dash
But as for paying his debts, do you know
The father couldn't see it so.
She wedded him to be rich and gay
But husband and children didn't pay
He wasn't the prize she hoped to draw
And wouldn't live with his mother-in-law.
Cary, like many others presented in this collection, adds a powerful voice to the growing rumblings of the women's movement. In her bitingly satirical dialogue poem "Was He Henpecked?" a husband responds to his wife's desire for equality thus:
'Now why,' he said, 'can't such as you
Accept what we assign them?
You have your rights, 'tis very true
But then, we should define them!'
'I'd keep you in the chicken yard,
Safe, honored and respected;
From all that makes us rough and hard,
Your sex should be protected.'
"Major Voices" also gives a fresh perspective on the most currently celebrated 19th century American female poet: Emily Dickinson. Her poems are presented here in their raw, unpublished form; there are no titles and her original plethora of dashes are included, granting her poems a striking immediacy.
Providing an extensive and literary-slanted introduction to each writer and including a substantial selection of each one's work, "Major Voices" presents a fascinating glimpse of 19th Century America through the eyes of its female poets.
Improve Your Piano Playing
Dr. John Meffen
Allworth Press
10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010
9781581154764 $12.95
"Improve Your Piano Playing" brings its reader quite close to personally accessing an exceptional piano teacher: Dr. John Meffen has poured extensive years of teaching, research and performance into his 160-page book in such a personal way as to make the concepts practically jump off the page.
Geared largely towards students in the beginning intermediate stages through advanced, "Improve Your Piano Playing" is equal parts erudition and humor. For example, when explaining the relative ease of finding a time and place to drum one's fingers (an amazingly simple and effective exercise he recommends in order to increase finger strength) he admits the following: "I have done more useful finger practice during boring meetings, less than enlivening lessons and tedious sermons than I care to admit."
One concept included in the book that might be considered somewhat controversial by some readers is Dr. Meffen's opinion regarding speed. Although many teachers would agree with the following statement: "speed is probably the most frequent reason for making mistakes [especially in the early stages of practice]," Dr. Meffen does not approve of excessive speed in general, even in the professional realm.
But as the rest of his book clearly illustrates, there is a great deal of assiduous thought behind every supposition and method Dr. Meffen presents and so each one is more than deserving of careful consideration.
The general tone of the book and the plethora of review questions at the end of each chapter reveal a teacher whose passion is to see his students play their very best. "Improve Your Piano Playing" is not an exhaustive treatise but rather a distillation from years of successful teaching, research and performance. It will not only benefit those who apply themselves to the concepts laid out by Dr. Meffen but will also be very helpful for those who teach them to others.
The Stop and Go Fast Food Nutritional Guide
Steven G. Aldana, Ph.D.
Maple Mountain Press
935 East 900 North, Mapleton, UT 84664
9780975882849 $6.95
In creating "The Stop and Go Fast Food Nutritional Guide," Steven Aldana has sought to fill an important informational gap in the fat-laden "western" diet (so called because of its prevalence among western industrialized nations). Although packaged foods are required to exhibit nutritional information, restaurants are not.
Enter Aldana's book. "Stop and Go" lists the nutritional content (i.e., calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium and fiber) of almost 3,500 different entrees from a total of 69 fast food restaurants. The title phrase "stop and go" refers to the clever and quickly comprehended layout of the book: healthy entrees are coded in green, borderline foods with yellow and those the highest in calories, saturated fats and trans fats are coded with (guess what?) red.
Trans fat (that is, hydrogenated vegetable oil), looms large in "Stop and Go." Aldana relates that the consumption of trans fat is responsible for at least 30,000 to 100,000 heart disease-related deaths each year. Since there is no safe level for trans fat consumption and since most fast-food restaurants utilize trans fats in some (if not all) of their cooking, "Stop and Go" is an informational windfall for those who eat fast food but are also concerned about their health.
Although the consistent redness of almost every McDonald's entree (including many salads) didn't surprise this reviewer, the many "red" Taco Bell entrees did. Trans fats are so dangerous that if an entree contained even 2 grams of trans fat, it received a red code. And so, the very delicious Nachos Bell Grande side dish, which contains a whopping 10 grams of trans fat is unfortunately but definitely red while the equally delicious spicy chicken soft taco received a green light for bearing only one gram of trans fat.
Although healthy fast-food eating may sounds like an impossible oxymoron, "The Stop and Go Fast Food Nutritional Guide" can make this a reality and should be placed in the glove compartment of every fast food restaurant patron.
Kathryn J. Atwood
Reviewer
Bethany's Bookshelf
Unleashing Her G-Spot Orgasm
Donald L. Hicks
Ulysses Press
PO Box 3440
Berkeley CA 94703-3440
9781569755631, $12.95 www.ulyssespress.com 1-800-377-2542
Written by award-winning author Donald L. Hicks, with the aid of correspondence from expert human sexuality researchers, Unleashing Her G-Spot Orgasm: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Ultimate Sexual Ecstasy lives fully up to its title. Chapters address the basics of human sexuality for pleasure, step-by-step techniques to use, types of G-Spot friendly coitus, how to deal with common problems that interfere with sexual pleasure (such as discomfort, "orgasm anxiety", or the urge to urinate), case studies, and more. A superb sex manual ideal for elevating one's sex life to new heights of passion.
Discrimination at High Levels
Gladys Cross
AE-TU Publishing
c/o Gladys Cross
PO Box 960246, Miami, FL 33296
9780976114628, $22.95 www.aetupublishing.com
Discrimination at High Levels: The Masculine U.S. Presidency is a resounding inquiry into why all of America's presidents have been white men throughout history. Written in an informal conversational style, Discrimination at High Levels does not mince words in vociferous outcry against discrimination from history to the modern day. "...of all elected American Presidents 73% had military experience in their resume. Also, many of these references were obtained when they comply with the draft [some were volunteers] but all of them, with no exception, rose quite fast toward the ranks of Lieutenant, Captain, Mayor, and twelve of them reached the General rank. To become President, the candidate needs to have a warrior reference and if this reference is a heroic one, there is a high probability this person will easily end up at the White House.. Ladies are in disadvantage due to this fact." A timely and thought-provoking examination of elements of gender discrimination embedded in the American society and in the electoral process.
Written by medical social worker Nancy Pearce, Inside Alzheimer's: How to Hear and Honor Connections With A Person Who Has Dementia is an uplifting guide for anyone whose friends or loved ones suffer from various stages of dementia. Relationship and connection are still possible, and highly beneficial, with patients who are afflicted with dementia; Inside Alzheimer's covers the six basic principles of forming a dynamic: freeing oneself from judgment, love, openness to receive love, silence, and thankfulness. "I would much rather err on the side of assuming that the person with dementia can participate in his decisions about end-of-life care, rather than assuming he can't. It happens more than one would expect that during an open discussion, the person with dementia pops into a particular moment of clarity and clearly provides input." Highly recommended as guideline, aid, comfort, and inspiration.
Fight Your Health Insurer and Win
Laurie Todd
Healthwise Publications
PO Box 2045, Woodinville, WA 98072
9780979143502, $14.95 www.theinsurancewarrior.com
According to Reader's Digest in April of 2006, seven in ten adults who were driven into debt by medical expenses had insurance at the time. Author Laurie Todd had health insurance when she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, but in order to obtain the expensive treatment necessary to save her life, she had to battle her insurance company tooth and nail. Fight Your Health Insurer and Win: Secrets of the Insurance Warrior is a distillation of what she learned - a lifesaving, no-nonsense guide written especially for sufferers of cancer and other deadly medical afflictions. Chapters cover how to qualify one's own doctors (and make sure one's provider is not only generally competent, but an expert in one's specific affliction), manage one's own care, find the best care possible for one's disease, and force one's health insurer to bear the full cost (a common practice among insurers is to pay an "out-of-network benefit" that covers only 60%-80% of the cost - which is just not enough when some surgeries can cost, $200,000 or more). Also discussed are how to research the life's work of one's physician on Google and ask him questions about his practice (it's important to listen to the tone of the answers as well as the answers themselves); why terms like "experimental/investigational procedures" and "medically necessary" are little more than manipulative word-dancing meant to frighten away people from demanding insurance payment; how to respectfully and persuasively present one's case to insurance industry bureaucrats and medical professionals who have a vested financial interest in your imminent death (if you die quickly, they don't have to pay for your treatment); and much more. Sample letters, step-by-step procedures, guidelines for telephone conversations, and above all the admonition to never give up infuse Fight Your Health Insurer and Win with literally life-giving energy and wisdom. Highly recommended, and an absolute "must-have" for anyone who has paid their health insurance dues.
Susan Bethany
Reviewer
Bob's Bookshelf
The Little Book of Big Excuses: More Strategies and Techniques for Faking It
Addie Johnson
Conari
65 Parker Street, Newburyport, MA 01950
9781573243131 $9.95 www.conari.com (800) 423-7087
This amusing book contains all sorts of excuses for being late, forgetting important names or a birthday plus dozens of other equally embarrassing situations. Looking for a way of explaining why you can't spend time with someone you really abhor? Call attention to how busy you are with altruistic tasks that are all very worthwhile and, of course, very time consuming! Hence, you are really sorry but, given your schedule, it is obvious that you just don't have time to have to socialize. Right? Right!
With over 100 excuses for every conceivable situation this could prove to be an invaluable little book for anyone who needs a little creative assistance explaining why he missed an appointment, forgot an anniversary, or just messed up a project at work.
Beaches and Parks From Monterey to Ventura
California Coastal Commission
University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704-1012
9780520249493 $24.95 www.ucpress.edu (510) 642-9737
Compiled by the California Coastal Commission staff, "Beaches and Parks From Monterey to Ventura" is an up-to-date, comprehensive guidebook that covers more than 310 beaches, parks, campgrounds, nature preserves, natural history museums, and outdoor recreation sites on or near the coast.
With 40 color topographic maps showing shoreline access and trails, four regional maps, and two foldout maps of California and the Pacific coastline, you won't have any problem finding the perfect place to surf, fish, or just kick back and enjoy a day in the sun.
Thinking about replacing the hinges and pulls on the kitchen cabinets or adding a tile backsplash to the counter? Or perhaps it's time create a lighted pathway in the yard or put in that garage workshop you've been talking about for years. "52 Weekend Makeovers" will guide you step-by-step through a number of easy projects that can transform your home inside and out.
Whether it's painting, updating plumbing fixtures, doing a closet makeover or adding outdoor lighting, there are numerous suggestions here that will not only add to your home's value and improve its appearance but also make it more livable. With 830 full color photos and numerous drawings, each project is visually documented from start to finish. Instructions include what tools will be necessary, a list of materials you'll need to buy, and detailed instructions on how to do the job. "What Can Go Wrong" sidebars also alert the do-it-yourselfer to possible pitfalls along the way.
Why pay to have someone else spruce up your house when you can handle the job yourself? These are not complicated or time consuming projects, yet they will have an impact on your living conditions. You'll also have the satisfaction of being able to say, "I did it myself!"
Tales From a Tin Can:
The USS Dale - From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay
Michael Keith Olson
Zenith Press
380 Jackson Street, St. Paul, MN 55101-3885
9780760327708 $24.95 www.zenithpress.com (800) 826-6600
"Tales From a Tin Can" by Santa Cruz, California, writer Michael Keith Olson is the story of the USS Dale, an American destroyer that has the remarkable distinction of making it from Pearl Harbor to the end of World War II without sustaining a single combat fatality. Told through the narratives of 44 of the ship's crew, this fascinating book captures not only the furious clashes with the Japanese but also the humdrum days in between and the heart stopping encounters with typhoons that could be as lethal as any engagement with the enemy.
Anyone interested in stories from World War II will find this well illustrated account of the naval campaign in the Pacific fascinating. The author's father was one of the men who served aboard the destroyer.
Ghosts and Mystery Along Old Monterey's Path of History
Randall Reinstedt
Ghost Town Publications
P.O. Drawer 5998, Carmel, CA 93921
9780933818132 $10.95 www.ghosttownpub.com (831) 373-2885
The author combines historical information about the various structures that make up Monterey's (California) famous Path of History with stories about the unnatural occurrences that are said to happen in some of these buildings. A generous number of black and white photos accompany the 47 stops along this well traveled route that meanders from Presidio Hill through Old Monterey to Casa Munras and the Royal Presidio Chapel.
So you won't get lost or miss any of the attractions, a map of the circuitous route is also included. Reinstedt sets off the accounts of supernatural shenanigans in boxes with a ghostly gray background so the reader won't miss them.
Bob Walch
Reviewer
Buhle's Bookshelf
The Edinburgh Goldsmiths I
Rodney Dietert & Janice Dietert
Lulu Press
860 Aviation Parkway, Suite 300, Morrisville, NC 27560
9780615144566, $29.96 www.lulu.com
The collaborative work of Rodney and Janice Dietert, "The Edinburgh Goldsmiths I: Training, Marks, Output And Demographics" is a definitive survey of almost five hundred years of the goldsmithing in Edinburgh, Scotland from the 1500s down to the present day and includes both apprentices as well as the freemen goldsmiths themselves. Among the roster of these 1,200 accomplished goldsmiths and their trainees are some of the most distinguished names known to recorded goldsmithing history. "The Edinburgh Goldsmiths I" includes 112 pages of diagrams spanning 15 generations of Scottish history illustrated with 130 photographs of goldsmith marks -- many of which are published here for the first time making "The Edinburgh Goldsmiths I" invaluable for genealogist as well as historians. Enhanced with a glossary of ancient professions as practiced in Europe, "The Edinburgh Goldsmiths I" is a unique and impressive contribution to scholarship that should be a core part of academic library Metalsmithing , Scottish History, and Genealogical Studies reference collections.
Mount Hood The Deep Blue Zone: Story of the 2006 Climbing Tragedy
Hubert A. Allen, Jr.
Hubert Allen and Associates
720-25 Tramway Lane, NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87122
9780979274046, $23.95
Written by experienced winter mountain climber Hubert A. Allen Jr., Mount Hood The Deep Blue Zone: Story of the 2006 Climbing Tragedy is a reconstruction of what possibly happened to three climbers who became lost on Oregon's Mount Hood in 2006. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this day-by-day reconstruction, pieced together from both primary and secondary sources. Appendices consisting of data for weather conditions on Mount Hood as well as a climbing glossary round out this thoughtful, detailed dissection of a recent tragedy. "Citizens, most of them non-climbers, debated the very premise of winter climbing. Non-climbers argued about how selfish it was for the three men to go off and climb what looked like an absurd project. But these men had no death wish. Indeed, there are indications that this group was working their way up to an attempt on Mount Everest." Recommended reading for any practicing or would-be mountain climber.
Yeshua and the Intimate God
Herb Dimock
Eddy Publishing
Box 1084, Carnation WA 98014
9780972283526, $15.00
Written by biblical scholar Herb Dimock, Yeshua and the Intimate God: A Radical Return to the Jesus of 30 A.D. is a cosmological novel based on the life of Yeshua, also known as Jesus, as he strives to spread God's word. Yeshua and the Intimate God presents conversations between Yeshua and God as the ultimate junior/senior partnership; Yeshua's loving relationship with the woman Sarah - a closeness of soul that transcends the physical; and a dark metaphor for the modern Iraq war in Rome's use of intimidation and violence to consolidate its political power. A moving novel encapsulating abiding faith in the power of God and Jesus Christ to aid mankind's torturous existence and offer a pathway to heavenly rapture.
The Man Code
Skip Wilhoit
PublishAmerica
PO Box 151, Frederick, MD 21705-0151
9781424161751, $19.95 www.publishamerica.com
Written by army veteran, teacher, and coach Skip Wilhoit, The Man Code: An In-Depth Look at the Rules of Engagement for Today's American Man is an at times tongue-in-cheek guide to asserting one's manliness in American culture without being (excessively) obnoxious. Although a few of the rules are tongue-in-cheek or even "The Man Show"-esque ("If you have to occupy a less attractive girl so your buddy can get somewhere with her really hot friend, then as long as he saw her first and you have no current prospects, there is a duty to perform"), most are practical cultural advisories for greasing social acceptance among fellow men ("Have a backbone and don't carry your woman's purse, go to the store for feminine products, or let her dress you in matching outfits. Acts such as this will give your buddies all the ammo they need to call you whipped") or strong tenets of morality and compassion for fellow human beings ("Being truthful and honest must always be at least considered regardless of what a man stands to gain or lose"). Ultimately a call for men to take responsibility for their own lives and reclaim their cultural roles as fathers, providers, protectors, and positive role models, The Man Code deserves to be commended for writing down formerly unwritten rules and emphasizing the importance of behaving in a (by male standards) respectable manner.
Between the Lines
Yasmin Mossadeghi, M.S. & Patricia Laguna, Ph.D.
Wish Publishing
PO Box 10337, Terre Haute, IN 47801
9781930546820, $16.95 www.wishpublishing.com
Written by college softball coach Yasmin Mossadeghi and sport psychology expert and softball coach Patricia Laguna, Ph.D., Between the Lines: The Mental Skills of Hitting for Softball is a no-nonsense guide to the nuances of softball batting. Chapters cover how to face a dominant or nondominant pitcher, practical skills for mental drill rehearsal, how to adjust to the role of designated hitter, and much more. Black-and-white photographs illustrate this point-by-point, in-depth guide. An excellent supplemental resource for softball players, recommended for high school libraries and the personal bookshelves of any dedicated softball athlete.
Willis M. Buhle
Reviewer
Burroughs' Bookshelf
Off-Shoring the Middle Class
Steve Mushero
Virtualbookworm.com Publishing
PO Box 9949, College Station, TX 77842
9781589399136, $14.95 www.virtualbookworm.com 1-877-376-4955
Written by global technologist Steve Mushero, Off-Shoring the Middle Class: Managing White-Collar Job Migration to Asia deserves to be a bookshelf companion to Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat", as it elaborates upon the critical issues that Friedman merely outlines: how can Americans and America as a whole succeed in the modern era rife with globalization, offshoring, and the increasing migration of jobs overseas? Like Friedman, Mushero emphasizes that globalization is here to stay; Mushero adopts a strictly practical approach to coping with its effects, emphasizing the importance entrepreneurship, innovation, free-trade, global management, and the cultivation of flexibility. Chapters discuss everything from protectionism to intellectual property protection to bridging global cultural and language divides, the individual's role and much more. "If it's not already clear, individuals must realize that no one deserves a job, let alone a high salary. The notion that Americans deserve the best jobs and income reflects a myopic view of the world that is dangerous, both to them and the world at large when such views stray into the realm of political action. Such attitudes also hide the underlying malaise, thereby preventing any substantial discussion or progress towards a solution." Highly recommended.
Do You Have the Mind Power to Live Efficiency?
Dr. L.T. Coleman Jr. and Dr. J.M. Williams
Morgan James Publishing
1225 Franklin Avenue, Suite 325, Garden City, NY 11530-1693
9781600372162, $13.95 www.MorganJamesPublishing.com 1-800-485-4943
Written by pharmacists Dr. L.T. Coleman Jr. and Dr. J.M. Williams, Do You Have the Mind Power to Live Efficiency? Get a Dose from the Dual Doctors is a self-help guide to breaking down mental blocks, dedicating oneself to one's dreams, and learning how to efficiently and effectively dedicate one's life to making those dreams reality. Chapters discuss the value of learning lessons from adversity and even failure; how to build upon education and knowledge as a foundation for success; the importance of being wary of and informed about drugs - not only illegal drugs but also over-the-counter drugs, prescription drugs, and alcohol; special concerns in preparing for college life; and much more. "The self-fulfilling prophecy states that if you believe something whether true or false, then your mind will believe it and it can become a part of your life. Just begin to pay attention and become conscious of your own thoughts. It can work for you also, if you tell yourself something good it can become a part of your life. That is why it is very important to never finish a negative statement. Negative statements destroy our hope and sap our energy." An excellent motivational guide to harnessing the power of one's own resolve.
Planting Design Illustrated
Gang Chen
OutskirtsPress.com
143270379X, $35.95 www.outskirtspress.com
An architecture with more than twenty years of professional experience, Gang Chen turns his attention to landscaping with the publication of "Planting Design Illustrated", a comprehensive instructional guide specifically written for non-specialist general readers, as well as students of gardening and landscaping, and professional architectures who must consult with soils and civil engineers, as well as other professionals, in coordinating their buildings in the context of landscape designs. Occasionally illustrated with charts, designs, and photos, "Planting Design Illustrated" covers basic planting design principles and concepts (including the Formal Garden), then goes on to cover approaching a planting design problem, the relationship of plants and human beings when designing a landscaping project, plants and spaces, the developmental history and trends of formal gardens, naturalist planting design using Chinese gardens as a model, as well as the English style natural garden. "Planting Design Illustrated" also covers plant materials, cultural influences, aesthetic considerations, functional aspects and ecological factors of the garden. Enhanced with an annotated bibliography and informative appendices, "Planting Design Illustrated" offers an especially 'reader friendly' and practical guide that makes it a very strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library Gardening & Landscaping reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
Some Day Never Comes
Kerry LePage
Klaatu Enterprises, LLC
PO Box 843, Apex, NC 27502
1705 White Dogwood Rd., Apex, NC 27502
9781424328550, $19.95 www.kerrylepage.com
Part memoir, part self-help guide, Some Day Never Comes is an eclectic anthology of insights by business professional and proud father Kerry LePage. From the sober realization that while unjust war is reprehensible, unjust peace is just as bad (whether the "peace" involves backing down from a school bully or doing nothing in response to genocide), to the fine art of balancing white lies that respect another human being's feelings with the fundamental importance of being truthful and honest, to reacting to losing one's job. "The first step in rejoining the ranks of the employed is to realize your number one priority. It's sad how frequently unemployed people ask, 'Now that I am unemployed I have spare time. Wouldn't it be a great time to paint the fence, repair the faucets, or clean out the garage?' The correct response to those questions is, 'No, now would be a great time to find a job.'" At times blunt, but overall laced with matter-of-fact charm, Some Day Never Comes is highly readable treasure trove of insights, to be savored a vignette at a time or all at once.
John Burroughs
Reviewer
Carson's Bookshelf
Jose Maria Sison: At Home in the World - Portrait of a Revolutionary
Conversations with Ninotchka Rosca
Open Hand Publishing, LLC
PO Box 20207, Greensboro, NC 27420
9780940880726, $16.00 www.openhand.com
Internationally acclaimed Filipino journalist and novelist Ninotchka Rosca presents Jose Maria Sison: Portrait of a Revolutionary, a political biography of Filipino revolutionary Jose Maria Sison as told in Sison's own words, through question-and-answer format. Sison bore witness to, and suffered from, the extreme corruption of the Marcos regime; ineptitudes of the Aquino regime; and even the failings of the left-wing revolutionary movements that he supported in a desperate effort to bring about positive change for the exploited and impoverished Filipino population. Jose Maria Sison: At Home in the World explores Sison's study of Marxism and other political precepts; the many ideological and personal smear attacks leveled against Sison as well as threats, and explains why labeling Sison a "terrorist" for his political views is slander. Furthermore, Sison offers his perspective on the Philippines' tumultuous history from the Marcos regime to the present day. Of special interest are Sison's predictions for the future, as well as his warnings for the United States' failings and complicity in exploiting Filipinos. "The crisis of overproduction in all types of goods - agricultural, mineral, basic industrial and high-tech products - and the ensuing bankruptcies and financial meltdowns cause terrible hardship and suffering for the working people in the US and other imperialist countries and so many in Asia, Africa and Latin America and will probably increase and intensify before a global war can break out among the imperialists or before the proletariat can seize power from the monopoly bourgeoisie in any imperialist country. Nowhere other than in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are there armed revolutionary movements led by the proletariat and actively fighting imperialism and seeking to seize political power in the process. No matter how few these armed revolutionary movements still are, they have the potential of increasing rapidly amidst the grave crisis of the world capitalist system." A one-of-a-kind personal portrayal of an emphatic and forceful personality dedicated to improving the overall human welfare of his home nation at any price.
Dying to Live
Kim Paffenroth
Permuted Press
177 Hillcrest Ln., Mena, AR 71953
097897073X, $12.95 www.permutedpress.com
Written by Kim Paffenroth, Bram Stoker award-nominated author of "Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romer's Visions of Hell on Earth", Dying to Live: A Novel of Life Among the Undead is a post-apocalyptic novel about the few human refugees struggling to survive in a zombie-infested world. Living in a museum-turned-compound, they are led by Jack, a practical and efficient military man, and Milton, an odd prophet with an inexplicable power over the dead. Yet their island community suffers a deadly clash with another group of survivors, underscoring that the living dead are far from their only threats to survival. At times shockingly and gruesomely violent, Dying to Live springs off the page as starkly vivid as any zombie movie ever made, with a decisive twist to its ending. Highly recommended especially for zombie and horror film buffs.
Confession of a Fighter
Peter Wood
Ringside Books
38 Timber Ridge, Mount Kisco, NY 10549
9780978968311, $19.95 www.ringsidebooks.com
Confessions of a Fighter: Battling Through the Golden Gloves is the autobiography of boxer Peter Wood, from his turbulent home life amid a stepfather who verbally abuses him and half-siblings who compound his misery, to his decision to literally start training to fight back in a crumbling local gym, to his astonishing ascent to the finals of the New York Golden Gloves Championships in 1971. A visceral, tell-it-like-it-is view of the rigors of training, the heart-stopping fear of losing a fight, and the moment of truth and clarity experienced before tens of thousands of riled-up spectators, Confessions of a Fighter is an absorbing read from cover to cover. Especially recommended for boxing fans, and also for anyone contemplating the long, hard, and painful road to fighting championships for themselves.
Parris Island Daze
Bob Shirley
Infinity Publishing
1094 New DeHaven Street, Suite 100, West Conshohocken, PA 19428-2713
9780741435040, $19.95 www.infinitypublishing.com
Written by Marine Corps Association member and Parris Island graduate Bob Shirley, Parris Island Daze: My Drill Instructor Was Tougher Than Yours is a tell-it-like-it-is account of what Parris Island (or any other American military boot camp) is really like. Recounting the experience of grueling yet invigorating training, and illustrated with twenty-eight black-and-white boot camp photographs, Parris Island Daze reminisces the forging experience without pulling any punches as to its severity. Parris Island Daze is especially recommended for anyone preparing to join the military, the better to inform them of the hurdle they are about to encounter, as well as the character and manhood-building rewards they can achieve!
Missing Links To The Culper Spy Ring?
Bernadine Fawcett
Infinity Publishing.com
1094 New Dehaven Street, #100, West Conshohocken, PA 19428-2713
0741421593, $22.95 www.amazon.com
The American Revolution was more than opposing forces meeting openly on various fields of battle. There was also a covert conflict of spies and what we would call today 'cover operations'. In "Missing Links To The Culper Spy Ring?", counselor, columnist, author, radio and television personality Beradine Fawcett shares her years of personal research and her genealogical resources (which ties her to the family of Aaron Burr). Vice President Aaron Burr corresponded with the Reverend Andrew Eliot's wife. Bernadine Fawcett inherited these letters through her husband's stepfather, and through these letters uncovered intimate and hitherto unpublished accounts of what is known to historians as the 'Patriot Spy Ring'. It turns out that Reverend Eliot was an obscure spy for the colonial rebellion and provided information about the British and passed information to and between key American leaders including George Washington, Ben Franklin, General John Hancock, and Colonel Jackson. If it hadn't been for the efforts of Reverend Eliot and his co-spy father in Boston, the British might well have succeeded in crushing the American Revolution. The pivotal role played by Reverend Eliot and a patriot spy named Thaddeus Burr will prove to be fascinating reading for students of American history in general, and the Culper Spy Ring in particular. Comprised of photocopies of the original letters along with a printed text of their contents, as well as historical photographs and period newspaper articles, "Missing Links To The Culper Spy Ring?" is a seminal contribution to American Revolutionary History Studies and an important, strongly recommended addition to academic library American History reference collections.
Michael J. Carson
Reviewer
Christy's Bookshelf
The Landlord's Black-eyed Daughter
Mary Ellen Dennis
Five Star/Thomson Gale
295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, ME 04901
9781594145759 $26.95 1-800-223-1244
Elizabeth Wyndham is somewhat of an anomaly during the 18th century; an English woman who writes best-selling Gothic novels, is not subservient to men and feels free to speak her mind. Haunted by memories from a former life, when Elizabeth meets Rand Remington, she feels strongly that the two have lived and loved together in the past, at which time, she betrayed her lover. Rand, a former soldier, thumbs his nose at the hypocrisy of the class system by becoming a highwayman, whereupon he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. But when Elizabeth comes into his life, he feels connected to her and is determined to find out what happened to the man and woman haunting each of them. When Rand steals from Walter Stafford, a man in love with Elizabeth, Stafford is hot on his trail, but when Elizabeth flees with Rand, Stafford is mad with desire to conquer Elizabeth and send Rand to the gallows.
Elizabeth's and Rand's thrilling journey takes them throughout England, but before they can resolve their past, both are captured and put in Newgate Prison. During an escape attempt, Rand is caught but Elizabeth manages to get away. When Rand is sentenced to die by hanging, she is distraught. Believing she has once more betrayed her lover, Elizabeth is determined to make amends for her past life, even if it means her own death.
The Landlord's Black-Eyed Daughter engages the reader in an exhilarating romp throughout 18th century England, with adventure at every turn and spine-tingling suspense. Combined with heated romance, accurate historical facts and nonstop action, this book will suit any adult reader. Characters and dialogue are compelling, historical facts not only interesting but fascinating, and the plot one that simply will not allow the book to be set aside until finished. An exceptional, superbly written book. Highly recommended.
Carved in Bone
by Jefferson Bass
William Morrow/Harper Collins
10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299
9780060759810 $24.95 www.harpercollins.com 1-800-242-7737
Dr. William Brockton is forensic anthropologist with the University of Tennessee and overseer of the Body Farm, made famous in Patricia Cornwell's bestselling novel of the same name. This installment of the Body Farm series finds Dr. Brockton called to Cooke County, Tennessee by Sheriff Tom Kitchings, where a woman's corpse lies mummified in a cave. When evidence of murder is revealed, Brockton, with the aid of Arthur Bohanan, criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department, embarks on his own investigation as to who killed the young woman and the unborn child she carried. Brockton soon finds himself stonewalled by the Sheriff and his deputies while someone is stealing evidence from his offices at U.T. The investigation leads Brockton and Bohanan into danger more than once, and forces Brockton to face the grief he has carried over the death of his wife two years earlier.
The name Jefferson Bass is a combination of two authors: Dr. Bill Bass, renowned forensic anthropologist with the University of Tennessee, and writer Jon Jefferson. Although Brockton is a fictional character based on Dr. Bass, Arthur Bohanan is a well-known criminalist, formerly with the Knoxville Police Department, and patented inventor of the process used to retrieve fingerprints from bodies and large objects.
Carved in Bone is a twisting mystery delivered in an informative style, with plenty of forensics relayed for those so interested. Brockton makes for an engaging character, with Southern roots and mannerisms, and his sidekick Bohanan is charming and witty. This mystery series' magical blend of storytelling with edification is sure to develop numerous fans and is one series this reviewer hopes will continue for years on end.
Memory in Death
J.D. Robb
G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Group
375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
0399153284 $24.95 www.penguin.com 1-800-847-5515
It's Christmastime and New York has gone mad, with tourists stumbling over each other, keeping petty thieves busy, and a Santa Claus who plunges to his death from 37 stories up. Eve Dallas can handle all this with ease, but when Trudy Lombard, her former foster mother, strolls into her office, Eve is drawn back to a time when she was very young and helpless, in the hands of this monster who liked to torture her. Although Trudy claims she is simply visiting New York to see how Eve is doing, when Eve will not deal with her, Trudy pays a visit to Eve's husband, Roarke, and demands money in exchange for keeping Eve's childhood a secret. Roarke offers Trudy good advice: get out of New York and leave them alone. But two days later, Trudy's body is found in her hotel room, bludgeoned to death.
Cop to the core, Eve takes on the case, although it brings back traumatic childhood memories she is forced to face as she diligently investigates who could have killed her former foster mother. As Eve delves further into her investigation, she discovers that she is not the only foster child Trudy tried to extort, one of which Eve is certain must be the killer.
Robb's In Death series continues to provide a good read, each book peeling away layers of the personas behind Eve Dallas the cop and her husband, wealthy entrepreneur Roarke. Known for delivering an entertaining mystery wrapped within a heated romance, Robb does not disappoint.
Cover of Night
Linda Howard
Ballantine Books
1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036
Widow Cate Nightingale runs a bed and breakfast in Trail Stop Idaho, an isolated community boxed in by mountains and a dangerous river. Cate's guests are sparse, consisting of rock climbers, hunters and fishermen, and Cate struggles to make ends meet. If it weren't for shy handyman Cal Harris, the B&B would fall apart and Cate would be bankrupt. But Cate is determined to raise her two, four-year-old twin boys in a safe environment and this charming town seems the perfect place.
Cate's nightmare begins when one of her guests climbs out of a window and disappears, leaving behind his personal effects. A few days later, two men show up and demand she turn over the man's belongings. Held at gunpoint, Cate fears for her life until Cal intrudes and forces the men to leave. Cate hopes that's the end of it, but soon she and the entire town find themselves held hostage by these two men, with the aid of four others. And there's no way to escape; the road leading into town has been blocked and the bridge over the river has been blown up. Cate and Cal team up to try to save their community. Their forced camaraderie leads them into not only danger but reveals the two share a hidden passion for one another.
Linda Howard is tops at romantic suspense. Although holding an entire town hostage seems implausible, she manages to make it real and provides a good read along the way. The chemistry between Cate and Cal is fun as it unfolds over the course of the book. With plenty of suspense, great characters, and a fast pace, Cover of Night will provide plenty of entertainment.
Christy Tillery French
Reviewer
Debra's Bookshelf
Replay
Ken Grimwood
Harper
068816112X $13.00
What would you do if you had your life to live over again? Would you marry the same person? Take the same jobs? Would you try to change the course of history? For Jeff Winston, the protagonist of Ken Grimwood's 1986 novel Replay, these questions are more than theoretical. After dying in 1988, at the age of 43, Jeff wakes up 25 years earlier in his dorm room at Emory. Without understanding why the clock has rewound for him, he lives the same quarter century again, making different mistakes against a familiar historical and cultural backdrop--Kennedy's assassination and Vietnam, the Beatles and Watergate, Patty Hearst and disco and Iran-Contra.
What would you do if you had your life to live over again...again? Come October 18th, 1988, his second time through, Jeff finds himself powerless to prevent his death, despite his foreknowledge of the event. When he wakes up again in 1963, with everything he accomplished in the last 25 years erased, this "second chance" at life seems more curse than gift.
We've all wondered, I'm sure, what we might do differently given a second shot at life. But Grimwood's exploration of the common fantasy goes far beyond superficial what-ifs. He has so thoroughly imagined his character's bizarre predicament that the story, fantastic in its premise, is wholly credible, and the choices Jeff makes across successive lifetimes, sometimes radically different, are rendered fully understandable. Grimwood also wrings surprising pathos from the story:
"He couldn't bring himself to see Judy again. This sweet-faced adolescent girl was not the woman he had loved, but merely a blank slate with the potential to become that woman. It would be pointless, even masochistic, to repeat by rote that process of mutual becoming, when he knew too well the emotional and spiritual death to which it all would lead." The characters' musings on the metaphysics of Jeff's situation can slow Grimwood's narrative, but otherwise this is a thoroughly enjoyable fantasy.
The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse
Jonathan Selwood
Harper
9780061173875 $13.95
Isabel Raven paints kitsch, technically impressive recreations of famous paintings updated for the celebrity age: an American Gothic featuring Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Kurt Cobain in The Death of Marat. Since teaming up some months earlier with bull-dogish art dealer John Dahlman, her career has taken off. Dahlman is obnoxious and vulgar, wholly driven by profit, but he's proved himself an indefatigable advocate since stepping in to seize control of her career. Unfortunately Dahlman's brand of management involves posting naked pictures of Isabel on the web and pushing her to advertise "vaginal rejuvenation" surgery. Isabel, meanwhile, ponders too long a question whose answer should be obvious: would participating in the ad campaign be "selling out"? Her vacillation on the issue is part of Isabel's larger problem, that she too readily surrenders control of her circumstances to others: she is bullied by Dahlman and manipulated by her boyfriend Javier and pushed around by a thirteen-year-old delinquent, Cordelia, a fan of Isabel's paintings. What spirit Isabel shows in response to their importunities has little practical effect.
Because of her spinelessness Isabel is not a particularly likable character: she is a blank canvas herself, registering the will of others. More importantly, she and the other characters in the book are two-dimensional: Isabel is passive, Dahlman offensive, Javier shallow. The self-proclaimedly "dissolute" Cordelia, meanwhile, is so unrealistically precocious that suspending disbelief is impossible:
"'What can I say? I'm dissolute.' She winks. 'Runs in the family. My grandpa once did ninety days for desecrating a taxidermy shop in Pasadena.'
Before I can ask, she cuts me off.
'You really don't want to know. Trust me... Smoke?' Cordelia stuffs the gold lighter in the cellophane and tosses me the pack. 'So is it true that you get hornier when you get old?'"
In Selwood's defense one could argue that the superficiality of his characters is purposeful: he is, after all, playing with the idea of finding authenticity in a skin-deep world, specifically in appearance-obsessed L.A. But that doesn't make me appreciate their cartoonishness very much more.
Selwood's writing can be clever, and he writes about big events as well as big ideas--earthquakes and conflagrations and the end of the world. Still, there isn't much of a story here. The book, like the character types it derides, is a little empty.
100 Ways to Improve the World
Giles Ward
Impress Books
Innovation Center, Rennes Drives, University of Exeter Campus, Exeter EX4 4RN
9780954758660 7.99 Brit. pounds
The first chapter of Giles Ward's 100 Ways to Improve the World is only four pages long, but it was long enough to convince me that I was in for a very di
