Good Book Research Articles

Review essay: When the dancing turned to mourning: Theological responses to the pandemic

This review essay considers four books published within the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through how each of these texts offers a timely Christian response to, and not explanation for, the challenges that we face: innumerable deaths, the inability to worship together, deserted streets and shut-up businesses, the place of viruses in the Earth’s ecology, and the apparent absence of God as the innovations of modern science seem to be our only salvation. Reviewed works:John C. Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? (Epsom, Surrey: The Good Book Company, 2020)Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK: 2020)Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2020)Robert Keay, Reframing Pandemic (The Window of Christianity series; New York: Basiliad Publishing, 2020)

Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil

Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil

Engaging readers through choice

School Library Policies usually include, .”the development of a life long love of reading/literature”. Choosing a good book to read is like choosing an artwork for your house. It is subject to personal taste, artistic preference and personal experiences. The Teacher Librarian can play a pivotal role in supporting students reading for enjoyment, both formally and informally within the school. By personalizing and developing choice as part of formal reading programs, they can assist students to develop their love of reading and indulge their passion for certain types of literature in a supportive and encouraging environment.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Ushashi Dasgupta

Reviewed by: Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Ushashi Dasgupta Dominic Rainsford (bio) Ushashi Dasgupta. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World. Oxford UP, 2020. Pp. xvi + 307. $80.00, £60.00. ISBN 978-0-19-885911-6 (hb). All readers of Dickens will have been struck by the attention given to domestic architecture and interiors in his work. Structures such as the Peggottys' boat-house, Bleak House, and Satis House attain a character-like status within a more general system of interchangeability, where bricks and mortar can peculiarly resemble flesh and blood. Furthermore, we can't ignore the socio-political and plot-related significances of many kinds of temporary housing: it is clearly of crucial importance in which grade of accommodation, in which part of town, under the malign or benevolent eye of what kind of owner or manager, Oliver, or the Nicklebys, or Nell (and so on, through the canon) come to lay their heads. We see all of this, but we may still not be sure precisely what it means to be housed up "two pair of stairs," in a "second floor front," or in an attic, let alone about the status of specific neighborhoods. Meanwhile, we may feel that there may be significant connections to be made between the fictional world of freeholds, lodgings, and tenancies, and the long and very complex story of Dickens's own homes. But we may not know quite where to start. Ushashi Dasgupta's very good book will reinvigorate and deepen our thinking about all of the above, and a great deal more – especially in relation to the fine historical detail of leased or rented housing in Dickens's England. At the same time, it connects this factual enrichment with a vital dimension of twenty-first-century literary-critical thinking, often marked as the "spatial turn," and with a more general move to resuscitate theory by thoroughly connecting matters of aesthetics, form, genre, and artistic self-expression with ethics, politics, commerce, the materiality of real lives in real bodies, and books as consequential objects in time and space. Picking up on the exuberant mood of early Dickens, Dasgupta's first chapter, "Building a Career: From Sketches to Dombey" concerns itself with "laughter and lodgings" (41). We look at the comic potential of miscellaneous people – not least, the young, romantic, and unattached – thrown together in shared housing, as well as at the all-too-easily mocked figure of the landlady (such as Mrs. Bardell or Miss La Creevy). Dasgupta refines our understanding of the situations in which Dickens places these characters by explaining tenancy and lodging law, and London demographics. But she also sets them in a highly convincing literary context: not so much the novel as the popular theatre, and more specifically the farce. This entails dusting off the works of farceurs such as John Poole and John Maddison Morton: authors who may be unknown to most 21st-century Dickensians, but who were deeply significant to Dickens's own cultural experience, [End Page 200] and to his evolution as a writer. "Without exception, lodging-house farces are peopled with two-dimensional caricatures, types, and tropes. … they ultimately speak to flatness and exaggeration in human behaviour" (48). In other words, this could be where Dickens picked up bad habits. However, "Dickens … does not simply flatten his lodging-house characters for laughs; instead, he uses practices common to farce to make some poignant suggestions about urban behaviour. Loneliness creates idiosyncrasy, and so does the desperate competition for attention in noisy, overcrowded quarters" (65). The lightness of the farce tradition is not condemned here; after all, Dickens retains a degree of frivolity (thank goodness) till the end, but we can see how he detected the serious undertones: the important things that the farce tradition almost inadvertently says about society. In the case of the landlady, for example, Dickens embarks on a pattern of reflection on gendered identities and spaces that will run through to his late work (and to Dasgupta's final chapter). There are metafictional hints, moreover, that even early Dickens senses that authors are landladies of a sort, accommodating characters as often precarious...

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture by Derritt Mason

Reviewed by: Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture by Derritt Mason Jonathan Alexander (bio) Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture. By Derritt Mason. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Over a hundred years ago, psychologist G. Stanley Hall identified adolescence as a period of “storm and stress,” borrowing the phrase “Sturm und Drang” from German romanticism. Whatever the psychic and physiological realities of this period of human maturation, adolescence has been popularly and persistently—even romantically— figured as a turbulent time. The contemporary boom in young adult (YA) literature has capitalized on such anxieties by offering readers a range of narratives of young people struggling to find their way in the world, and sometimes, in the case of dystopian YA, raging against the machinery of adult oppression not just on a micro (familial) level but on a macro (political) stage as well. When marginalized identities become part of the story, the pressures of adolescent anxieties assume particular shape as befitting the personal, cultural, and social nuances of identities and accompanying bigotries and prejudices. Derritt Mason, in Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, turns our attention to the anxious specifics of queer YA and, in doing so, underscores how anxiety is never just a thematic of YA, especially of queer YA, but an often-unnamed pressure in the production and critical reception of YA. Mason forcefully makes his claim early in his study, asserting that we should embrace YA “as an anxious genre” (6). The case of queer YA affords him a specific purchase on what he means by “anxious genre,” particularly as he invites us to see how “the longer history of anxiety and adolescence collide[s] with contemporary concerns about queer youth and the content of texts for young people” (6). Not only is YA about the anxieties of adolescence; it itself, as a genre, is the product of anxieties about young people, with anxieties about queer young people offering a rich set of flashpoints for revealing and critically analyzing what we are so often anxious about. For instance, in depicting the lives of queer young [End Page 330] people, writers and publishers (and readers) often have to grapple with the problem of authenticity and voice: “what is an ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ GLBTQ voice? What constitutes ‘fresh insight’ into queer lives?” (5). In a way, the problem of voice is the problem of all YA; how can an adult writer capture and represent the voices of young people, as such voices embody their cares, concerns, struggles, and hopes? When the anxieties of queer youth are central to the story, the anxieties seem compounded by the representation of queer identities in homophobic and transphobic cultures. For Mason, the compounding assumes the form of both the pressure to represent a group of young people facing particular problems and the pressure of such works potentially to serve as a remedy for such problems. As Mason eloquently puts it, “Queer YA and cultural texts that seek to address queer youth proliferate as both an anxiety management strategy (a potential antidote to the fact that queer youth are in crisis) and a producer of additional anxiety (what if this address fails in its mission?)” (9). Such anxieties serve to mirror, perhaps metonymically, larger, literary anxieties about YA as a genre. Mason quotes Peter Hunt on this issue: critics of YA often worry over “what is good for the child socially, intellectually, and educationally, and what we, really, honestly think is a good book” (13). Borrowing from the theoretical energies of affect theory, Mason sets up his book as a series of case studies about the contours of such anxieties in queer YA. His central claims are, on one hand, hopeful and, on the other, critical: “[D]oes it not inspire at least a bit of hope that anxiety about the well-being of queer youth and the status of their representation in popular texts seems to connect so many of us? It may be that, in centering affect in our analysis of queer YA, we might better attune ourselves to the structures of feeling that attend adolescent queerness and those moments when our own anxieties, as adults, tend to...

Four Kinds of Hard: An Understanding of Cancer and Death among Latino Community Leaders

Early integration of palliative care after a diagnosis of cancer improves outcomes, yet such care for Latino populations is lacking in rural regions of the United States. We used a participatory action research design with Latino community leaders from emerging immigrant communities in North Carolina to explore sociocultural perspectives on cancer and death. Thematic analysis was conceptualized as Four Kinds of Hard represented by four themes: Receiving an Eviction Notice, Getting in the Good Book, Talking is (Sometimes) Taboo, and Seeing Their Pain Makes us Suffer. These themes captured fears of deportation, coping with cancer through faithfulness, ambivalence about advance care planning, and a desire to spare families from suffering. Findings suggest strategies to improve conversations about end-of-life wishes when facing advanced illness and death. This study demonstrates the importance of training Latino community leaders to improve palliative care and bridge service gaps for Latino families living in emerging rural communities.

Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Cindy Ott (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. In any good book about photographs, the images themselves should tell a valuable story, not just the text. Photographs alone can change our thinking and make us question our assumptions. In Through a Native Lens, Nicole Dawn Strathman has gathered photographs by and about American Indians that do just that. Photography has been central to the image-making of American Indians for as long as the technology has existed. Yet up until recent years, historians thought that American Indians had little to nothing to say about the photographic process or the images. An important turn in that thinking was Shamoon Zamir's The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (2014). He argues that American Indians who posed for Curtis participated in, and contributed to, the creation of those famous sepia-toned, soft-focus images of bygone days. Yet no matter the level of revisionist history, those powerful images of precolonial ways of life stick in our heads. Strathman sees herself following in Zamir's footsteps. And while she critiques classic portraiture from the early twentieth century, her most important contribution is to dig up and present images that defy categorization, before she even applies her deft interpretation. Images include young American Indian boarding school students goofing around in front of the handheld Kodiak Brownie of their Kiowa classmate Parker McKenzie. We see them in relaxed, playful interactions rather than posing before the official school photographer's large-format mounted camera in military precision, or at work in the classroom. The Native subjects of indigenous Alaskan Benjamin Haldane wore the latest fashions and directed their stare at the camera. They created self-portraits of wealth and sophistication, Strathman writes, rather than of exotic cultures from a distant time and place. Strathman's main and essential point is that American Indians, from the photographers to those who posed for them, controlled the technology and used it to their own ends. With Curtis's images still dancing in our heads, this is a useful reminder. Yet the value of Through a Native Lens doesn't stop there. The author also describes how Tribal communities have relied on these new technologies and images to document their history and perpetuate their values. In this way, the photographs become modern-day petroglyphs, ancient images incised or drawn on boulders, which Native people rely on as pneumonic devices to recall stories of who they are as a people. These photographs, and the stories about them, also make clear [End Page 898] that American Indians, even those from the same community, are never one and the same. Strathman presents images of American Indians in a variety of clothing, at work and play, with multiple motivations to use photography. She describes the controversies that the Tlingit photographer and anthropologist Louis Shotridge caused in communities when he took photographs against their will. This example highlights the diversity of experiences and opinions among Native people. Strathman's work is organized thematically, and it shifts from famous to everyday American Indians who sat for photographers, to professional and amateur American Indian photographers. The book synthesizes recent scholarship. The author cites Philip Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), for example, to explain why modern American Indian women would pose as stereotypical princesses. Strathman owes a great debt to Johanna Cohan Scherer, longtime photo archivist at the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology. Scherer has spent decades studying and cataloging images of American Indians, and her comments, laced throughout the book, lend weight. Strathman offers many close readings of images based on extensive historical research. Yet sometimes she veers too far into speculation. She describes the motivations of the sitters with a certainty that lacks the documentation she needs to back up her assertions. In general, she moves on quickly from one image or person...

First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey

Reviewed by: First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey Gracjan Kraszewski First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. By Katherine Bentley Jeffrey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 200 pp. $45.00. The first question that should be posed to author Katherine Bentley Jeffrey is why? Why write this book? Surrounding her work's central character—the Jesuit priest Darius Hubert, Civil War chaplain for the Confederacy—there exists an admitted paucity of primary sources. Why tell his story? Three pages into this excellent biography the answer is clear: because other scholars have become discouraged by problems of extant material, or intimidated by a subject's lack of star power, the vicious cycle of historiographical Catholic absence in the antebellum South has been perpetuated. From this, false assumptions emerge that Catholics were not present in the nineteenth-century South. If nothing else, Jeffrey has successfully joined the fight to remedy this problem. Fortunately for us readers, there is so much more here. Told chronologically following an opening vignette from February 1880, where Hubert, who was noted for his oratorical ability, commemorated George Washington's birthday with a speech, the story begins in France, where a procession honoring a relic of St. Augustine of Hippo inspired a priestly vocation. Young Darius joined the Jesuits and volunteered for the North American mission. Ordained in 1850, he spent much of that tumultuous decade as an educator in Louisiana Catholic schools where his polyglot abilities and affable character won him wide respect and admiration. Civil War scholars will find chapter four most interesting. It details Hubert's war years as a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia. It is here we find the strongest evidence for Jeffrey's claim that some considered Hubert to be "a perfect man" (xii, 77). Hubert did not shirk from the dangers of battle, bore the war's hardships and privations next to his men, was indefatigable in his care for the sick and wounded placing a man's spiritual considerations first, and was indiscriminately gracious to men Protestant, Catholic, and other. Hubert's postbellum record was marked by service rather than Lost Cause fanaticism. In [End Page 86] 1876, he travelled to Savannah to help with a yellow fever outbreak. A medallion he received afterwards from the Savannah Benevolent Association, with Matthew 25:36 inscribed thereon, remained one of his few cherished possessions. Father Hubert died in 1893, convinced, according to Jeffrey, of "the obligation to move forward as one people in a reunited nation" (139). This is a good book with much in it, biography done right, best suited for the graduate school seminar. It sheds light on Catholics in the Civil War, race relations in the Reconstruction South, and offers many an interesting anecdote, Margaret Gaffney Haughery's "Steam and Mechanical Bakery" but one example, illuminating the richness and variety of Southern Catholic life. But if there is a singular thesis here, an overarching theme and contribution, it is the brilliant way in which Jeffrey demonstrates Catholic acceptance and importance in nineteenth-century Southern culture. Catholics were not marginal members of Southern society but active, respected, and even admired citizens, Hubert but one such person. The best example of Hubert's seamless assimilation into Southern life comes from an article in the Baton Rouge Gazette in December 1858. Despite opining that "we are the antagonists of all his religious views," the paper was forced to admit that Hubert had "won golden opinions from all sorts of people," citing "his gentlemanly deportment as a citizen" and "kind ministrations to the sick and the afflicted during the late epidemic " and that "the most eloquent, impressive, and logical discourse we have ever listened to under the roof of St. Joseph's came from his lips" (35). While one can find themes of Catholic integration in Southern society in works such as Michael Pasquier's Fathers on the Frontier or Jon Wakelyn and Randall Miller's classic Catholics in the Old South, Jeffrey's book is a natural companion to Andrew Stern's Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross. What Stern shows concerning Catholic-Protestant cooperation in the antebellum era...

Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century, by Keneshia N. Grant

Review: <i>The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century</i>, by Keneshia N. Grant

Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden

Reviewed by: Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden Giles Whiteley James Uden, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 284. $74.00 cloth. Good scholarly books sometimes seek not only to add to what we know about any given subject, but also to radically reconfigure the supposed knowns of this subject. James Uden's Spectres of Antiquity is one such book. Founded on what initially seems like a counter-intuitive inspiration, Uden asks us to re-conceive our understanding of the origins of the Gothic as less a reaction to, than a reconfiguration of, the classical heritage. In the mode of all good Gothicists, Uden unearths the repressed kernel at the core of his subject, but in this case it is the surprising revelation that the Gothic does not seek to exorcise the "spectres" of the classics and the classical past, but rather mines and relies upon a subterranean vault of classical sources, creatively reworking them. The results of Uden's labors are striking, and it is not hyperbole to say that Spectres of Antiquity will be essential reading to all who are interested in the origins of the Gothic or to the history of classical reception in the eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. The story of the origins of the Gothic that Uden calls into question is much rehearsed. When Horace Walpole republished The Castle of Otranto in a second edition, he included a famous preface which figured the "Gothic Story" (the new subtitle) as the blending of two kinds of "romance," ancient and modern. The model for this Gothic was an English-language literary tradition of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, one which emphasized the power of "fancy," rather than the classical authors which many of Walpole's contemporaries were openly emulating. His defense of the genre was accompanied by an attack on Voltaire, who had himself recently attacked Shakespeare for violating the "classical" laws of the Aristotelian dramatic unities. Walpole's Gothic then is supposedly founded on a suppression of the "classical" laws of order, reason, and decorum, in favor of a more English or "Gothic" value of imagination. [End Page 130] In this, Walpole's version of the Gothic seemed to chime with a contemporary reappraisal of the standing of the "Gothic" during the period. His literary experiments became part of a wider politico-cultural narrative, one expressed in the factional infighting of the Whig party during the immediate period of composition, and one which had claimed the career of Walpole's father, Prime Minister Robert Walpole. According to this view, the rise of interest in Gothic art and architecture during the middle of the eighteenth century was ultimately a question of nationalism: the new Gothicists of the period discovered in their subject an imagined culture of medieval northern Europe. In a moment of ahistorical bravura, this same spirit could be traced back to the supposedly emancipatory gestures of the sackings of Rome by the Goths, and teleologically read forward both to Henry VIII's break with Rome and to the development of parliamentary democracy after the Revolution. As such, the Gothic became a quintessentially Whiggish preoccupation. If this stretched the Gothic well beyond its historical borders, it also did the same with the classical, conflating ancient Rome with the Catholic Church, and the Goths, who were broadly based in Germany, with the English. Regardless, however, of the questionable historicism of the Gothicists of the period, battle lines were supposedly drawn: it was the Gothic contra classicism. In Spectres of Antiquity, Uden not only questions this eighteenth-century historicism; he also questions the ways in which literary historians have been a little bit too quick to buy this story. Indeed, as with all good counter-narratives, closer scrutiny reveals that what initially seems extraordinary is obvious when Uden has brought the facts to light. His argument is that a clear classical presence underwrites the Gothic, one which, in many cases, has been right before the reader's eyes. For instance, under the subtitle to Otranto, Walpole positions an epigraph from Horace, as Matthew Lewis positions a different epigraph from the same...

Elizabeth Boyle, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland. London: Routledge, 2021, xii, 205 pp.

The Irish are a nation of poets; they inhabit the Isle of Saints. So what Ireland’s early bards and teachers had to say on the Christian message makes a good book. In a monograph of five chapters, Dr Boyle (of NUI, Maynooth) hence tells us much, with the right combination of didactic and lyrical.

ANALYSIS ON READING TEACHING MATERIAL BASED ON CRITICAL READING SKILL AT UIN MALANG | تحليل مادة مهارة القراءة على أساس القراءة الناقدة في جامعة مولانا مالك إبراهيم الإسلامية الحكومية مالانج

Teaching material has an important role in learning, so in providing good teaching materials, it must refer to the principles of the preparation of good teaching books, one of which is the principle of education. This study aimed to analyze Maharah al-Qiraah 2 material in Arabic and Letters Department base on the principle of education, namely: curriculum, syllabus, and suitability material content, suitability presentation of material and language used. The type research is descriptive qualitative research by content analysis. The result of this research explain from suitability of the content Maharah al-Qiraah 2 material suitable by the curriculum and syllabus in Arabic language and Letters Department that aimed to analyze the discourses in learning material. The suitability of presentation material suitable by the gradation start from easy material to difficult material, but need to choose the argumentative topics and reformulating the argumentative questions in exercises which support students to critical thingking.

Yeats’s Island Poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and Rajeev S. Patke’s Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination

This essay deals with how to read poetry that relates to islands. Rajeev S. Patke has recently published a good book, which expands the scope of literary scholarship to a new field, “islands and literature.” Pattke’s Poetry and Islands will open up this discussion in the future in English scholarship.

Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1-11

Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1-11

Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. By Elizabeth A. Lambourn (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2018) 301 pp. $99.99 cloth $39.99 paper

The typical Indian Ocean history does not lend itself to social history or to close looks at the daily lives of actual humans. It can read like a 5,000 years-long weather report interspersed with lists of trade goods—a massive amount of research and scholarly synthesis that is more than a little dry. The other common feature of the Indian Ocean genre is recourse to Braudel’s longue duree, which allows authors to use more recent anthropological work to try to illuminate social and cultural practices from the distant past.1 Thus, a description of life on board a twentieth-century dhow might serve as an approximate guide to life on a twelfth-century ship. It might not be perfect for the task, but it is the best that we could do for now.Lambourn’s book, which is built around a list that was scribbled into the margins of a letter, represents a totally different approach to social history in the Indian Ocean. Abraham Ben Yiju, the list’s author, was a member of the community of North African Jews, whose correspondence is preserved in the contents of the Cairo Geniza.2 His list was made in 1149 as he was preparing to return from Malabar to Egypt. Lists of trade goods are a dime a dozen in Indian Ocean histories, but this one, of personal items, was meant to provide for the Ben Yiju party’s sea voyage home rather than to catalog trade goods. Items range from bags of rice to preserved fish, jars of lemons, a cabin door, and a rat trap (never go to sea without one). Lambourn also includes lists of goods that Ben Yiju’s friends and agents sent to him as gifts, which were clearly intended for household use rather than resale. Like the packing list, they shed light on the social and material culture of Ben Yiju’s world.From Lambourn we learn that raisins (which Ben Yiju received frequently as gifts) were macerated in water to make a substance that could be used as “wine” for Jewish ritual purposes. The silver trays that Ben Yiju packed for the sea voyage reveal something of South Indian rice-eating habits (dishes served on a platter and garnished with pickles). The cabin door and planks that he packed for the sea voyage testify to women’s modesty and their protection at sea. Some parts of the book consider Ben Yiju and his family’s life on land (and by inference that of the entire Jewish community), and other parts use Ben Yiju’s packing list to improve our knowledge of life at sea.In effect, Lambourn’s book is an ethnography of an 800-year-old cultural world, but its human feel makes it unlike any previous work about the region and period. Ghosh’s book also has this human element, but it is not always clear about the line between evidence and imagination. Lambourn’s is more attentive to the usual scholarly conventions about evidence. She discovers a wealth of information hiding in plain sight, waiting for new questions and contexts (most of the Geniza’s contents were translated and published decades ago). Hopefully, this good book is the first of many to deviate from the traditional lines-on-maps-and-commodity-list approach to Indian History.

Read any good books lately?

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Quality of life: Investigating the impact of two major mental disorders, anxiety and depression, in patients with age-related macular degeneration

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact on the quality of life of patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in relation to common mental disorders, namely anxiety and depression, and determine specific factors (e.g., thoughts/feelings, sociodemographic characteristics) that may be used to refer such patients to psychiatrists. Materials–Methods: To classify the patients into different categories, regarding the development of the mental disorders under consideration, the “Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale” (HADS) has been utilized. The main statistical methodologies applied are classification and regression trees (CART) techniques and logistic regression. For the purposes of the aforementioned statistical analysis, the R software package has been used. Results: Both depression and anxiety scores varied considerably across visual acuity (VA) severity. Patients with severe visual acuity problems tend to have also higher HADS scores. Women were more likely to be affected by depression; sociodemographic factors did not have any significant effect. According to the performed CART analysis, responses to two HADS items (namely, “I can enjoy a good book or radio or television program” and “I have lost interest in my appearance”) identified the vast majority of severely to moderately depressed patients. Furthermore, the level of VA severity was found as a main driver for diagnosing an AMD patient with depression. Conclusions: VA impairment (or decline) severity level was found to be the main factor associated with depression in patients with AMD. Moreover, specific thoughts/feelings present in patients with AMD have been found as significant regarding the level of their mental disorders under consideration and could be asked by the ophthalmologist to refer (or not) them to psychiatrists.

Labs to Accompany Treatment of General Relativity in a General Education Astronomy Course

It often falls to a physicist to teach a conceptual astronomy course. It is easy to justify a treatment of general relativity in the context of massive stars, black holes, and cosmology. There are a number of good books available to serve as texts or references, including Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy and Robert Geroch’s General Relativity from A to B. The purpose of this article is to describe three experimental introductions to the mathematical and physical concepts of general relativity. These can be accomplished at little expense and require no advanced mathematics on the part of students.

Maximizing Indonesian Students’ Readability by Using English Textbooks

The objective of the research was to find out whether the textbook provided by teachers had fulfilled the criteria of having a good book. The researcher used qualitative research, particularly content analysis research design. To answer the research questions, the researcher analyzed the contents of textbooks, evaluated by using a checklist adapted from the Cunningsworth checklist and writing a report. The researcher interpreted data to determine whether the textbook met the criteria for a good textbook. The results of the analysis showed that there were no textbooks that met the criteria for good books. The first result showed that the Think Global Act Locally met the criteria with a percentage of 51.92%, the coverage was 66.67% for aims and approaches, 33.33% for design, 40% for language content, 55.56% for skills, 66.67% for topics, 80% for methodology, 0% for teacher's book and 75% for practical considerations. The second was "English on Sky 3" met the percentage of 59.62%, the coverage was 66.67% for aims and approaches, 50% for design, 60% for language content, 72.22% for skills, 66.67% for the topic, 80% for methodology, 0% for Teacher's book and 50% for practical considerations. Meanwhile, Practices Your English Competence 3 met the percentage of 42.31%, the coverage was 33.33% for aims and approaches, 50% for design, 60% for language content, 33.33% for skills, 66.67% for topics, 60% for methodology, 0% for teacher's book and 50% for practical. In conclusion, there were no criteria that achieved good criteria and three out of eight criteria were considered fair.

Políticas de formação de leitores no final da década de 1960: Nancy Larrick (1969) e as orientações para pais e professores

Com o objetivo de contribuir para a compreensão da história da formação de professores e para a história da literatura infantil brasileira, analisou-se a configuração textual do Guia dos pais na escolha de livros para crianças, de Nancy Larrick, especialista nos assuntos relacionados à leitura para crianças, publicado pelo Centro de Bibliotecnia para o Desenvolvimento do Instituto “Roberto Simonsen” (SP), em 1969. Esse livro é a tradução do original norte-americano A parent’s guide to childreen´s reading, publicado pelo Franklin Book Programs, em 1958. A tradução em língua portuguesa foi feita pela professora Alcina Jorge de Almeida e a adaptação pelo jornalista Leonardo Arroyo, com a supervisão do professor e psicólogo Manoel Lourenço Bergström Filho. Os resultados obtidos por meio da análise do Guia dos pais ... têm contribuído para a compreensão da necessidade apontada por especialistas em literatura infantil, leitura e bibliotecas para a infância, em meados do século XX, dentre eles Leonardo Arroyo e Lenyra Fraccaroli, quanto à orientação de pais e professores na escolha de bons livros para crianças e jovens. Nesse contexto educacional brasileiro, destaca-se também a elaboração de catálogos de livros para crianças, uma prática iniciada pelos pioneiros Lenyra Fraccaroli e Leonardo Arroyo.