Narrative Flows Research Articles

Reading Harimohan Jha’s The Bride, translated by Lalit Kumar: A Masterly Appraisal in Shared Pragmatism

Most people believe that translation entails creating a copy of the original. However, as no two pieces of art can be exact replicas of one another, this is rarely the intended outcome. However, translation allows the translator to serve as a link between two communities, two languages, two cultures, and, ultimately, two worldviews. It allows the translator to invent something altogether new in that way. The translation is also a freeing activity since it does not entail reconstructing lexicon after lexicon. It gives the translator a great deal of freedom. When exercising such liberty, chapter names may be introduced in places where they are absent. These interventions may also result in changing the title or the addition of the proper references, as well as the repair of typographical mistakes and revisions to the narrative flows and chronology. In other words, the translator is given the 'authority' to represent two different cultures as an ambassador. This is precisely the situation with Lalit Kumar's expertly translated novel, The Bride, which was released by Harper Perennial.

Ten Steps for Writing an Exceptional Personal Statement.

Ten Steps for Writing an Exceptional Personal Statement.

Undisciplining Englishness: Narratives of Colonial Encounter in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four

This article explores how Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four undisciplines Englishness—English national character constructed through the nation’s racial politics from the Reform Act and beyond the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century—by drawing upon the trendy Victorian studies’ call for “undisciplining.” I define “undisciplining” as an act of undermining the disciplinary racism sustained by novelistic form and examine how the novel undisciplines Englishness—i.e. places the nation’s assumed isolated superiority in relation to unregulated colonial encounters negating racial hierarchies and criminality in narrative and urban space. Doyle portrays Englishness as a racial construct created for the purpose of clearing out a space for an artificially imagined sphere of the comfortable home secured from outside forces of colonial encounters. Episodes and characters imported from colonial India disturb the seemingly seamless narrative that incorporates them into England. I argue that the colonial elements in the novel—the British Indian Army, Jonathan Small, Indian jewelry, and Tonga—do not build toward the establishment of the superiority of Englishness, but instead reveal an unstableness and artificiality of that ideological construct. While Watson’s first-person narration endorses a form of disciplinary power, other narrative flows dissemble the narrative components working within that frame so that they cannot fit into the logic of the definite omniscient closure, and thereby reveal an undisciplined vista of Englishness, interfused by colonial encounters.

Review: Roman Architecture and Urbanism: From the Origins to Late Antiquity

Review: <i>Roman Architecture and Urbanism: From the Origins to Late Antiquity</i>

Trama de ‘floresceres’ no ensino da ciência. Percursos orientados por entrelaços de amorosidade, confiança e alegria, em processos autopoiéticos de ensino e produção da ciência

The text has an essayistic character, as a result of 30 years of teaching, research, consulting and supervision of texts, linked to the science production, in several areas. The weft of 'floresceres', on Science teaching, proposes to present signs found in the teaching pathways, guided by assumptions of amorousness, trust and joy, on autopoietic process, involving graduating students, specialization, master's degree and doctorate degree in many areas, special and directly, in the work developed on six brazilian universities, with partnerships with researchers of, at leats, eight countries. The theoretical referential is transdisciplinary, Strongly marked by Schizoanalysis of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, as well as by epistemological assumptions of contemporary science mutation, signaled by authors as Fritjof Capra, Roberto Crema, Boaventura de Souza Santos, Deepak Chopra, Amit Goswmani, Marcelo Gleiser and others. On education, stands out the thouth of Paulo Freire, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, always in association to the schizoanalytical assumptions, especially regarding the autopoietic machines of subjectivity production. In methodological terms, the text has a guiding of authoral strategy named as Knowledge Cartography, in combination with Rhizomatic Matrices, seeking the combination between four investigation paths: Personal Knowledge, Theorical Knowledge, Factory Production and Intuitive Dimension of the Research, with the matrix alignment of narrative flows, with the matrix alignment of narrative flows, possible to be apprehended only in reflective rhizomes.

Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Paula Mitchell Marks Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. 345. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.) In the early 1980s, organizers of the Texas Women’s History Project made the first significant effort to address the scope of women’s experiences and activities in Texas over time, uncovering neglected resources and creating a traveling exhibit, Texas Women: A Celebration of History. They and others were pushing the boundaries of United States and Texas history, in large part with a recognition that the dominant historical narratives focusing on male political, military, and economic activities were inadequate in fully illuminating an era and the lives in it. In the ensuing decades, dedicated researchers have unearthed materials for and carefully interpreted many aspects of women’s experience [End Page 112] in Texas. Intensive efforts to honor, incorporate, and share with diverse audiences this growing body of work began in 2006 with the founding of the Ruthe Winegarten Foundation for Texas Women’s History, the sponsor of the series of which Women in Texas History is a part. Subsequently, two broad-based books in particular helped identify and define the field: Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience (University of Texas Press, 2010) by Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith, and Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (University of Georgia Press, 2015) edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless. The Texas State Historical Association itself is in the midst of an initiative to do the same in its Handbook of Texas Women. Boswell builds on such efforts with the first extended scholarly examination of Texas women’s history, from tens of thousands of years ago to the present. As anyone who has sought to bring order to a massive array of historical events and realities can attest, organizing the material and drawing together as many threads as possible offer daunting challenges. Additional difficulties arise from the unevenness of the historical record and previous research as well as the need to balance the general with the specific. Boswell deals thoughtfully and effectively with these issues. Her organization relies on the ways in which women affected or were affected by “developments and events that occurred in the state” (xii), and this means that “technological innovation or patterns of migration” could have more significance than “war or politics” (xii). She makes use of the areas of greatest women’s history research and the subjects that have received the most attention, but she is also sensitive to stories that have not been as accessible or obvious, especially when place, race, class, and gender have obscured women’s lives. Ultimately, she chooses to focus as much as possible on “how unremarkable women coped with daily life, acted as agents in their own lives, and participated in the historical changes that shaped women’s future opportunities” (xii). In the matter of combining a necessary general approach with a human dimension through specific examples, the narrative flows smoothly; Boswell is especially good at incorporating apt quotations. Occasionally the author has is an understandable but unfortunate tendency to overgeneralize, as when she says of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, “Texas women finally had their right to vote guaranteed, and they could proceed to use it—after registering and paying a poll tax” (152). Despite the addendum and an earlier acknowledgment that African American voting rights were being undermined, this glosses over a situation still fraught with difficulty for African American women and many Tejanas. By the same token, the statement that “all white women lost their superior social status as a result of the ending of slavery” (95) seems very difficult to reconcile with the realities of Reconstruction and all that followed. [End Page 113] Such statements do not undermine the value of the book. Boswell does many things exceedingly well in limning the landscape of women’s lives in Texas, particularly in charting the ways in which diverse individual women and groups have sought, often against daunting odds, to build strong and healthy communities and expand the rights and opportunities of the disenfranchised. Further, she provides...

Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer by Leslie Williams

Reviewed by: Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer by Leslie Williams Fredrica Harris Thompsett (bio) Leslie Williams. Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer. Eerdmans Publishing, 2016, 192 pp. ISBN 978-0802874184, $18.00. Why, I wondered, after Diarmaid MacCulloch's definitive scholarly study, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996), do we need another biography of Thomas Cranmer? As one of the most influential theologians and crafters of English Protestantism, Cranmer's life and legacy deserve much wider telling. Williams's short study, in style and intent, serves a much broader audience of curious readers. Professional scholars and more popular readers of history will find herein a refreshing account of this hero of the English Reformation. This readership will also include those interested in Anglicanism writ large, students curious about Tudor history, worshippers accustomed to liturgy shaped by the Book of Common Prayer, as well as those who simply enjoy reading lively historical biographies. Yes, there definitely is a place for Williams's engaging narrative of the life and times of Thomas Cranmer. The narrative moves briskly, presented free of footnotes and other interrupting academic notations, although a key to quotations and other references is found at the end of the book with brief "notes to pages." Williams's narrative flows forward in short engaging chapters depicting Cranmer's early life and intense scholarly formation at Cambridge. The author tells of his travels as a diplomat interacting with Continental reformers, his first and second marriages, his ability to survive enmeshed political and doctrinal rivalries, his avoidance whenever possible of conflict and plots that were endemic in Tudor royal courts, his natural diplomacy and preference for forgiveness, as well as his carefully shaped theological conclusions, which were deeply grounded in the authority of the Bible. One of the central dynamics in Cranmer's life is his slowly growing and eventually deep friendship with King Henry VIII. Here Williams is "deeply indebted" (1) to MacCulloch, whom she often quotes directly. One example is MacCulloch's apt description of the early relationship between Cranmer and the king as between a "timid lecturer and the self-righteous, Godobsessed royal bully" (80). Williams's attentive portrait of the king includes the ongoing efforts of Cranmer to ground his king in central aspects of the reformed faith and the protection Henry eventually provided Cranmer in court intrigues. The emotional story of Cranmer's presence as Henry's chaplain as the old king lay dying attests to the extent of their friendship. At times Williams tends to overdraw emotional dynamics, as when she notes, "Henry died with his only friend [Cranmer] by his side" (99). Accounts of Henry's final marriage, to Catherine Parr, provided emotional support, friendship, and happiness for the last four years of the king's life. Readers of Williams's narrative who are new to Tudor history will likely learn as much about King Henry VIII as about his archbishop. [End Page 460] After Henry's death, the significance of the archbishop's fidelity to the crown continued to direct Cranmer's allegiance to Henry's royal successors, whom he held as divinely appointed. Because Cranmer was a reformer, his second guiding principle, a deep-seated grounding in the authority of scripture, flourished during Edward VI's reign. Cranmer's liturgical brilliance led to the publication of prayer books for English worshippers, and reformers from Tyndale through Coverdale shaped various versions of the Bible in English. Conversely, during Mary Tudor's reign, Cranmer's legacy and theological emphases were overturned. The persecution of reform-minded bishops and ordinary believers alike intensified in the fires of Marian England. Williams is at her best detailing the high drama of Cranmer's and other reformers' degradation under Mary. During the final days of his imprisonment, Cranmer declines in body and mind. Williams reveals to us the despondent archbishop as he defends and then recants aspects of reformed theology, culminating in his dramatic and heroic withdrawal of his last recantation before being burned alive. Williams's energetic narrative and popularizing style accords well with the dramatic and gripping story she has to tell. The author sets forth clearly needed background for...

The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus

Reviewed by: The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War by Carl Lawrence Paulus Michael E. Woods (bio) The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. By Carl Lawrence Paulus. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 311. $49.95 cloth) When proslavery southerners evoked "the horrors of St. Domingo," they conjured images of a world turned upside down, in which blacks violated white bodies, seized white property, and demolished white supremacy. From 1791 through the secession winter, the Haitian Revolution shaped American slaveholders' memories of the past and expectations for the future. Carl Lawrence Paulus persuasively shows that fears of slave rebellion—darkened by Haiti's shadow; quickened by the thwarted conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner; and intensified by the transatlantic abolitionist movement—decisively shaped American proslavery politics. Southern [End Page 111] statesmen first responded by seeking to dominate the federal government, using its legal and military might to defend slavery against home-grown abolitionists and foreign, especially British, meddlers. Simultaneously, they conducted a broader political and cultural campaign to define abolitionism as a dangerously un-American movement and to make slavery's preservation an overriding national priority. Only upon the failure of this two-pronged effort to embed slavery in notions of America's national purpose and exceptional nature did slavery's champions resort to secession. By exploring the interrelated politics of fear and exceptionalism, Paulus contributes to a broader shift in historians' understanding of slavery, nationalism, and sectionalism in the nineteenth-century United States. Paulus covers events and issues that will be familiar to specialists. Based mainly on published primary sources, his narrative flows from Haiti to the major U.S. insurrection plots and thence to British West Indian emancipation, debates over abolitionist mailings and petitions, and the escalating conflict over slavery's expansion, particularly concerning Texas annexation and the Wilmot Proviso. But Paulus's steady focus on the political implications of slave rebellion invigorates his analysis of well-known issues. By foregrounding the specter of revolt, Paulus avoids overemphasizing the legal and constitutional abstractions which can obscure what precisely was at stake in the sectional struggle. Thus, the Wilmot Proviso controversy highlighted slaveholders' dread that a bottled-up slave population would someday explode into a Haitian-style inferno. Similarly, proslavery politicians' determination to gag abolitionist petitions represented a brazen attempt to co-opt the federal government, and seduce northern support, by branding antislavery activism as treason. From this useful vantage point, proslavery politics appears aggressive, not defensive, and national in ambition rather than purely regional. Paulus joins scholars such as Matthew Karp and Robert E. Bonner in documenting proslavery leaders' often successful efforts to make slavery a cornerstone of American national identity and its protection a centerpiece of federal policy. Implicitly, he also reinforces recent [End Page 112] studies that demonstrate how slave agency fomented sectional strife. Contests over American exceptionalism provide a second, if less robust, narrative thread. In several chapters this theme sharpens Paulus's analysis, as when he shows how southern (and northern) critics denounced abolitionists as fanatical Anglophiles who conspired against the ostensibly proslavery American Union. Antislavery agitation, they argued, threatened to destroy America's unique republican experiment. But elsewhere, particularly when fear of revolt offers the most compelling explanation for slaveholders' political demands, the exceptionalism theme seems somewhat forced. A clearer definition of the concept would have strengthened the overall argument for its influence. Paulus associates exceptionalism variously with patriotism, nationalism, republicanism, federalism, collective destiny, national security, and territorial policy. In modern usage, "exceptionalism" is certainly a malleable term, and here it becomes even more plastic because antebellum Americans did not use it. Exceptionalism may not offer the best lens through which to examine each and every one of the diverse political disputes covered in this book. At its best, however, Paulus's analysis demonstrates that the tactic of claiming "real" Americanism has a very long, and equally troubled, history. Michael E. Woods MICHAEL E. WOODS is an assistant professor of history at Marshall University. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (2016) and Emotional...

Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors Shaping Data Visualization Story Reading Experiences

AbstractMany factors can shape the flow of visual data‐driven stories, and thereby the way readers experience those stories. Through the analysis of 80 existing stories found on popular websites, we systematically investigate and identify seven characteristics of these stories, which we name “flow‐factors,” and we illustrate how they feed into the broader concept of “visual narrative flow.” These flow‐factors are navigation input, level of control, navigation progress, story layout, role of visualization, story progression, and navigation feedback. We also describe a series of studies we conducted, which shed initial light on how different visual narrative flows impact the reading experience. We report on two exploratory studies, in which we gathered reactions and preferences of readers for stepper‐ vs. scroller‐driven flows. We then report on a crowdsourced study with 240 participants, in which we explore the effect of the combination of different flow‐factors on readers’ engagement. Our results indicate that visuals and navigation feedback (e.g., static vs. animated transitions) have an impact on readers’ engagement, while level of control (e.g., discrete vs. continuous) may not.

A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant by Harry S. Laver (review)

Reviewed by: A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant by Harry S. Laver Brooks D. Simpson (bio) A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant. By Harry S. Laver. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 195. Cloth, $32.50.) Over the last three decades there has been a renaissance of interest in Ulysses S. Grant's generalship. Most of the resulting scholarship has taken a largely positive view of his performance: in a few cases these studies have offered insights not already captured in the work of J. F. C. Fuller, Bruce Catton, or T. Harry Williams. It is reasonable to ask whether more recent studies are simply rehashing and summarizing what is already out there, or whether they make a new and insightful contribution to understanding the secret to Grant's success. Harry S. Laver braves this challenge in his concise examination of Grant's Civil War career. He argues that the key to Grant's leadership is to be found in the concept of "analytical determination." The concept builds on Carl von Clausewitz's concept of "a great force of will": Laver declares that the great captain "will have the determination to exercise self-control and control of his command, overcome the voices of self-doubt that rise in moments of crisis, and then make the necessary adjustments to accomplish the mission." One should not confuse this with being stubborn. "By continually evaluating the environment, making the appropriate adjustments, and maintaining a cool head, analytical determination produces a decision both well conceived and deliberately made" (7). These observations should come as no surprise to students of Grant's generalship. Scholars have remarked upon his uncommon common sense, [End Page 134] his ability to assess situations quickly and respond to circumstances, and his coolness under pressure. Simply giving those characteristics a new label does not advance the argument much. The problem, indeed, may well lie elsewhere. As William T. Sherman once observed, "To me he is a mystery, and I believe he is a mystery to himself." The puzzle concerns character and temperament more than intellect. It may well reside in one's tendency to dismiss simpler and straightforward explanations as somehow unsatisfying. That we sometimes find Grant a mystery may tell us more about us than about Grant. Moreover, Laver avoids altogether the obvious question: if Grant possessed "analytical determination" as a general, where did it go during the next twenty years? Where was it evident when it came to business or politics? After all, if Grant was an extraordinary leader, how can one bring together his experiences as general and as president? Laver prefers to confine himself to Grant the general. While it may be unfair to ask an author to reflect on a subject he chose not to examine, Laver's failure to explore Grant's later careers limits the usefulness of an insight that most historians and biographers have already observed and described. "Analytical determination" is at best a term summarizing observations that cry for elaboration: at times it serves as shorthand substituting for more insightful analysis. Laver offers a rather familiar account of Grant's early life, pre-Civil War military career, and rise to high command. The signposts are familiar: his first encounter with the foe at Florida, Missouri; the quick change of fortune at Belmont; the taking of Fort Donelson; the response to surprise at Shiloh; and so on, with each episode offering a lesson in command that Grant usually absorbed. Laver has little to say about Grant's growing political awareness or his skill at civil-military relationships, although each made essential contributions to his success as a commander. Instead, as the narrative flows forward to Vicksburg and Chattanooga, one will find much that is familiar, and much more that is uncritical. Those scholars who stick up for John McClernand, William S. Rosecrans, or George H. Thomas will find much to complain about. More problematic is Laver's treatment of Grant's assumption of overall command in 1864. He passes over Grant's original plan of campaign submitted in January 1864 without understanding what it revealed about Grant's thinking; he asserts that...

Engaging the narrative in ontological (in)security theory: insights from feminist IR

Ontological security theory (OST) provides a unique account of how state Self-identity is formed and reformed in international relations. OST postulates that state Self-identity is usefully understood by inquiring into the foundation of a state's sense of Self: its autobiographical narrative. We seek to amend this line of argument by further suggesting that the autobiographical narratives of states are ‘gendered’. Feminist theorizing about the relationship between gender and power implies that the dominant autobiographical narrative of state Self-identity is ‘gendered’ masculine. The power of this masculinized autobiographical narrative flows from an ‘internal othering’ process of counter ‘feminine’ autobiographical narratives that exist alongside the masculinized autobiographical narrative. Our goal is to suggest that opportunities do arise for counter ‘feminine’ narratives to challenge the dominant autobiographical narrative due to their interdependence and we explicate two practices by which masculinized narratives can be engaged, challenged and disrupted.

The Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry (review)

The Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry Nancy L. Zens The story of the Massachusetts 54th Colored Troop emerges as a portion of the larger story of black slavery, pre-war abolitionist activities (especially those of John Brown, Frederick Douglas, and Governor Andrew of Massachusetts), and the emergence of a white man's war based on disagreements over the slavery but not dedicated to the ending of the institution. Union failures on the battlefield, decreasing white enlistments, growing disillusionment with the war, along with black fugitive flight to Union lines and insistent free black political activities finally bring President Abraham Lincoln to the conclusion that ending slavery is a necessary war measure needed to weaken the South and add much needed manpower to the Union war effort. The film, directed by Steven Ives and Ben Loeterman, emphasizes the struggles faced during the initial recruitment efforts of Governor Andrew, who sought to create an elite colored regiment of free blacks who had risen above the ranks of common laborer. Despite the persuasive powers of Frederick Douglass, there were insufficient volunteers from Massachusetts to [End Page 52] fill the regiment, and it was necessary for him to send recruiters to other states. Black men originally enlisted for the same pay and uniform, under the same conditions as white volunteers, yet only white officers were appointed for black troops. Within months, the U.S. Congress passed laws lowering the pay scale from a soldier's pay of $13.00 a month to camp laborer pay of $10.00. The 54th refused to accept pay throughout the war until this law was altered to provide full soldier's pay, causing serious hardship for the men's families. Though promising good coverage of the 54th Massachusetts, the majority of the film's narrative covers political side issues. The majority of the photographs used throughout this film are men in uniform or in battle situations; the actual narrative includes little coverage of battlefield experiences. The 54th's first action on the battlefield on St. James Island or the more famous vanguard position in the attack on Fort Wagner, Charleston, S.C. both receive only a few minutes' coverage. The further activities of the 54th until the end of the war also receive little attention. It is clear that the intent of the filmmakers was to explore the broad aspects of African American experiences before and during the war. The broader political/social issues are intertwined throughout the film in logical thematic fashion but illogical chronological fashion. To someone not thoroughly familiar with the early 19th century, the issues causing the Civil War, and the Civil War itself, all seem to be happening at the same time so that, although the facts are accurate, the final impressions are misleading. From a historical standpoint, this film could be a useful summary of the abolition movement, slavery, complex Civil War politics that do not include blacks as the center of war time attention, and the attempts of abolitionists and free blacks to bring it to center stage, but students would need a good grounding in the progression of events if they are not to become confused in viewing the film. The film could be very useful to an American Studies approach to the Civil War or a portion of black history where the scholarly emphasis is on social and philosophical themes. Archival photographs of individuals and groups of black soldiers, period etchings of wartime conditions, modern film of historic buildings and locations, and shots of newspaper clippings are skillfully woven together using various musical renditions of songs popular among black soldiers during the Civil War, letters written home by soldiers narrated by modern actors, oral histories told by descendants, and historical assessments by reputable historians like James Horton and Barbara Fields. The visual images are skillfully edited so that the narrative flows well. Nancy L. Zens Central Oregon Community College Copyright © 2006 Historians Film Committee

Nature Lessons

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessNature LessonsRoxanne Lanquetot, M.A., M.S.Roxanne LanquetotSearch for more papers by this author, M.A., M.S.Published Online:1 Dec 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.54.12.1662AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Nature Lessons, a novel by Lynette Brasfield, is partly autobiographical. Brasfield moved to the United States from Durban, South Africa, to escape from her mother, who had schizophrenia. I can understand her need to run away. Growing up with a psychotic parent is a nightmare. I had to go to France to escape from my mother, who had the same illness.Kate, the book's heroine, is 40 years old, unmarried, and childless. She lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. She is waiting for Simon, ex-fiancé number three, to pick up his things when a letter arrives from her mother. Thinking that it brings news of her mother's "enemies," she doesn't open it immediately. The half dozen letters she has received since she left 18 years ago were full of paranoia and admonishments to her daughter to remain in the United States, safe from the inherent dangers in South Africa, her country of birth. But this letter is different. Her mother begs her to come back to Durban to discharge her from the hospital where she has been incarcerated, supposedly for treatment of cancer. The letter awakens Kate's dormant feelings of guilt, and she decides to return to South Africa to rescue her mother.Kate has harbored the guilt since childhood, when she refused to accompany her mother to Cape Town to escape before Uncle Oom Piet could take her to the hospital. Forced to live with her uncle's family during her mother's first hospitalization, Kate was teased mercilessly by her cousins, but she didn't care. She felt that the punishment was merited, because she had refused to leave Durban before it was too late. Many children of people with mental illness, like Kate, feel guilty and wish to be punished for not preventing a parent from becoming mentally ill.This book is well written, and the narrative flows. The plot is colored by Zulu folklore. A white girl's relationship with a black boy makes apartheid come alive. Figures of speech and descriptions are highly imaginative. For example, "her [Kate's mother's] thick legs encased in stockings, beneath which unshaven hair … curled into small Catherine-wheel whorls," and "[Kate's] brain felt like a hot air balloon—untethered and drifting, unable to find a place to land." After her father died, she imagined his heart being marched off in handcuffs. Anecdotes about her three fiancés and numerous lovers are lighthearted and amusing. The author cleverly switches from Chagrin Falls to South Africa both in the present and during Kate's childhood, delineating changes by chapter headings, dates, and locales. Themes of Kate's mother's involvement in a scandal and her father's possible murder are mysteries that are not solved by the adult Kate until the end.I recommend the book both to the lay public, who will find it good reading, and to mental health professionals, who have heard stories of the trauma of living with a mentally ill parent from their patients and who will see these experiences come alive in the form of a novel. My only criticism is that mental illness as an organic brain disease is never clearly explained, and an uninformed reader may be left with the impression that the scandal was the cause of psychosis instead of a stress factor.Ms. Lanquetot is a writer as well as teacher-coordinator of children's classes at the children's inpatient service in the department of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.by Lynette Brasfield; New York, St. Martin's Press, 2003, 275 pages, $23.95 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 54Issue 12 December 2003Pages 1662-1662 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2003 Published in print 1 December 2003

Thomas Say: New World Naturalist (review)

Book Reviews41 Thomas Say: New World Naturalist. By Patricia Tyson Stroud. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. xv + 340 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Thomas Say (1787-1 834) was the first American naturalist to find, name, and publish descriptions of a large number ofAmerican insects and shells. He was one ofAmerica's first professionals in that he devoted almost his entire adulthood to his favorite branches ofnatural history, earning for his last decade a "life grant" from his patron and surrogate parent, William Maclure (1763-1840). The wealthy Scot retired early to travel and explore the geology of Europe and North America, and met Say, curator ofthe new Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, months after his father died in 1813. Say's life as an ex-Quaker shows the effects ofthe Quaker tradition. His father, an apothecary and physician, belonged to the Society of Free Quakers who supported the American Revolution. His mother, who died when he was six, was William Bartram the Quaker botanist's niece. Thomas Say was sent to the new Quaker school atWesttown in 1799 anddeveloped alifelong friendshipwithFriend Reuben Haines, his Westtown classmate, an amateur naturalist. He hated his three years of compulsory worship and negative discipline at the boarding school, although he later used the science, literature, and Bible he learned there. I see residual Quakerismnotonly in Say's appreciation ofnature as the home ofGod, but also in his concerned dealings with the Indians met on his travels, recording their ways, and sometimes treating their diseases with what he had learned at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. Stroud threads her way through a rain forest ofcorrespondence. Say was a letter writer by nature and office, as curator of the Philadelphia Academy, and as a passionate naturalist aiming to demonstrate to the scientific world the preeminence ofAmerican naturalists. His great-grandfather, John Bartram, had been a founder ofthe American Philosophical Society, which appointed Say curator in 1821 . His participation as zoologist on Maj. Stephen H. Long's expedition to the Rockies, 1819-20, and to the lakes north of the Minnesota-Canadian border in 1823, increased his data network. His last eight years in the provincial village of New Harmony, Indiana, requiredconstantcorrespondencewith thecenters ofsciencefor books, printing materials, specimens, and exchange of information. A good deal of Stroud's narrative flows on a stream of quotations from these letters. They are interesting remarks, but perhaps her story would glide even more smoothly if the author told it straight, with her judicious comment and perceptive interpretations incorporated. She is familiar with the most recent literature about science in the age of Jackson, Western explorations, and the setting of Say's freethinking philosophy. Sheconsiders all sides ofSay's personality withoutlosing focus on his science. After Maclure moved to Mexico in 1828, his patronage pinned Say to New Harmony as editor of Maclure's writings and as a caretaker of Maclure's Indiana property. Maclure was interested in popular education for social reform more than in scientific research, although he subsidized Say's work. In 1 838 he gave Thomas H. Palmer ofPittsford, Vermont, although unknown to him, $400 for a local public library, but Say's widow could not persuade him to finance the more expensive republication ofthe entomologist's collected essays. The authorhas exhaustively consulted the known sources and relied on the latest 42Quaker History works about related subjects. Her forty-seven contemporary illustrations are judiciously placed in the text. The index is unusually helpful. Burlington, Vt.Thomas D. S. Bassett Cork City Quakers 1655-1939: A BriefHistory. By Richard S. Harrison. Bantry: Privately Published by the Author, 1991. [3], iii, 91pp, illus. Available from the Author for $ 1 8 (including first class airmail postage): 2 Marine Street, Bantry, Co. Cork, Republic of Ireland. This is a rich and fascinating monograph in which Richard S. Harrison vividly combines the Friend's call to publish the truth with the antiquary's urge to record some ofthe unwritten history ofhis county and its capital. Irish Quakerism has not received the kind of professional attention from modem historians that it has deserved—the continuing researches of Kenneth Carroll, Charles Cherry, and Harrison himselfprove...

The English Gothic illuminated Apocalypse,lectio divina, and the art of memory

Abstract Among the books of Scripture the Apocalypse is uniquely composed of visions personally experienced and described by its author. St John, each signalled by ‘I saw’ or ‘in my vision, I heard’. Its cataclysmic horrors and ecstatic glimpses of celestial majesty do not ‘happen’ or ‘unfold’, as in the scriptural narratives of Genesis or the Gospels. Described in vivid, often metaphorical language by a seer-author—poet, they ‘appear’ as they are seen and heard in visions and dreams. The narrative flows without plot, outside the boundaries of operative causes, for its ‘events’ lie beyond time. The manuscript illustrations created for the Book of Revelation reveal a special character that persists to the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike other illuminated biblical texts, the Apocalypse offers a literal transformation of narrative discourse into an extended cycle of pictures representing every episode, moment, and gesture. Instead of retelling stories in pictures, however, the images authenticate the experien...

The Life Cycle of Schistosoma Mansoni (film)

This short movie is intended primarily as an introduction for lectures or small group conferences with students of medicine, nursing, public health or of other health and biologic sciences, as well as for physician audiences. It is not meant to be a self-contained compendium of schistosome biology; lay groups may have some trouble with the terminology used in the narration, and workers familiar with schistosomiasis will not be shown much they do not already know. However, the film is both factual and visually attractive and should fulfill its intended role admirably well. The film is introduced and punctuated by colorful pictures of the river Nile and of its people, then shifts to shots of live vector snails, cercariae, schistosomula, adult worms, eggs and miracidia in succession. These dramatic live shots alternate with fixed light- and electron microscopic images and with explanatory animated sequences as the narrative flows through successive schistosome life stages and transitions.