Sort Of Book Research Articles

The Money Pit Mystery by E. Walters

Walters, Eric. The Money Pit Mystery. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2011. Print. [Originally published by HarperCollins in 1999]. You may recall that in 1986, Tom Hanks and Shelly Long starred in a romantic home-repair comedy called The Money Pit. Today, that film has generally been forgotten, and the nickname “The Money Pit” once again evokes only the legend of Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Ahoy! There be Captain Kidd’s treasure in that there pit. (…or is there?) You may also recall that in 1999, the much-awarded Eric Walters saw the publication of a page-turner called The Money Pit Mystery. This new paperback edition is a straightforward reissue. However, the novel has aged well, and today’s upper elementary readers can escape to summertime adventures with a new copy of this made-in-Canada thriller. The Money Pit Mystery effectively conveys the scale, menace, and irresistibility of the Money Pit, which so far is an immense but fruitless excavation. The Money Pit is dangerous for another reason, too, which is that it is under strict corporate control, fenced and guarded, a true-to-life detail. Protagonists Sam and Beth are inspired by their grandfather’s longtime passion for the mystery when they arrive to stay with him for the summer. Emboldened by their friend Buzz, Sam and Beth succumb to their curiosity, eventually enlisting Grandpa in their quest to find the treasure. More detailed information is available in this Lego®-animated student book report (*spoiler alert*). While The Money Pit Mystery is a successful adventure tale, it’s also a nuanced portrayal of sibling angst, early adolescent crushes, and, most significantly, Alzheimer’s disease. The question of Grandpa’s fitness for independent living is what brings Beth, Sam, and their mother to Oak Island for the summer. The issue threads its way through the book, reminding us that the Pit is deep metaphorically as well as physically. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

Munsch at Play Act Two: Eight More Stage Adaptations by I. Watts & R. Munsch

Watts, Irene N., and Robert Munsch. Munsch at Play Act Two: Eight More Stage Adaptations. Illus. Michael Marchenko. Toronto: Annick, 2011. Print. Which child should inhabit the role of the protagonist Andrew (“No, no, no, no, no”) in “I Have to Go”? What could be used to make the “sound” in “Jonathan Cleaned Up — Then He Heard a Sound”? How could you dress the titular character of “David’s Father” so that everyone can tell he’s a giant? Munsch at Play Act Two will have your imagination firing with questions such as these. As with the original Munsch at Play, this volume gives readers/thespians eight of Robert Munsch’s tales transformed into stage plays for young performers. Readers familiar with Munsch’s live performances will recognize his distinct rhythmic and participatory elements within Watts’ adaptations. Readers will also enjoy Michael Martchenko’s kinetic illustrations, in his style so well-known from so many Munsch storybooks. Having said this, plays are to be performed on the stage, not just admired on the page. Irene N. Watts’ adaptations succeed for a variety of reasons. The stories have been thoughtfully selected and adapted to provide the variety that makes this sort of book worthwhile. There are stories that can be performed with a finite handful of players, such as “I Have to Go,” and there are stories whose castings can expand as much as you like, including “Pigs,” in which you may include “any number that the pigpen can accommodate.” Watts also includes detailed, approachable notes about staging. She tells readers about suitable spaces for staging each play, such as “works well as a theatre in the round” (“Show and Tell”). She also provides exhaustive lists of sets, costumes, and props for each play. Most stories require quite a few props, but these are often indicated as optional, and could be scavenged, made into a craft project, or conjured via imagination. Watts’ supporting documentation (lists, guidance, and recommendations) lessens the effort involved with getting each play “up on its feet.” This enables everyone involved to focus on the excitement of stories and vocal participation. It’s not likely that anybody will say “No, no, no, no, no” to Munsch at Play Act Two. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

A Reference Grammar of French

Those who enjoy dipping into grammar books will find many hours of enjoyment here. Though a reference grammar at heart, its short, focused chapters are presented with few subheadings, so that the reader is drawn in to the chapter topic as a whole, even once an answer has been located. This, along with the lively style and wealth of intriguing facts, is a great strength of the book. A few quirks in the structure and index do not detract from its overall qualities. The content is presented in sixty-eight chapters, grouped into eleven parts. The motivation for the division into (untitled) parts is not particularly clear, as the parts are neither uniform in size, nor are the chapters always grouped by obvious grammatical connections (for example, the subjunctive mood forms a twenty-page chapter and part by itself, while the imperative mood forms one of thirty-three chapters in a 225-page part devoted to verbs). The content as a whole is very well located within its wider context, however. In their broad-sweep introductory essay on the history of French, the authors give a clear sense of the diversity of Francophonie today, as well as the deep-rooted tensions between prescription and description. Examples throughout the book are drawn principally from France, Quebec, Belgium, and Switzerland, and also illustrate a range of registers (discussed in early chapters), with classification as R1 (very informal), R2 (standard), or R3 (formal, literary) to aid the learner. Further, a very attractive feature is that the authors consistently seek to place French in the context of neighbouring Romance languages, with discussion of systematic grammatical differences between French, Italian, and Spanish. Several of the illustrative texts that introduce most chapters also take the geography or culture of other countries as their subject matter. This contextualization will be very useful for students learning more than one of these languages, and, like the book as a whole, offers food for thought for others. All treatment of pronunciation is achieved without recourse to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which makes it very accessible, but means that advanced students may wish to use the book in conjunction with a good dictionary indicating pronunciation. The grammar ends with a helpful glossary, with entry headings that are bilingual like the chapter headings, a brief, partially annotated bibliography of grammars and usage guides, and two indexes — a general index and a ‘subjunctive index’. With the main index, the user has to be prepared to try different entries (for example, to locate treatment of the definite article under ‘le/la/les’ rather than ‘definite article’ or ‘articles’), or to cross-reference to the contents page. One might argue that the subjunctive index is hardly necessary, as all of the entries refer to a single twenty-page chapter on the subjunctive mood; nevertheless, this is an ingenious idea, and should be a frequent port of call by anglophone students who often fear the subjunctive's unknowns. All in all, this is the sort of grammar book with which one can form a lasting relationship throughout a degree programme.

The Lowdown on Denim by T. L. Kyi

Kyi, Tanya Lloyd. The Lowdown on Denim. Illus. Clayton Hanmer. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. It’s springtime: time to pick up a pair of the latest blue jeans for the new season. This year, however, thanks to The Lowdown on Denim, young fashionistas can also read about their pants, and consider the cultural, economic, political, and environmental issues surrounding them. The Lowdown on Denim provides an entertaining introduction to how jeans have evolved, who makes them, and what they’ve meant throughout the world. Author Tanya Lloyd Kyi, based in British Columbia, has created a wide variety of curiosity-sparking non-fiction titles; including 50 Underwear Questions (reviewed by T. Chatterley in this issue) and 50 Poisonous Questions (reviewed by K. Frail in Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011). Here, she applies an unobtrusive narrative frame; protagonists JD and Shred are sent to detention, having been caught blue-handed running their teacher’s jeans up the school flagpole. In detention, JD and Shred are tasked with writing a report on the history of jeans, which, as Shred points out, “have been around way longer than Google”. Kyi takes her protagonists on a tour of jeans beginning in the mid-19th century, and illustrator Clayton Hanmer carries the reader along by placing JD and Shred in each time and place along the way. They begin by panning for gold in California in garments woefully lacking in ruggedness. They go on to explore wartime periods, the cold war, rock’n’roll, disco, punk, hip hop, and more. Throughout, Kyi and Hanmer also touch upon issues including trade globalization, factory working conditions, marketing strategies, gender norms, and pesticide-intensive cotton. Hanmer’s award-winning illustrations are well-known thanks to publications such as OWL Magazine, National Geographic Kids, and The Globe & Mail, as well as several books. Here he effectively captures JD and Shred’s bewilderment at their whirlwind tour, while highlighting key moments of insight. The Lowdown on Denim is unfortunately mistitled. Kyi and Hanmer have actually given us The Lowdown on Jeans Beginning with Levi Strauss. Readers may unfortunately be left with the impression that jeans were a solely American invention; denim fabric’s European origins, for example, go unmentioned. Despite this, The Lowdown on Denim is a detailed, readable, engaging commodity history. It will draw in pre-teen and early teen readers, and could serve as a great launching point for a variety of classroom discussions and projects. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

The Watch That Ends The Night: Voices From The Titanic by A. Wolf

Wolf, Allan. The Watch That Ends The Night: Voices From The Titanic. Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2011. Print. If you are searching for a way to mark April 14, 2012, the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic’s striking of the iceberg, consider settling into a comfortable chair with The Watch That Ends The Night: Voices From The Titanic. You may wish to choose a chair with secure footing on solid ground. Formally, The Watch That Ends The Night is a novel consisting of poems, primarily in free verse, along with a variety of other styles suiting the two dozen “voices” who tell the story. This book stands out in large part thanks to Wolf’s resonant crafting of these voices. We hear from the crew, including an engine room man, a violinist, and the Captain himself. We hear from a range of passengers, including some of the richest and some of the poorest. We hear from men working in the aftermath of the collision, including a sailor on board the RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the Titanic’s survivors. The observations of a Nova Scotian undertaker, tasked with cataloguing the bodies and effects of the dead, are interspersed throughout, providing suspense despite the familiarity of the narrative. We read the wireless transmissions, most of which, Wolf mentions, are real: “From: RMS Titanic. To: All Ships at Sea. […] I require immediate assistance”. Wolf enriches the reader’s experience further by giving voice to the ominous perspective of the iceberg: “The lookouts on her mast can’t make me out”. Even “The Ship Rat” appears, scurrying along on a quest for survival whose symbolic importance increases as events unfold. Taken individually, each poem is an engaging insight into a particular perspective at a given moment within the voyage. Taken as a whole, Wolf’s poems build the tension that befits this story while capturing the stratification and diversity that existed on the ship in its time. The back matter is wonderful. Wolf provides details on each character and clarifies what is fact and what is fiction. There is also an extensive bibliography. The Watch That Ends The Night: Voices From The Titanic has many potential classroom applications. Hopefully, many young adult and adult readers will also read it purely for enjoyment. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

How do you Hug a Porcupine? by L. Isop

Isop, Laurie. Illustrated by Gwen Millward. How do you Hug a Porcupine? New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Your Readers, 2011. Print. A charming and hopefully harmless little book. The variety of animals is illustrated realistically enough to be recognizable on the page and probably even in real-life. The text is nicely lyrical with a rhythm and rhyme that makes you want to sing while reading. The message, however, is not all positive. On the good side, the portrayal of animals as worthy of human attention, respect, and appreciation (although not particularly original in children’s books) is always welcome. Also nice is the mix of familiar animals (e.g. cow, horse, pig, giraffe) with some that don’t get much attention (e.g. hedgehog, yak, ostrich) so young readers might learn something new. On the negative side, however, is the encouragement to hug any-and-all animals. Knowledge of the difference between tame (domestic) animals and wild animals should be instilled from a young age and, even if not taught explicitly, children’s authors should at least not introduce ideas that must be unlearned in real life. Pandas, yaks, porcupines, kangaroos, and dolphins should NOT, as a general rule, ever be hugged and people should NOT be convinced that everything needs a hug. For one thing, animals are unpredictable and potentially dangerous to the hugger. For another, hugging or touching a wild animal can be dangerous for the hugged - hugging a porcupine would dislodge many quills and reduce its defenses against predators. Sometimes I wonder if the national park tourists who slather honey on their child’s arm to get a picture of the cute bear licking it or approach a fully-grown elk to touch its antler velvet were maybe too exposed to this sort of book. In short, the answer to “how do you hug a porcupine?” should be, “you don’t!” Stick to hugging your own kitty-cat or puppy-dog instead that you know will probably appreciate it and not attack you. Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 stars (charming and lyrical but potentially dangerous in later life). Reviewer: David Sulz David is a librarian at the University of Alberta working mostly with scholars in Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. His university studies included: Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics. On the education front, he taught various grades and subjects for several years in schools as well as museums. His interest in Japan and things Japanese stands above his other diverse interests.

Zombie in Love by K. DiPucchio

DiPucchio, Kelly. Zombie in Love. Illus. Scott Campbell. New York: Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print.Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here is a guilelessly grotesque exploration of a young zombie’s search for a sweetheart. Not surprisingly, when you’re a zombie, it’s complicated. Among online arbiters of taste, the debate surrounding whether zombies are the new vampires seems to have peaked in the summer of 2010. This rings true for this reviewer, who recalls among that summer’s highlights a spontaneous trip through a charity zombie car wash. However late Kelly DiPucchio’s Zombie in Love is to the trend, it is a worthwhile addition, primarily because it contains Scott Campbell’s illustrations. DiPucchio, known for Grace for President and The Sandwich Swap, provides a detailed, straightforward description of protagonist Mortimer’s efforts to find a date for the Cupid’s Ball. He does his best to “put himself out there” in ways any singleton might try (walk dog in park, place personal ad, take ballroom dancing lessons, etc.). Mortimer’s efforts fail because, while he is intelligent and thoughtful, he is also a bug-eyed, rotten-toothed zombie whose limbs fall off while he’s lifting weights at the gym. In other words, everyone who’s not a zombie finds him off-putting. DiPucchio’s prose is unexciting, but this isn’t a fatal flaw, since Scott Campbell’s illustrations are the main attraction in Zombie in Love. Campbell, a multi-disciplinary artist, is known mainly for his work on comics and video games, as well as the beloved Great Showdowns by Scott C. web series. He elegantly captures Mortimer’s hope, despondence, and ghastliness, while also giving us a richly-imagined vision of everyday zombie life (“life”?). In the end, Mortimer meets his clumsy, putrid match in Mildred, a fellow zombie, leaving us with a lesson about keeping faith that there’s someone out there for everyone. This is a less subversive message than some readers may hope for. Rather than seeing someone “normal” value Mortimer’s inner qualities over his physicality, we see the two ugliest people at Cupid’s Ball find love at first sight. Zombie in Love offers a sweet, superficial story and engrossing watercolour illustrations for readers in elementary school.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

Poindexter Makes a Friend by M. Twohy

Twohy, Mike. Poindexter Makes a Friend. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print. Full disclosure: this is a book, reviewed by a librarian, about making a friend at the library. However, the gentle charms of Poindexter Makes a Friend will appeal to most everyone, regardless of the size of one’s soft spot for libraries. Poindexter is an introverted young pig who would rather read a story to his stuffed animals than go out to play in his neighbourhood. His adores his local public library, where he helps to shelve books and push the book cart. Poindexter’s comfortable life of library volunteerism is interrupted when Shelby, a shy turtle, asks for help finding a book about how to make friends. Some children make friends easily, and some do not. Either way, friends are a pressing concern for the pre-school and early elementary crowd, the audience for Poindexter Makes a Friend. The book’s appeals include the friendly, expressive watercolours of author Mike Twohy, a veteran New Yorker cartoonist. However, the book’s most valuable facet is its discussion of how to make friends, which takes place, not pedantically, between Poindexter and Shelby. This discussion includes concrete, age-appropriate parsing of concepts such as “sharing” and “being nice,” and could make a good launching point for a group discussion at a library story hour or at the beginning of a new school year. This is a tale that is simple, but not simplistic. As Poindexter helps Shelby, so will Poindexter Makes a Friend help bashful souls to emerge a little bit from their shells. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

Oh, How Sylvester Can Pester! And Other Poems More or Less About Manners by R. Kinerk

Kinerk, Robert. Oh, How Sylvester Can Pester! And Other Poems More or Less About Manners. Illus. Drazen Kozjan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print. “You be nice to me; I’ll be nice to you. / That agreement might work. It may get us quite far. / (And it could be what manners, in truth, really are.)” (1). Books filled with poems about manners must be relatively rare. If so, then a book filled with twenty rollicking, frank, vivaciously-illustrated poems about manners must be nearly unheard of. However, this is what Robert Kinerk and Drazen Kozjan have given us in Oh, How Sylvester Can Pester! Readers of all ages will enjoy Kinerk’s direct, extravagant rhymes. His approach is comprehensive: he provides poems on entry-level etiquette such as cleaning one’s room, saying “please” and “thank you,” and keeping one’s clothes on in public, while also exploring more complex courtesies, such as shaking hands with adults, being on time, and keeping quiet at the movies. Kozjan’s illustrations are rich in both colour and detail. His style has been widely described as “retro,” likely because his work shares a particular rosy-cheeked exuberance with the work of iconic predecessors such as Mary Blair. Kozjan’s is a style in which an entire story is contained within a few strands of hair or a precisely-arched eyebrow. Despite its rolling rhythms and cheeky illustrations, what is most winning about Oh, How Sylvester Can Pester! is its sophisticated approach to its topic. It even contains a poem about the fact that it’s bad manners to lecture others about their manners. “Manners aren’t lists of things you should do. / Manners help folks become easy with you,” Kinerk writes (12). It’s this deft touch that makes this book memorable and admirable. Oh, How Sylvester Can Pester! will be appreciated by primary-school readers (and their adults). The poems are best read out loud, but the illustrations should not be neglected. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah Polkinghorne Sarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

The Cambridge Companion to Philo (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Philo Ken Schenck Adam Kamesar , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv + 301 pp. Cloth, $85; paper, $29.99. The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by Adam Kamesar, now takes its place on a rather short list of introductions to Philo, including such distinguished works as those by E. R. Goodenough (1940) and Samuel Sandmel (1979). This Cambridge volume is an incredible asset for anyone wishing to engage Philo's writings, especially someone who already has some basic sense of ancient philosophy or who wishes to understand Philo on a more advanced level. Its authors are an international and diverse collection of Philo experts whose names would feature in any substantial bibliography of Philonic research, and several are recognized leaders in the field. The advantage of this type of introduction is that it gives the reader the thinking of Philonic experts as it is in process. The goal is not so much to give the spectrum of opinion on issues of debate as to present a reasonable overview of each topic from the standpoint of a particular scholar. At the same time, if one does not have some basic knowledge of the relevant ancient fields of knowledge, this sort of book will require a good deal of work even as an introduction. If one does not have at least a cursory acquaintance with ancient philosophical schools like Stoicism and Platonism, a basic sense of the New Testament and ancient Jewish literature, as well as other basic categories of the ancient world, a good deal of the book's potential may be lost. The first three chapters of the book introduce the reader to "Philo's Life [End Page 506] and Writings," the first section of the book as a whole. "Philo, His Family, and His Times" is appropriately the first chapter, written by Daniel Schwartz of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Schwartz gives an excellent overview of what we know of Philo's life and family, set against what we know from the occasional personal comment here and there in Philo's writings, from the occasional mentions of Philo in contemporary literature, and from our general knowledge of the Egyptian city of Alexandria at the time. In keeping with the nature of the book, Schwartz occasionally presents his own hypotheses. One very plausible one is that many of the social conflicts in Alexandria arose from the Romans adding a stratum on top of the existing social structure of Alexandria, with the existing Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian residents then forced to vie with one another for differential status (20). Interestingly, Schwartz also suggests that Philo's attachment to the physical temple was a matter of inconsistency and sentimentality, since Schwartz believes Philo's thought system undermines any attachment to the literal temple whatsoever (29). The second chapter introduces the reader to "The Works of Philo." Its primary author is James Royse of San Francisco State University, with additional contributions from Adam Kamesar, the volume's editor. This chapter is an incredibly valuable map to the complicated issues involved with an ancient collection of writings whose boundaries are uncertain and some of whose contents are lost to history. Philo's works included three large commentary series, each unique in form and apparent purpose, whose order and precise contents in themselves are a matter of debate. Royse then groups the remaining writings appropriately into apologetic/historical works and philosophical works. This chapter helpfully identifies which portions of each writing are extant, gives some sense of its content, and suggests treatises that might be missing in each group. The first section of the book ends with "Biblical Interpretation in Philo," written by Adam Kamesar himself, who teaches at Hebrew Union College in Ohio. With this chapter, the book, as the subject matter, becomes slightly more demanding for the novice. The sense that Philo was first and foremost an interpreter of Scripture—rather than a philosopher—has become the dominant lens through which to view him. Individual scholars vary in their sense of how consistently or profoundly Philo participated in the philosophical currents of his day, but generally agree that he used philosophy in service to...

The Never Weres by F. Smyth

Smyth, Fiona. The Never Weres. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. What would life be like for humanity’s final generation, those who would always be the youngest people on Earth, born just before a “barren virus” has rendered humans infertile? This question underpins the pre-teen sci-fi mystery The Never Weres, the first graphic novel from Toronto-based Fiona Smyth, veteran painter, cartoonist, and illustrator. Smyth’s exploration of the daily lives of teenagers Xian, Mia, and Jesse is a fresh extrapolation of the dystopian “world without children,” popularly identified with P.D. James’ Children of Men. Smyth interweaves her heroes’ world — from which parents are variously absent — with classic science fiction tropes such as robotics, genetics, and virtual online communities. Most pressingly, the ethical and practical implications of human cloning are central to the mystery as it unfolds. Smyth handles the issue evenly and rightly represents it as controversial. By focusing on a missing girl’s possible involvement with long-ago experiments, Smyth effectively provokes reflection about cloning’s impacts on human relationships. However, she has simplified the relevant ideas to the extent that readers may not be challenged much by them. The layouts of The Never Weres are at times confusing and may hinder readers’ progress. The book’s visual style conveys Smyth’s vision of a bleak, crowded, deteriorating Toronto somewhat better than it captures her spirited protagonists. Overall, despite some weaknesses, The Never Weres wraps a worthwhile science-positive message within an engaging mystery adventure. Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

Why on Earth does God Have to Paint? Centripetal Art

WHY ON EARTH DOES GOD HAVE TO PAINT?, CENTRIPETAL ART, Rafael Chodos, Malibu, CA: Giotto Multimedia, 2009, pp xi + 340, Cloth, $35. 00. Reviewed by J. Harold Ellens. Rafael Chodos is a noted independent humanist scholar, an eminent attorney, and a prolific author in the field of fiduciary law, Torah and biblical studies, and the aesthetics of fine art. Thus he has the good taste to have married an amazingly profound artist, Junko Chodos, who specializes in paintings of deep philosophical expression and exploration. Her extensive repertoire of brilliant works manifests the metamorphosis of her spirit and her sense of the meaning of life, developed from her childhood in the Japanese travail of WWII, to her immigration to the USA as a young adult art student, marriage, and maturation as a leading American contributor to the world of art museums and national personal art shows. This present volume is a remarkably lovely publication. It is a palpable aesthetic inspiration to view it, hold it, savor the delicate beauty evident in the quality of the jacket, the cover, every delightful page of its content, and the sophisticated scholarly end papers. The physical experience of this volume is that of an objet d'art in itself, apart from its even more magnificent color plates and profound philosophical text. No one who cares about meaning and beauty can afford to be without this book. Moreover, it is the sort of book one would expect to cost $125.00, and is available for a very modest fraction of that price. Dr. Chodos has crafted this volume in a Foreword, seven chapters in three parts, and an Afterword. Part One is entitled The Surface Layers and contains three chapters: Objects as Visitants, Biography and Cultural Influences, and Techniques and Styles. The chapter titles in Part Two, The Deeper Layers, are equally suggestive and articulate but more deeply philosophical: Narrative - Resolution and Transcendence, A Vital Spirituality, A Complex Spirituality, and The Role and Mission of the Artist. The Afterword, placed at the end of Part Two is entitled The Furnace. Part Three describes The Physiology of the Book, including the life history of the artist, Junko Chodos, and her art shows, the story of the author and his development as an aesthete, and 45 pages of end notes, scholarly bibliography, list of citations from the writings of the artist, a glossary of Japanese terms used in the volume, and an illustrated catalogue of the artists work with a chronological list of the numerous series of her prolific productivity. This volume is a precious work of art in itself, and is finished neatly with a useful index and graphic four page display of the progression of the development of the nearly twenty series of paintings. Each series containing from ten to fifty large wallsized works. Why on Earth Does God have to Paint? is, on the one hand, a presentation of the literal and symbolic significance of Junko Chodos' personal journey; and on the other hand, a philosophical reflection on the meaning of the human pilgrimage from the primal to the transcendent. It is an articulation of the travail of what John Kennedy described as the tragic adventure of human existence. Junko's story is a moving experience of common human terror and our common hope, as Barbara Mertz once put it when describing the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on life and death. Reading this book and viewing the 160 articulate full color plates that illustrate it moves one deeply and is a spiritual inspiration. The author's aesthetic philosophy fills the reader with a sense of having grappled with the fundamenta of the material, moral, and spiritual universes. The artists Odyssey alone is emotionally gripping. She was a young child in Tokyo during the Allied bombings in WWII and was psychologically traumatized by encountering her uncle, a physician, killing a chicken for the extended family's sparse dinner. She was overcome with a sense of horror that made her phobic of all birds until her mid-life. …

The Dialogical Talmud: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbinics

The Dialogical Talmud: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbinics Daniel Boyarin. Socrates and the Fat Rabbi). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 388.Since 1990, Daniel Boyarin has published seven monographs Intertextuaiity and the Reading of Mid ras h [1990], A Radical Jew [1994], Carnal Israel [1993], Unheroic Conduct [1997], Dying for God [1999], Borderlines [2004], and the volume under review).1 The sheer number of monographs is remarkable; even more noteworthy are the ways in which this body of work has shaped the field of rabbinic literature. In his seven monographs, Boyarin does not follow the normal paradigm of his academic field. Though his was the most profound philological and linguistic training, Boyarin has not spent his academic life producing the critical editions and narrowly constructed monographs his training encouraged. This is particularly surprising because Boyarin's initial publications operated comfortably and successfully within this milieu. Though Boyarin's first book Ha-'iyun ha-Sef aradi (1989; English title Sephardi Speculation) is a philosophically oriented treatment of medieval talmudic hermeneutics, this work still fits comfortably within the field of rabbinics. This is the sort of book expected of a scholar trained by Saul Lieberman and Haim Z. Dimitrovsky at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the 1960s and 1970s. The subsequent books have shifted the paradigm of rabbinics as a field. As a corpus, these volumes puncture the comfortable definition of the field of rabbinic literature, staking a place for rabbinic literature within the fields of Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, and Greco-Roman rhetoric. These expansions of rabbinics into neighboring contemporaneous corpora continue Lieberman's own project though they do so not only by alerting rabbinics to relevant parallel data (as Lieberman generally did) but by integrating rabbinic literature into these parallel fields. Boyarin's work invites outsiders to the field of rabbinics to see the relevance of this material for their own projects.The impact of Boyarin's work is not limited to the connections it makes between rabbinic and other ancient textual traditions. What distinguishes his work is its triangulation of rabbinic texts, external textual corpora, and contemporary theory. In these seven monographs, several distinct contemporary theories of reading have been invoked and put in dialogue with theories of gender, sexuality, and power. This triangulation has challenged the integrity of rabbinics as a field not only by shattering its hermetic isolation but also by undermining confidence in the old methodology. Since Intertextuality and the Reading of Midraeh (1990), Boyarin has resisted the centripetal pull of the field of rabbinics and turned rabbinic literature outward toward the broader humanities. Though interdisciplinary work has become a campus commonplace, much of the work that transpires under this rubric consists in poaching a neighboring idea or method and crudely applying it within disciplinary boundaries. These seven monographs, in contrast, so engage other fields that they manage both to make important claims about rabbinic literature and culture and genuinely to contribute to the fields with which the rabbinic corpus is put in conversation. Put differently, Boyarin's work tears down disciplinary bounds, including rabbinic texts within a larger library of ancient literature that has hitherto ignored them, and insists that the field of rabbinics update its own hermeneu tics from the model of nmeteenth-century philology to that of literary poststructuralism. The success of this paradigm shift is evident in the work of a new generation of scholars (even in the Wissenschaft stronghold of Israel) who strive to model their own work on Boyarin's triangulation.For some time now, Boyarin has been obsessed with fat rabbis- not with a contemporary problem of rabbinic obesity or with real life fat rabbis, but with a set of literary fat rabbis who appear in a talmudic story at bBM 84a. …

성인의 반복독서 경험에 관한 연구 - 전북대학교 평생교육원 학생들을 중심으로 -

본 연구에서는 성인이 어떤 도서를 반복적으로 읽는지, 성별 및 연령별로 어떤 차이가 있는지 등 성인의 반복독서 행태에 관하여 밝히고자 한다. 평생교육원에 재학 중인 성인을 대상으로 설문지를 배포하여 그들의 반복독서 경험에 관해 조사하여 분석하였다. 통계 분석 결과 밝혀진 중요한 사실은 다음과 같다. 1) 대부분의 성인이 반복독서 경험을 가지고 있고, 여성이 남성보다 반복독서경험 비율이 약간 높으며 연령대별로는 큰 차이가 없다. 2) 평균적으로 개인별 총 반복독서 횟수는 여성이 남성보다 많고, 연령별로 보면 40대 연령층이 많다. 3) 도서를 반복하여 읽는 경우에 반복 횟수는 2회가 가장 많고 이어서 3회가 많다. 성별로 분석할 경우 반복독서의 횟수가 증가할수록 여성의 비율이 남성의 비율보다 높고 연령대별로는 큰 차이가 없다. 4) 전체의 절반 이상이 가장 기억에 남는 도서를 다독한다. 5) 다독자수와 함께 반복독서 횟수까지 감안하여 중요도를 평가한 결과 가장 중요도가 높은 도서는 <어린왕자>, <삼국지>, <아낌없이 주는 나무>, <그리스 로마 신화>, <나의 라임오렌지나무>, <무소유> 등이다. 6) 대부분 즐거움이나 교훈을 얻고자 반복독서를 하고 있다. The goal of this study is to examine what kind of repeated-reading habits adults have, what sort of books they read repeatedly, and what preferences they have depending on their age or gender. A questionnaire was distributed to the students at Lifelong Education Center of Chonbuk National University to survey their repeated reading experiences. The results of the statistical analysis are as follows: 1) Most adults have experienced repeated reading. 2) Women have more experience with repeated reading than men, and in terms of age, more people in their forties read the same books repeatedly. 3) Most repeated readers read their books twice: Women tend to read their books repeatedly more than men do. 4) More than half of the adults in the sample group have read their favorite books several times. 5) The importance of books in this study was judged on the basis of the number of repeated readers and the frequency of reading. The order of important books is as follows: The Little Prince, The Tale of Three Kingdoms, The Giving Tree, The Greek and Roman Mythology, Meu Pe de Larania Lima, No Possession, Hope for the Flowers, and Demian. 6) More than half of the male repeated readers read The Tale of Three Kingdoms while female repeated readers tend to read a wider variety of books. 7) Adults read the same books repeatedly to enjoy and learn something.

&lt;em&gt;Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian England&lt;/em&gt;, by Preeti Nijhar&lt;br/&gt;&lt;em&gt;Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief&lt;/em&gt;, by Henry Schwarz

Reviewed by: Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian England, and: Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief Clare Anderson (bio) Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian England, by Preeti Nijhar; pp. 220. London and Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto, 2009, £60.00, $99.00. Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief, by Henry Schwarz; pp. viii + 163. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, £60.00, $99.95. Law and Imperialism is a fascinating study of legal hierarchies in Britain and India. Preeti Nijar ranges widely across sociology, criminology, and history to discuss the close relationship between metropole and colony in the making of scientific typologies and social categories. Drawing on Homi Bhaba's idea of ambivalence, Nijar theorises this relationship as part of a deliberate effort to distance colonizer from colonized and to alleviate fears provoked by the proximity of the social other in Britain and in India. The place of scientific understandings is of special concern to her, in particular with respect to the supposed dangerousness of specific communities. Though I greatly enjoyed this book, more engaged and critical editing would have greatly assisted Nijhar in producing a more forceful argument. Too often her prose is laboured, repetitive, and hard to follow. She presents a number of quotations without introduction or contextualisation. The footnotes are inconsistent; primary sources are included in the bibliography of secondary literature; and the author even misspells the name of one of the advisory editors of the book series. Conceptually, the book left me a little confused about the lines of distinction between race and ethnicity. Also, the history of the British Isles makes the concept of British indigeneity—repeatedly invoked by the author—deeply problematic. There are minor errors, too. She misunderstands the meaning of the word "outcast," following each citation with "sic." This completely misses its biblical associations, which are critical to understanding particular representations of the London poor. Nijhar is simply wrong, furthermore, about the history of convict transportation. She says that it was used in Britain before India, that Britain was unique in using it, and that convicts were used as indentured labor. But the East India Company transported Indian convicts overseas from the 1790s; Portugal, Spain, and France also transported convicts; and convicts were used as indentured [End Page 327] labor only in the Americas, not in Australia. These criticisms aside, the general thrust of the book is timely and convincing, joining a growing academic literature on colonial networks and connectedness that includes Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy's Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (2006). In placing the so-called criminal Sansi tribe and the British criminal classes into a single frame of analysis through an evaluation of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act in India and the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act in England, Nijhar is especially effective. She writes of the mutual exchange of ideas about dangerousness and race: "The 'criminal' tribes and castes of imperial India were legally and socially reified in ways not dissimilar to the 'dangerous' classes in Victorian England" (134). Constructing the Criminal Tribe is a quite different sort of book, its analysis literary rather than historical or sociolegal. In Law and Imperialism, Nijhar places critical legal theory, criminal justice history, postcolonial theory, and criminology (especially labelling theory) within a single frame of historical analysis—albeit with the ultimate (though unexplored) aim of considering the historical constitution of aspects of postcolonial India. Henry Schwarz presents a narrower discussion of "the stigma of criminal inheritance" that impacts the denotified (ex-criminal) tribes in India today to more explicitly think through what I would call the colonial present (3). This is not a story of colonial and postcolonial crossings; it is instead about the explicit integration of history with the now, about the significance of colonialism for the Indian state, its institutions, its law, its governance, and its identity. Schwarz does not have to dig very deeply to find what he is looking for—the denotified tribe on which he mainly focuses (the Chhara) lives on the margins, and colonial discourses about criminality pervade contemporary social attitudes towards...

Some Words for Nature

Some Words for Nature William W. Stowe (bio) Rochelle L. Johnson . Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. xvii + 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Steve Nicholls . Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. x + 524 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. "I wish to speak a word for Nature . . ." —Thoreau, "Walking" (1862) There can be little doubt that the earth's plants and animals, including human animals, are facing a crisis that threatens our survival. Timelines and rescue scenarios vary. Some imagine a catastrophic tipping point in the all-too-foreseeable future, while others urge the need to take action for the sake of later generations. Some see a "return" to "simpler" lifeways as our only hope, while others are convinced that human inventiveness will come up with a technological fix, "as it always has." Meanwhile, environmental historians, scholar/critics of environmental literature, concerned writers, and literarily inclined activists are asking what they can do to influence the way their readers think and to induce them to bring about necessary change before it is too late. A forlorn hope, some might suggest, and yet there are popular writers like Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Michael Pollan who have reached wide audiences and can lay legitimate claim to affecting public behavior, while historians and critics like Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, Leo Marx, and Lawrence Buell continue to affect the thinking of influential readers in important ways. How, then, should the concerned writer proceed? What sort of book will be most effective? How can a historian or a literary scholar contribute to the welfare of the planet? Rochelle Johnson's Passions for Nature and Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found suggest answers to these questions. Johnson begins her book by declaring that the "passions for nature" of her mid-nineteenth-century subjects "can help us clarify our contemporary relations with the physical world" and [End Page 506] figure out "just how we got where we are today" (pp. xii, xiv). She concludes by arguing that while our culture fetishizes something it calls "nature," it pays so little attention to the actual natural world that it has no "accurate understanding of nature, its phenomena, its behavior, or its health" (p. 232). What she proposes to remedy this situation is "'an aesthetics of humility,'—a celebration of the delight and beauty that is experienced by valuing nature's particulars" without any attendant drive to dominate (p. 236). Like Johnson, Nicholls analyzes the parlous state of the natural world and suggests a remedy. He announces in his preface that his book's "message" will be "that life—all life—is complicated and therefore, even in limitless abundance, fragile and wonderfully, endlessly fascinating" (p. 7). Hardly fighting words, but another argument takes shape as Nicholls moves from place to place and time to time, chronicling the decline of species and the waste of life, and presenting compelling evidence that "we have diminished nature far more than most people know." If only people did know what we as a species had done, he concludes, "the true realization . . . would, I'm sure, spur enormous efforts to repair the damage, for the legacy of humanity to be more than just an impoverished planet" (p. 459). He aims to provide some of this essential knowledge. While their goals are similar, Johnson and Nicholls bring different skills and experiences to their tasks and aim for different readerships. Johnson is a seasoned literary scholar, past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the country's leading expert on the work of Susan Fenimore Cooper. Her audience is made up of her scholarly peers: writers and teachers in the field of American culture and environment. Her table of contents offers the reader analyses of a tantalizing range of subjects, beginning with Cooper but also including the painter Thomas Cole, the architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Nicholls has a Ph.D. in entomology but has made a long, prize-winning career as a writer and director of nature...

Sophomoric

September 25, 2010 (2:45 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 90 Reviews SOPHOMORIC Peter Stone Center for Ethics and Public ATairs / Tulane U. New Orleans, la 70118, usa pstone@tulane.edu Jyotish Ch. Basak. Bertrand Russell’s Socio-Political Ideas. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2008. Pp. xii, 146. isbn: 978-8172112547. Rs. 500. There really is no better word for describing the book Bertrand Russell’s SocioPolitical Ideas than “sophomoric”. The author, Jyotish Basak, apparently holds a ph.d. from Aligarh Muslim University. He is currently a reader in the philosophy department of the University of North Bengal, and has published a previous book dealing with ethical issues surrounding human genetics. And yet despite these seemingly reasonable credentials, Basak has produced the sort of book I might expect an undergraduate student to write. And not a particularly bright one, either. While reading Basak’s book, it is impossible not to notice the grammatical September 25, 2010 (2:45 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd Reviews 91 and spelling errors which plague almost every page. Basak’s publisher, Northern Book Centre, claims to be “Publishers of Scholarly Reference Books”. But at this particular publishing company, either nobodyknowshowtooperatethespelling and grammar checker on a word-processing programme, or else no one is fully proWcient in English. I’ve had students who write papers with this many typos, but to the best of my knowledge none of them have ever published two books. One might think it unfair to hold Basak responsible for the incompetence of his publisher. Perhaps, but it is certainly fair to hold him responsible for the content of the book he allegedly wrote. Why do I say “allegedly”? Well, consider his description of Russell’s Autobiography. He writes, “In his Autobiography Russell mentioned three passions, which were although simple, yet overwhelmingly strong, that governed his life. These passions are: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suTering of mankind” (p. 3). He quotes Russell immediately thereafter, apparently hoping that no one would notice that he has been quoting Russell, with minor word changes, all along. The very next paragraph reads as follows: He has given three reasons for his passion for love. First, he sought it because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that he would often have sacriWced all the rest of his life for a few hours of this joy. Second, love relieves loneliness. Third, in the union of love he had seen, “in a mystic miniature, the preWguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined”. (P. 3) Anyone who loves Russell’s Autobiography, especially its beautiful prologue, will recognize these words, which Basak would like us to believe are his own. And so it goes for the next two paragraphs, until there is no more of Russell’s prologue left to plagiarize. A minor oversight? Here’s Basak’s description of anarchism: The modern Anarchism is associated with belief in the communal ownership of land and capital. In this respect it is akin to Socialism. Socialism and Anarchist Communism alike have arisen from the perception that private capital is a source of tyranny by certain individuals over others. The diTerence in them is that whereas orthodox Socialism believes that the individual will become free if the state becomes the sole capitalist, Anarchists do not subscribe to this view. Anarchists fear that in that case the state might merely inherit the tyrannical propensities of the private capitalists. Accordingly, it seeks for a means of reconciling communal ownership with the utmost possible diminution in the powers of the state, and indeed ultimately with the complete abolition of the state. (P. 27) And here’s Russell’s description of anarchism in Roads to Freedomz: The modern Anarchism … is associated with belief in the communal ownership of land and capital, and is thus in an important respect akin to Socialism.… Socialism and Anarchist Communism alike have arisen from the perception that private capital is a source of tyranny by certain individuals over...

The names of plants, 4th edn

The names of plants, 4th edn

American Rifle: An Interview with Alexander Rose

American Rifle:An Interview with Alexander Rose Donald A. Yerxa We asked Alexander Rose, author of American Rifle: A Biography (Delta/Random House, 2008), to continue the discussion, begun in the November 2009 issue, of firearms in the American historical context. In addition to American Rifle, named a Book of the Year by the Economist, Rose has written Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring (Bantam, 2006) and Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History, 1066-1489 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). He has written for the English Historical Review, 20th Century British History, the TLS, the New York Observer, Studies in Intelligence, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Invention & Technology, the National Interest, and other publications. Donald A. Yerxa: What are you attempting to do with this book? Alexander Rose: Well, from the get-go, I was determined to avoid the pitfalls and traps inherent in the "gun-book genre." There are two basic types of books about guns. First, you have the technical sort. These are extraordinarily detailed descriptions—manuals would be a better word—of a particular form or make of gun. Full of facts, they consequently lack reflection or historical context and are intended for collectors and specialists. Second, you have the analytical format, which is long on, say, the place of guns in the masculine culture of the 19th-century Western frontier, but short on technical knowledge. To their authors, a gun is just a gun, not a muzzle loader, percussion-cap, rimfire, smooth-bore, rolling block, or any of the other endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful populating what I call the mid-19th century's Big Bang in weapons technology. This is why you often find howlers in such books—conflating a bullet with a cartridge, for instance, or getting confused between a Sharps and a Spencer rifle—much to the very loud disgust of the people who write the technical sort of books. To them, getting these kinds of details wrong is like claiming that Apple Macs run on Windows. A deeper flaw of the latter type of writing, however, is that the authors often can't free themselves from the concerns and attitudes of the present. They interpret guns through the prism of their personal politics and their view of the Second Amendment. I wanted to avoid all this. American Rifle does not mention the Second Amendment, nor does it allow politics to intrude, and yet it strives to get the technical aspects right. It tells a story, one encompassing culture, economics, technology, and military history, of how America made the rifle and how the rifle made America from the colonial era onward. Click for larger view View full resolution The American Rifle Club at an international competition, Dollymount Range, Ireland. From Harper's Weekly, July 17, 1875. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-134454]. Yerxa: What prompted you to write it? Rose: It began with a long proposal to the publisher for a book focusing on the combat experiences of American soldiers. In it, I made an admittedly asinine remark along the lines of "every soldier carried a rifle," only for the publisher to propose that I write a short book on the history of the rifle before submitting the magnificent magnum opus that will one day be American Soldier: Four Battles and the Experience of Combat (or The Great Red God, I still haven't settled on a title). What was originally intended to be a six-month project turned into a two-year slog as I discovered that there was much more to the history of rifles than either the publisher or I had expected. The publisher wanted 60,000 words; I submitted 120,000, so we compromised at 150,000. Yerxa: What is a rifle? How is it different from other firearms, especially the musket? Rose: In the simplest possible terms, a rifle is rifled and a musket is not. The inside of the barrel is grooved, helically, in order to impart spin to the bullet as it hurtles from the chamber toward the muzzle. Spin in turn promotes projectile stability, enabling the bullet to...

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (review)

Reviewed by: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music Edward Komara Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. [xiii, 449 p. ISBN-13: 9780393062588 (hardcover), $27.95; ISBN-13: 9780393337501 (paperback), $16.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Because the blues in the Delta region in the northwest corner of Mississippi is so much a part of the region’s oral culture, little about it has the appearance to historians of being known for certain. As a result, many presentations of Delta blues history have had to rely on much that some readers may take as speculation, folktale, even myth. Whatever failings as history that Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) may have had, Palmer did attempt to “fight fire with fire,” that is, to address a few myths not with facts, but with new myths of his own. That W. W. Norton has published a book on Delta blues is not surprising, since it has published in three editions one of the key books about African American music, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans (1971; 1983; 1997). But what sort of book is Gioia’s Delta Blues? His previous books include three volumes on jazz (especially The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), and his 2006 Duke University Press publications Work Songs and Healing Songs may be regarded as broadening his research scope. Studying the blues is a logical move from jazz studies, since jazz musicians use blues forms as bases of improvisation. Taking up Delta blues, despite its difficulties to historians because of its lack of written and notated documents, follows from Gioia’s study of work songs because of the work-song phrasing of many pre-1942 (“pre-war”) Delta blues singers. But his thesis that “[rock music] is the true final destination of the Delta sound” (p. 6) strikes me as out of step with his previous studies, and debatable in view of the very limited role that Delta blues played in blues overall during the early years of rock (1954–63) until British rock groups from 1964 on brought Delta styles to great prominence. While the stripped-down instrumentation (often a single guitar) lends to Delta blues a primitive-seeming sound, it does not mean necessarily that Delta blues has a primal function as the source of all blues—although it is tempting and very easy to think so. Historians have long been divided over whether blues began in the Delta and spread outward, or whether it developed across the South from Arkansas to Georgia. The first two chapters of Lawrence Cohn’s Nothing But The Blues (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993) each present the opposing viewpoints of that debate: Samuel Charters (“Working on the Building: Roots and Influences,” pp. 13–31) took the Delta-centric view, and David Evans (“Goin’ Up The Country: Blues in Texas and the Deep South,” pp. 33–85) thought blues was the result of the South as a whole. For the sake of his thesis, Gioia appears to be a Delta-centrist, on the side claiming that the blues—or at least the most influential of all blues styles—comes from the Delta. One need not be a Delta-centrist to relate the history of Delta blues; in fact, one may be better off not being one, so as to notice and discuss without bias the outside influences on Delta blues. One such example is Bessie Smith, whom Gioia mentions on pp. 40–42, but does not comment on her influence. Charlie Patton used her rendition of “Mountain Top Blues” for his 1929 Paramount record “Hammer [Hammock] Blues,” and Son House and Skip James each took lyrics from her “Work House Blues” release for their own blues. Instead of a continuous narrative, Gioia uses a series of chapter-length portraits of individual musicians to relate his history. Those he singles out are W. C. Handy, Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King. Palmer had followed a similar plan featuring...