Humanities Books

This is a fantastic little book that I wish were more available (it is kind of a pain to get your hands on). It is well-organized and beautifully written by an historian who knows Boston very well. I would advise this to anyone interested in the history of Boston or to urban historians in general, because of its concise nature. It is an excellent companion to O'Connor's other books about the history of Boston, and particularly its Irish inhabitants. Definitely worth a read.

This book is one in the My Story series. The books in this series are fictional diaries of young girls living during different periods of British, Scottish, and Irish history.

Twelve-year-old Edith, who hates her name and prefers to be called Edie, lives in London in 1940. The war is changing everyone's lives, and not for the better. Edie and her family huddle in terror in their air-raid shelter while bombs rain down from the sky. Edie and her younger brother are evacuated to Wales, but return home in despair after being treated as servants, not heeding the danger they will have to face.

This book was written in the form of a diary kept by Edie in 1940 and 1941 and captured by terror of World War II and the Blitz as seen through the eyes of a young girl. Readers who enjoyed other books in the My Story series are sure to enjoy this one as well. I would also recommend this book to readers who enjoy historical fiction in diary form.

This book is one in the My Story series. The books in this series are fictional diaries of young girls living during different periods of British, Scottish, and Irish history.

Tilly Middleton is thirteen years old in the spring of 1553, when she begins her diary. She and her family live at the Tower of London, where her father is the physician. She describes her life at home, doing chores and helping care for her younger siblings, as well as the events of the day in England. It is a time of great turmoil, as the young king, Edward, dies, and his Catholic half-sister, Mary, becomes Queen of England. During Mary's reign, many people are kept at the tower as prisoners, including Mary's Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.

I enjoyed this book from the My Story series a lot, as I particularly like this time period, but the book covered a long time period, and as a result, the later half contained a lot less detail than I would have liked, so I wish it were longer. However, I still recommend it to readers who enjoy historical fiction in diary format or who have an interest in this time period.

Blundering Social Bodies: How Groups Threaten Our Humanity is a scholarly yet stinging text examining social bodies and how they affect human relationships. Author Richard Rieben carefully and insightfully analyzes what society is and does, how it affects personal lives and world history, with a look on the group's effects upon individual rights and liberty. A fascinating study on human mass psychology, sociology and behavior, Blundering Social Bodies is a strongly recommended addition to academic and personal sociological reference collections and reading lists.

If you have a keen interest in the Elizabethan era, this little book is a must have. (My copy came as a special order from Amazon.co.uk)

The exquisite description of Elizabeth's tiny devotion book from which the prayers were taken is worth the price alone. Read all about the little gold and ruby encrusted volume in the forward by Rev. Canon J. P. Hodges.

Or, find treasures of a less earthly nature in the prayers written by the Queen in her own hand. These prayers were written in English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek. Not to worry, all the prayers have been translated into English by Rev. Adam Fox, so that all may read and reflect on this most interesting side of the life and times of Elizabeth I.

John Feierabend's creative and fun approach to music education breathes new life into the music classroom. This bookis full of new and inventive ideas for teaching young students to use their head voices. There are a few songs in this book, but the bulk of it contains warm-ups.

The masnavi is the longer, freer cousin of the more constrained ghazal. It can be virtually unlimited in length and rhyms AABBCC. Hafez has only a handful masnavies compared to his nearly 500 ghazals. Two of them are well known to native speakers: "the wild deer" and "the winebringer," the first one even put to song by a popular pop singer.

Smith does an admirable job of catching the essence, as well as the music and lyricism, of these gems. Smith's Winebringer is as easy to the ears, and as fluid, as the original. He achieves this by clever usage of vocabulary while maintaining constant line-length and rhyming scheme so essential to the form. I highly recommend this delightful volume.


Winebringer, come. That liquid that all cares burns;
That if a lion drinks, into a burner of forests turns,

Give, so to the sky that captures the lion I can go;
So the care, this tired old world, I can overthrow.

The Borzoi handbook is the most concise and easy to use reference book of its kind. A must have for all high school and college students. The addition of the workbook makes it an excellent resource for individual and class study. I have used the Borzoi for almost 15 years, and this latest edition is the best yet.

Of all the (countless) responses to the Bard by writers over the last four hundred years or so, this one may be the most idiosyncratic; it may also be the most intelligent, insightful and inspired. BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE reminds me a little bit of Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, first, in its encyclopedic bulk, and, second, in the preponderance of quotes in its pages. Louis Zukofsky was a world-class quoter (he's spiritual kin to Walter Benjamin, I think, who dreamed of writing-if that's the right word-a book composed entirely of quotations), and in BOTTOM, he cites everyone from Homer to Wittgenstein, and whole pages of Shakespeare, for the central purpose of elucidating what may be thought of as the book's thesis, which Zukofsky puts thus:

"Love is to reason as the eyes are to mind."

I don't pretend to understand entirely what that means. But the idea that to perceive something as it truly is requires love, or is the beginning of love, or both, is beautiful.

It's important to keep in mind that although he was a professor of English, widely read, and had an acute literary-critical gift, Zukofsky was, above all, an artist. A staggering amount of scholarship went into BOTTOM, but it is, in the end, a poetic response to Shakespeare, a poet's reply to a poet. By academic standards, therefore, BOTTOM is downright eccentric. An example. Elsewhere, Zukofsky writes, "And it is possible in imagination to divorce speech of all graphic elements, to let it become a movement of sounds." Thought as music. A writer as deeply ethical as Zukofsky would never say something like that if he didn't mean it, and so we find that the second part of BOTTOM, the culmination of his thought on Shakespeare, isn't critical prose, but a musical setting for PERICLES, composed by Celia Zukofsky, Louis's wife.

Obviously, this book isn't an introduction to Shakespeare. The student coming to grips with the Bard won't get much help here. Like Zukofsky's poetry, of which it's very much an extension, BOTTOM can be obscure and taxing. On the other hand, it's as beautiful as it is difficult. At every turn, some idea or turn of phrase will make the patient reader gasp (or sigh, I suppose, depending on one's temperament). For anyone really, vitally engaged with Shakespeare, for any fan of Zukofsky, and for anyone who really cares about poetry, five stars is too few to recommend BOTTOM: ON SHAKESPEARE.

This book is truly amazing because it answers so many questions we have always been asking through life... questions like why men are more aggressive, why some people change sex, and why some girls behave like boys and vice-versa.

In a sense, this book is like a college reference book (after all, I picked it up at my college library) but it reads like a bestseller! I couldn't stop reading after starting on it. It has a great chronological order of how boys and girls develop into their roles, and it touches on the biological side as well.

One thing I greatly admire about this book is that you don't need to have a major in Biology to understand what it is about. There are many techinal aspects of course, but the author made it easy to understand. In addition, her views are often supported by evidence and she also counteract her views with other arguments. In the end, the product is a well-balanced book, with unbiased views and sometimes, even more unanswered questions that will always be in our minds....trying to understand why boys grow up to be boys and why girls grow up to be girls.

One word for you, Carole R. Beal - Excellent!