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Hidden in issue ten of volume 15 of this RBOC Update is possibly the most gripping 500 word essay documenting the tireless work of Bellsouth, relentless missionaries of The Real Yellow Pages.

There can be only one Real Yellow Pages according to Thomas Gale. This slyly dry tale of banishing the pagan "Talking Phone Book" from the greater Louisville area literally had me in tears; frightful, horrible tears. Of Joy. To see the word of the Real Yellow Pages reach each and every corner of that godforsaken land.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. + 449 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $19.95 - Swartz attempts the commendable task of motivating nonprofessional philosophers to engage in the activity of identifying and criticizing their own metaphysical theories. He does this first by explaining what a metaphysical theory is and how to evaluate it, and second by examining the plausibility of various theories concerning space, time, properties, synchronic identity, diachronic identity, and personal identity. A professional philosopher will find it easy to read. An upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate student would, I imagine, find it challenging at times but readable. There is a glossary of technical terms, further readings suggested, bibliographical references, a name index, and a subject index at the end of the book.

Swartz lays out the currently-popular approach to metaphysics used by analytically-trained philosophers, that is, the testing of our intuitions in counterfactual situations. He claims that if we are to learn which metaphysical theories are better than others, we must go beyond what scientific theories are limited by, namely, experience. He shows convincingly that scientific theories are imbedded with metaphysical theories which cannot themselves be adjudicated using experience (or observation) alone. Moreover, there is no mechanical way to decide between metaphysical theories. One simply has to test these theories using conceptual analysis on a case by case basis. Swartz's understanding of conceptual analysis, then, involves analyzing a concept in counterfactual situations. That is, one has to ask whether a logically consistent story could be told such that the story would make sense of a particularly odd use of a term. If so, then one has found out that a commonly-accepted use for a term is not necessarily, that is, metaphysically, the correct use for that term, but is only contingently the correct use.

Swartz then examines briefly (which is surprising in a 449-page book) various metaphysical theories concerning what space is, what time is, what a property is, what synchronic identity is, what diachronic identity is, and what being a person is. He suggests, but does not argue, that a negative theory of space, for example, is more plausible than a positive theory. That is, he suggests that a metaphysical theory which reduces talk of "space" to talk of physical objects without remainder is more plausible than a theory which posits the existence of space in addition to physical objects. He suggests, but again does not argue, that realism as opposed to conceptualism, nominalism, and a theory of tropes, is most plausible, although reluctantly so. This reluctance stems from, I think, his preference for negative theories in general. He then suggests that positive theories concerning synchronic identity just push the problem back one step, and do not solve the problem. On the other hand, negative theories do solve the problem. The same suggestion is made with respect to positive theories concerning diachronic identity and personal identity. In other words, the problems of individuation, identity through time, and personal identity are not solved by positing the existence of some additional kind of thing, called "substance." These problems are just postponed.

I found this book interesting to read. Swartz introduces and motivates nicely some metaphysical problems and some of the main metaphysical theories which have been proposed to solve them. However, his philosophical methodology will look more like a "language game" than a hard-nosed search after truth. This, I believe, makes his goal of motivating the nonprofessional philosopher difficult to achieve. Such a reader, in turn, may be left with the feeling that metaphysics is all "ivory tower" stuff, which, as Swartz agrees, it is not.

Sawyer was acquitted in the murder trial of Cathy Anne Cranston, the daughter of a flamboyant televangelist. Though Mara Taylor felt sure Holden was innocent of the charges, someone else felt both of them were guilty, someone who was sending the rash of threatening messages, causing car "accidents" and littering dead bodies around them? Donna K. Smith's gripping mystery is full of bright dialogue, interesting plot twists and outrageous characters which would make the hardest of detectives blush. Parts of this book are not for the squeamish, but they are for readers who like a fine balance of romance, suspense and faith.

$5.95 for a one-page review of "Big Jabe" in a magazine? Look, I'll GIVE you my review for free, and it has more words (760) than the one you pay for! Here it is:

"Now when I look upon BIG JABE, he certainly was born out of a great need. But, he also symbolizes a wish fulfillment and the desire a nine-year-old girl expressed long ago. My formal introduction to the subject of slavery in the United States came in elementary school. I was horrified. I still am. I wanted to 'do something' for those 'people who were treated as slaves.' May Big Jabe bring us all to the pear tree." Jerdine Nolen thus explains (on her website) how she first felt when confronted with the fact of slavery. "Big Jabe" is her adult attempt to deal with that horror, to honor the slaves, and to give something hopeful to her readers.

She succeeds through a mythic tale that combines themes from Moses and the American John Henry. It's like a fairy tale: There are bad guys and victims, an improbable hero, and a magical resolution. Yet, looming throughout is one's knowledge that the brutality she describes actually happened. By explaining the slaves' escape though Big Jabe's superhero qualities, she personifies the means of their deliverance, yet maintains enough distance that children won't be overwhelmed.

Because the plot is so thoroughly described in the other Amazon.com Big Jabe reviews, I'll just touch on the major points, especially those that parallel motifs found in the Bible. Like Moses, Jabe is discovered in a river. Here, it's a young woman--the brave Addy. In the opening scene, the young boy displays the power of a Biblical hero, as he simply commands scores of fish to jump out of the river: 'Fish, fish, where is you, fish? Jump to the wagon like Miss Addy wish!'" Later nicknamed fish-boy, the man-child Jabe "opened his little-boy mouth and laughed a big man-sized laugh." He also plants a pear tree (Addy takes a bit of pear, and calls it "the fruit of heaven"); that tree figures prominently later in the story.

Although Jabe's strength (single-handedly clearing acres of cotton, building houses, and making "Plenty Plantation as good as its name") equals the work of several slaves, Nolen shows that the owner and overseer aren't content with prosperity--there's a power relationship to preserve. "But as the slaves looked forward to the first soft sleep of their lives [because of the extra cotton that Jabe secretly gave them for their beds], Mr. Sorenson was boiling over. With Jabe doing all the work, just who was he supposed to oversee anyway?"

Kadir Nelson ("ellington Wasn't Always a Street") is a magnificent illustrator, and his large dramatic scenes capture the opposing forces of Jabe and the slave-owners. In another Bible-inspired segment, Jabe creates a tremendous storm, so strong it lifts livestock hundreds of feet into the air, and under its cover a man (who was whipped the night before) and his family escape. That particularly violent storm recalls the plagues besetting the Egyptian slaves owners of the Old Testament; another rainy storm references Noah and the flood. The fury of the storms, along with the life-giving powers of the peach tree, soon enable every slave on the plantation to escape, including Addy, shackled in chains by the suspicious owners.

The book has scenes of violent force and torturous mistreatment, such as the cows flung up in the air and Addy chained inside a smokehouse, but Nelson doesn't show us the aftermath. Very young children may be either thrilled or a little frightened by these spectacles, but the magical elements of Big Jabe and the pear tree keep the more horrible realities at a distance. (It's not exactly clear what the pear tree does, although it makes an old horse younger, and Nolen implies that it's the departure place for the escaping slaves.)

Nolen and Nelson manage to neither minimize slavery nor explicitly picture its bloody truth. Similarly, while every slave on this plantation escapes, Nolen doesn't facilely plant a happy conclusion. Jabe leaves the plantation, "though he turned up at different times in different places throughout the South. And everywhere he did, burdens were lifted." Nolen brings the reader closer to the story as well, by framing her historic myth with a contemporary girl who stands with her grandmother on the very same riverbank where Addy found Jabe, under the same pear tree that they planted. Nolan's exciting story and heavy use of dialogue, along with Nelson's masterful larger-than-life pictures, completely engage the reader. The mythic aspect shows the power of fantasy and hope; adults may want to pair this book with age-appropriate historical or biographical material for balance and contrast. Nolen and, especially, Nelson have informative websites for those interested in their other work.

Yehuda Amichai was a great poet. His work speaks on many levels to a wide audience of readers, and for Israelis he is something like a national poet. He writes of the experiences of War and Love in an ironic colloquial language which often has Biblical reference and echo. Raised as a religious Jew the literature of the Tradition is part of his heritage and often plays and comments on it. Amichai learned much from American colloquial language poets, and moved away from the formal language of his predecessors. He is very much a poet of Jerusalem and its special landcape, heritage and world. Above all he speaks to the universal in the heart of Man, to all that we dream to be in love, and death, life and poetry. .

Appelfeld 's story is an incredible and moving one. Orphaned from his mother at the age of eight, and imprisoned by the Nazis he escaped and survived in hiding for three years. He tells the story of these years in his short but powerful autobiographical volume , "Story of a Life".
After the war he made a new life in Israel where he became a celebrated author. His path to this was not slow or easy. He is an Israeli writer who writes in Hebrew but his works are not about Israeli society. They are most often about the European world he came from, with special focus on the periods before the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt is one of the great political philosophers of the twentieth century. She thinks in a fundamental and deep way about the great concepts of political and human thought. Her work on Totalitarianism is one of the seminal works in understanding this form of political evil. Her reflections on the human condition have illuminated our understanding of our own human situation. Her devotion to and understanding of the meaning of 'thinking' and of 'political action' are also important contributions.
Arendt's distinction as a thinker and dignity as a human being were compromised by her insensitivity to the reactions of survivors in the report she gave on the Eichmann trial. Her relation to her own Jewishness is also a somewhat problematic question, though it should be noted that she worked tirelessly to help rescue Jewish children from the Nazis at the time she was in France.
Her work and life is the subject of increasing interest. There is a growing literature on Arendt, and on the meaning of her work.

Atlas is one of America's finest biographers. His pioneering work on the life of Delmore Schwartz was followed by his exhaustively researched work on Saul Bellow. This book took Atlas eleven years, and in the course of it a bit of his friendship with Bellow as Atlas insisted on telling the truth about Bellow's complex personal life. Atlas also has written a memoir " Life in the Middle Ages" in which he talks about his childhood, his parents , and above all about the complexities of being 'middle- aged' and responsible in America of today. The Chicago- bred author long - worked for the NY Times, has been an editor of a major biography series but his first professional credential is again that he is an outstanding biographer.

Paul Auster is I believe one of the finest of the novelists writing today. He is an incredible storyteller with a capacity for creating remarkably interesting characters. He is serious, intellectual and cultured and his work has characters who seem to touch on all aspects of life. He is a very good sense of the nitty- gritty of American everyday life. The dialogue in his work is sharp and surprising. And in fact the capacity of surprise in his storytelling, is as good as anyone I know.
But Auster is too a dark writer whose characters often engage in or are more likely victims of terrible violence. Auster's whole philosophy of life seems to make much of chance and unpredictability. He has spoken of characters searching for themselves and never really solving the mystery of themselves. Life as Auster presents it is unpredictable, and often for that reason chaotic and disastrous. Yet he has a strong sense of life's pleasures and can write beautifully of Love and human relations. He also explores in his work the meanings of Reading , and his characters often have books on their minds and in their hearts. Auster who started as a poet managed to do something many poets cannot , convert his writing into a strongly narrative prose. Often with Auster the beginnings of his books and first parts are, as I understand it more interesting than their latter parts and conclusions. Perhaps because I am a sentimental soul I am distressed when I read of how sympathetic characters in Auster's work often come to disastrous ends.
Stable long- term relationships are not what Auster's work is about. The family and the world are broken from beginning, with the father often absent. Auster is again a tremendously readable writer who knows how to push the reader forward out of deepest curiosity as to what will happen next.
I sense perhaps wrongly an underlying gloom which somehow sets the deeper tone of the work.
I recommend his work highly though my own world- view and way of seeing things especially in religious terms( Auster is the most secular writer imaginable) are completely opposite of his.

Menachem Begin was one of the greatest of all modern Jewish leaders. He was a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky in pre-war Poland and already an important leader there. After he came to Eretz Yisrael he led the Irgun in its actions to remove British control over the Holy Land as step in establishing an independent Jewish state. He labored for long years as leader of the political opposition in Israel until in 1977 his Likud party became the first non- Labor head of a coalition in Israel.
When Begin first came to office he was decried by the Left in Israel and by the international media as a warmonger who would lead Israel to greater violence with its neighbors. He surprised everyone by appointing Moshe Dayan as his Foreign Minister and beginning a campaign for peace. He as Prime Minister thus led Israel to the signing of its first peace treaty with an Arab country, Egypt. For this he received the Nobel Prize.
Begin was a much beloved leader who made major efforts to help the poorer sections of the Israeli populace. He made the critical decision to bomb the Iraqi nuclear - reactor in Baghdad thus saving the world from the danger of a Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons. In 1982 in an effort to prevent Palestinian terrorists under Yassar Arafat from continuing attacks on Israel he sent Israeli troops into Lebanon. This initially planned short operation was to become prolonged far beyond Begin's term of office. After the death of his beloved wife, and a worsening of his own health situation Begin resigned while still in office.
He is today considered by the people of Israel one of its most beloved leaders. He lived modestly was known for his Old - World gentlemanly good manners. He was a tremendously moving orator who in time would be longed for as a man of integrity even by many of his own former antagonists from the Left, such as Yossi Sarid.
Begin who lost his parents in the Shoah had a deep sense of Jewish history, a love for the Jewish people and a general humanity which made him seem to be on a higher level than most political leaders.
He fought for what he believed in, risked and sacrificed for it, set an example in courage and integrity of what a political leader should be.
May his Memory be blessed.