Indiana Books

"The Dandy Dollhouse Stories: The Mexican Dollhouse" is one of the few books written about Mexican/Spanish style dollhouses. This story is inspired by the actual dollhouse that the author had built for her daughter while they were living in Mexico in the early 1950's. However, the story is more about accepting people from other cultures then about the dollhouse. Not surprisingly, the story is set in the mid-1950's, as Nancy has recently recovered from a chilhood bout of polio. Nancy's dollhouse and its dollhouse family, the Dandys, helped get her through a difficult time of recovery. In this third book in The Dandy Dollhouse series, the focus is on a new girl and the problems she must overcome.

The new girl at Nancy and Katie's school is from Mexico. Her name is "Rosalinda Chavez", she dresses in traditional Mexican clothes and is still learning English. Nancy knows what it is like to be teased because of her polio and the leg brace she had to wear, so she and her friend, Katie, offer their friendship to Rosalinda.In a world of prejudice and racial suspicion, the girls find that they have something in common with Rosalinda. She has a wonderful dollhouse! The reader learns something about Mexican families through the "living" dollhouse family in the Mexican dollhouse.

The most valuable lesson this book teaches, though, is the lesson of friendship. Friendship is not always easy, but that doesn't mean that one should not reach out to others who may be different. In this multi-cultural world, it may be less rare to see diversity, but reading this book may gently bring up the topic of prejudice and stereotypes. It offers a role model of three girls and their dollhouse families who do the right thing when it isn't the popular thing to do.

This set of essays by the master Shakespeare critic A.C. Bradley contains essays on :Poetry for Poetry's Sake, The Sublime, Hegel's Theory of Tragedy, Wordsworth, Shelley's View of Poetry, The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth, The Letters of Keats, The Rejection of Falstaff, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare the Man, Shakespeare's Theatre and Audience.
I especially enjoyed the essay on Keats where Bradley focuses on the meaning of Beauty in Keats' letters. His appreciation of the remarkable character of Keats and how this is reflected both in the Letters and the Poems is instructive. The essay on Shakespeare the Man I found a bit speculative , yet another attempt to say something about the character of the character who mastered and made so many different characters. It is interesting that Bradley believes that Shakespeare is the poet who best exemplified Keats' prescription for what a poet ideally should be, one whose negative capability means he is within and without all the characters he creates. The essay on Wordsworth focuses on his originality especially in finding in the simplicities of daily life, and in simple characters the deepest expressions of human soul.
But there is much more than I have indicated here . This is a classic set of essays by one of the English literary traditions, most important critics.

Author: Payne, Robert, 1911-
Title: The three worlds of Albert Schweitzer / Robert Payne.
Publisher: New York : T. Nelson, c1957.
Edition Date: 1957
Language: English
Notes: Includes index.
Physical Details: 252 p. ; 21 cm.
Subjects: Schweitzer, Albert, 1875-1965.
Missions, Medical.

I live in Oh and bought the book in OH. I have not figured out how to tell which state the book is for. I can tell you that everything matches with what I know. It is excellent! It includes lots of good practical information. I grow Blueberry, Red and Black Raspberries plus the garden vegtable and fruit plants.

This beautifully written book is a real find and I hope someone restores it to print. Kluger weaves together recollections of her childhood on an Indiana farm in the 1930s with the recipes for the dishes she grew up eating. Every page is filled with affection that feels genuine, never cloying. The recipes are outstanding and will remind many people of food they, or their parents, ate. (Chess pie, buttermilk biscuits, real preserves, etc.) This book is also a good reminder of a time when people not only made do with what they could grow or build themselves, they also turned what people today might think of as hardships into occasions for joy.

South Asia's geography and politics is of key interest to the developing nations, and so A Military History of India and South Asia From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era should be on the shelves of any college-level collection, whether it be military or civilian in nature. Collections also strong in Asian history and culture will find this history important: it surveys the region since 1700, covering major conflicts, ideological and social differences, military encounters, and more. Experts contribute chapters strongly supported by source materials and research.

Mim and the Criminal

Sequel to Mim and the KLAN , this book captures the elements of young people struggling to understand one another and themselves. Set in an agrarian Quaker county in northern Indiana, principles of Quaker tradition and the energy of youth come together. The story carries good complexity in several dimensions. First is the impending marriage of Mim that even before the knot is tied, runs into trouble through miscommunication. Second, intergenerational insights emerge to elucidate the people and events. Third, and central to the story, is the exposure of the fallacy of schizophrenic thinking (profiling) and the tragic damage done to people's lives by making this psychological pathology, and its concomitant moral inversion, the norm of coercive, life threatening power.
Written for the adolescent age group, Mim and the Criminal offers an enjoyable reading, a good portrait of life in a closely knit community with generations of common history. This setting embraces the reader with warm and compassionate community life, emphasizing the spiritual priority of all humanity. The historical moments of the work provide a backdrop to the main line of humanness threading the book.
The characters are well developed, and their differences in moral development at their ages are well drawn. Not to be diminished is the Quaker tradition emphasizing the power of silence and suspension of judgment. The stark contrast between the Quaker search for truth and the politically motivated rush to judgment frame the tension of the mystery. Thus the story, as ingeniously crafted by Ms Stanley Russell, provides a metaphor for understanding our present time and its deeply divided agendas of power politics and human beings trying to live their lives in peace. Mim will not permit the political to overwhelm the human, and thus the tension of the story gradually comes to resolution. The book would make a very good focus of discussion for young people¡¯s reading groups and library reading programs.

Nicely illustrated by Quaker graphic designer, Susanna Peebles Combs, Mim and the KLAN contains twenty chapters of three to five pages each. Set in the author's home of Wabash County, Indiana in 1969, detailed descriptions of rural family farm life invoke memories of a radically different American life style. The teen-age main characters, Mim and her cousin Karen, are children of a Quaker farming family, and so their lives and conversations revolve around experience of farms, animals, extended family and their Quaker Meeting. The skeletal story of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana laced into the main story line creates a sharply conflicting value system to the rural Quakers. "I [Mim] told Karen what Grampa and Grams had told me. 'The Klan was here in Indiana - not just the South. And it was here in our county - even among our church members.' I thought we were past all that bigotry - prejudice." "Karen, I am ashamed to say this is a state that still [1969] harbors prejudice." (page 21). The story then moves smartly along, yet retains its integrity and homespun character.
Karen cans strawberries and Mim raises animals for show (4-H) at the Indiana State Fair while a parallel story finds the Klan, the Quaker Meeting and public institutions, both at county and state levels in mutual support of one another. Strange bedfellows indeed; William Penn's "Holy Experiment" failure in 17th century Pennsylvania illustrated the incongruity of Quaker values and the moral inversion of politics, but for the Klan to have gained credibility and support in a Quaker Meeting is truly remarkable. Mim does some library research about the Klan and uncovers rather embarrassing facts about their Quaker Meeting and a mob lynching of two black men a generation ago. But the Klan=s tentacles reach down through the generations, and a close family friend agonizing through serious self-examination in a context of typical Quaker sympathy, trust and cooperative association highlights the starkly contrasting values.
A new friend, Jonathan, a young African-American man and expert harness race driver, is introduced by scenes at the State Fair, while Mim and Karen challenge contemporary stereotypes and the harsh consequences of prejudicial thinking that dominate public thought. Quaker values, and Klan values which still permeate society today, conflict directly in the final chapters where Mim and Karen make assumptions about Jonathan radically different than the police.
Thematically, there are dimensions of value systems that make the book appealing to reflective people of any age. Quaker communities implicitly assume that we are spiritual beings on a human journey, and so embrace trust, sympathy and mutual support for one another. The Quaker commitment to living in community, caring for others and grounding their spiritual guidance in the form of questions (The Queries) make it natural to extend community to other people without judgment. The Ku Klux Klan on the other hand, prides itself on ethnic superiority, mindless antagonism and hatred expressed in intimidation and murder - the polar opposite of community (pages 88 - 92). Precedence for such moral inversion is as old as history itself (Isaiah 5:20), and remains with us in the form of 'market morality', 'growth and progress', 'ethnic cleansing' and other popular political and business euphemisms. The Quaker community in the story, and in reality, is in sharp contrast to political, 'market' values where mutual adversity and competition replace cooperative association; predatory economics replaces sympathy, and contractual penalty replaces trust.
Cynthia Stanley Russell's book is rich with implied questions for discussion among young people. It would work well in youth discussion groups in which each participant has read the book at least once, and enters the discussion with questions well prepared. It is also a suitable reading for university classes in ethics, Indiana history and sociology. Mim and the Klan has a nice flow, well integrated themes and is grounded in a fertile history. There are many questions elicited by this book, and thoughtful adults who look past the surface structure will find a deep, rich significance for their own lives.

Ruedy builds his history of modern Algeria the old-fashioned way, from the ground up, focusing on economic and social movements and the rise of the Algerian nationalist movement. He is especially strong on the disastrous economic and social effects of the 130-year French occupation and the way in which these disruptions paved the way for modern Algerian nationalism. Readers who are suspicious of state-based nationalisms will no doubt question the overarching narrative, with its focus on the inexorable rise of an Algerian nation-state; still, Ruedy makes a compelling case that the nationalist paradigm of Algerian history has a lot going for it. This book should be a standard reference for anyone interested in Algerian history or politics.

This is a wonderful selection of modern arabic drama...so different from western drama and really shows the arab point of view. Very moving. especially piece like Darkness, The CHina Tree, and Night Traveller.