Indiana Books

Clear, wide ranging,synthetic, erudite, but never pedantic. A great read. A lucid mind.

Emil Fackenheim was one of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a person of great integrity who deeply cared for the Jewish people. His understanding of Jerusalem as the spiritual center of the Jewish people was one major element of his thought. His concern with Jewish survival after the Shoah was another central element. As a survivor of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, as one who was trained as a Rabbi, and became an academic philosopher he had a background which moved him to a very deep reading and thinking about Jewish history. All this comes to focus in 'To Mend the World' where he outlines for the Jewish people centered in Jerusalem a way of hope toward the future. He does this through reading of history and midrashim traditional religious texts, and creating a Jewish world of thought of his own.

First, I have one of the essays in this book to thank for getting me started on Darkover. If only for that, it deserves a few stars.

Beyond that, it's difficult not to enjoy reading an essay that narrowly missed being titled "The Triumph of the Flasher." Russ writes clearly and humorously of the problems that face women connected with the written word -- both as authors and as characters (often in stories written by men).

Meaghan Morris, early and late, writes cultural criticism at its global/local,wry perverse best. Lest this sound too late-capitalist cynical or rude, I should say that she writes from and as the local and national site of Australia, making this political and libidinal space of transnational cultural studies resonate with the most urgent, critical, and international issues that trouble our politics and poetics.

As such, she reinvents Asia/Pacific as she writes, showing us (or should I say the writerly obsessive "me") how to work and affiliate in a space of writing and moral-political concern. When I read her essays, I face the panic white sublimity of awe and admiration, clotted and displaced. She invents topics and tropes for each essay or book, reframing tourism, mass media, film, movement, embodied location, identity, without falling into the "banality of cultural studies" or the throwaway language and motel spaces that haunt our politics.

She is an untimely critic, whose writing is both too soon and too late for the market. But the "tyranny of space" in the Pacific has been overcome, and I for one am very grateful such an artist and cultural critic and scholar exists all packed into one person, Meaghan Morris.

What a great idea! And what a polished way of presenting both facts and opinions!
Bill May has done an excellent job of gathering and organizing information about Indiana high school basketball. Nowhere else can a fan or sportswriter find so much basketball tournament history in one place and presented so clearly. Sportswriters decades from now will be relying upon May's work. In addition to this factual material, the reader will also get opinions about the state of basketball today from a man who obviously knows and cares about the game.
That's the solid main course at this basketball banquet, but it's the dessert that makes the meal complete. The dessert here is the collection of anecdotes that May presents in a down-to-earth, Hoosier style. When you read this section of the book you'll think that the writer is sitting beside you and rolling out story after story of basketball history.

Wow, I checked this out at my library and was amazed at the info in this. I am from Indiana and this has every score from every sectional, regional, semi state and state game from 1911 - 2005. I bought a used one on Amazon for my own for a little over $2!!! Best money I have spent in a long time.

This is an excellent depiction of American railroading. The addition of some U.S. History makes this superbly interesting. Whether a railroad or history buff (or not), this reading will grab your attention. The light humor also adds to the enjoyment of this book. Filled with very interesting facts on how the early railroads actually created & perfected many of the technologies we know today. You won't want to put this book down once you start reading it!

I was actually a bit saddened that nobody had reviewed this book before me. It deserves to be more popular.

To be honest, I didn't read this book for a month after I got it because it is a large volume (both in size and number of pages) and that sort of intimidated me a bit, but once I started reading I could barely bring myself to put it down.

It is a real page-turner!

This book quite thoroughly discusses the early history of Orthodox Friends in the United States and in the process gives an explanation of the general American religious enviroment(s) of the time. It helps a person to see why most Orthodox Friends in modern times are so similar to other Christian groups. Details and footnotes are everywhere.

Many of the movements and thought patterns discussed, as well as the people who pioneered them are familiar names to many Friends: Rufus M. Jones, Joel Bean, Joseph John Gurney, and many many others.

This book has a huge bibliography and has been impeccably researched by the author. There are over 50 full pages of notes, as well as an Appendix 1 of Orthodox Friends' membership statistics from 1845-1908 and an Appendix 2 of a "family tree" of Quakers which shows all the different branches.

All in all, this book is very solid (absolutely no "filler" material) and very helpful in understand Quaker history and American religious history in general. It is one of my favorite Quaker books.

Buy it!

This is a must read for anyone who has a relationship with music, musicians, teaching and learning. Estelle Jorgensen provides a philosophical discourse that inspires new ways to think and talk about music --it's role in the transmission of history and culture and it's potential to transform and be transformed!

Joanna Kirkpatrick
Transports of Delight: The Ricksha Arts of Bangladesh
Indiana University Press (2003)

An appealing review and analysis of the ricksha arts of Bangladesh, with comparisons to popular arts in India and Pakistan, this interactive multimedia CD-ROM is informative and easy to navigate. Besides the large number of excellent color images of rickshas and the art that decorates them, there are four video clips, shot with a hand-held camcorder, that give a vivid impression of what it is like to travel by ricksha through the city streets and country roads of Bangladesh. These clips employ both folk songs and natural sound. The introduction is also backgrounded by a contemporary Bengali ballad that invokes Kirkpatrick's interpretive theme of the CD.

The CD-ROM is divided into four main sections (Introduction, Ricksha Art Images, Streets and Views, and Readings). Sub-sections address various topics, including the history of "conveyance art," comparisons of ricksha art to other genres of popular and folk art, and recurrent themes seen in ricksha decoration. A sub-section on artists and makers examines how rickshas are made and decorated. Each sub-section includes illustrated text discussions and a gallery of photographs supplementing the points the author has made.

The text and the four articles in the Readings file raise important questions, such as how "iconophilic" South Asia reconciles with Muslim uneasiness about the depiction of human figures, and the ways that popular imagery pique or satisfy a largely male audience's desires. These and other timely discussion points make this CD-ROM an ideal resource for courses on the art or visual ethnography of South Asia. It should also be of great interest both to scholars of the region, and to general readers interested in world popular and folk art.