Indiana Books

This book is an excellent collection of essays from a wide variety of philosophers. This is certainly not a self-help book or an inspirational collection - it a thoughtful exploration of how the acts of cooking, eating, and thinkning have implications in feminist, post-modern, and Zen philosophy. Some of my favorite essays looked at how cooking is goverened by social power relationships, how one's diet is a political act, and how eating is an integral part of a person's understanding of Self and Other. I really dug this book. Finally, the title is a great play on Martin Heidegger's "Building, Dwelling, Thinking". Check them both out!

This is a great book that reflects the excitment of this cooking school in the middle of Main Street Indiana. I purchased two! Marie has focused on easy yet elegant time-tested recipes that will soon be a staple in your home.

Irvington, 1939. A secure, tree-shaded world of businessmen, aging artists and writers in a suburb of east Indianapolis. Shop owners, stay-at-home mothers, their teenaged sons and daughters enjoying the rivalry of football in opposing schools - all did not know they stood on the edge of cataclysm.

This autobiographical novel pictures in poignant, vivid detail the coming of World War II to the small town on the East Side. It portrays the shattering of the comfortable world of the small town's boyhood friends as they scatter to England, to Normandy, to the Asia of Chennault. Most of all, A Corner of Time shows the intense, bitter rivalry of two Irvington brothers, whose animosity extends even beyond the war to a surprising final conclusion.
--- from books dustjacket

This book is invaluable to be used for preparation for the ASQ CQA test. It is divided into relevant chapters and each chapter has a test with questions - and answers! The book is in a 3 ring format so that the test questions can be removed before the exam.

Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana

Karen Zach, Montgomery County Indiana Historian has put together a
worthy book for her first foray into "real" publication. Karen is not
new to the people who research history in Montgomery County.

Karen, who is a teacher, and an enormous asset to the Community, is
well known among Historians, and Genealogists. Karen has been
coordinating the USGenWeb Project web page for the County for
some time, she is also a past President of the Daughters of the
American Revolution, Dorothy Q Chapter, and maintains that website
as well. Karen is Ambassador of much of the history and genealogy
in the County, and her close support of Crawfordsville's District
Library, and its extensive resources, is highly commendable.

Karen is to be commended for her efforts to get copious amounts of
data out to the public. In that spirit she took on the project of
composing a Crawfordsville history for the "Making of America"
series.

The Making of America series is a nationwide project of local
histories, and using vintage photos, and excerpts from many local
sources, Karen has done an excellent job for the community of
Crawfordsville.

For more than 150 years Crawfordsville has been a central place for
the cutting edge of culture in western Indiana.
From being the place where many generals of the Civil War began the
recruiting for that conflict, and the literary endeavors of General Lew
Wallace and others, to the influence and confluence of the railroads
and the General Land Office on the people of the entire region, she
touches all of these. The developments of Basketball as a sport, and
the archetectural impact of Crawfordsville, are also key points.

Karen leads us from the earliest days of the County, to the
modern-post September 11, 2001- era.
One part of the history leads us right into the next in a continuous
tapestry of what makes this City uniquely Hoosier. Wabash College,
an early institute of higher education, was a drawing point for the
great minds, and the environment of Crawfordsville must have been
ripe, rich, and sweet, because many inventions sprang from it, great
works of literature and art abound, and it seems that everyone has
something to add to the general progress of the region and
especially Montgomery County.

Taken as a place of history, and as an undeniable place IN history,
Crawfordsville is and was the "Athens of Indiana". Perhaps it is the
Athens of the whole USA.

Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana,
Copyright © 2003, Karen Bazzani Zach
Arcadia Publishing,
Tempus Publishing, 2 Cumberland Street, Charleston, South Carolina,
USA. 29401

Library of Congress Catalog Card #2002116806

ISBN: 0738524174

War of the Worlds is one of the most important science fiction novels, but its importance can be difficult to see without some knowledge of the time in which it was written. Using essays (some by Wells himself) and copious footnotes, this critical edition does a fine job of placing War of the Worlds into its proper context

how have i missed p. m. carlson? this book is intelligent, great characters, and intricate and logical plot. not sure how i've missed this author, but i am going back for more.

In this collection of essays, Wiredu makes and unpacks four interrelated claims. Along the way, he supplies numerous examples and proofs from Akan thought and in some of the middle chapters provides clear expositions of large elements of it. First, he asserts that there exist universally true ideas and concepts including in morality whose validity can be determined objectively. Second, he argues that the conflation of morality with custom makes morality appear to be culturally relative and demonstrates this conflation by Christian evangelicals in Africa. Third, he suggests that part of the legacy of this conflation is an often unwitting "colonial mentality" of African intellectuals who ponder, articulate and write about their cultures in foreign languages (i.e. English and French) and who use Western concepts to articulate African thought. Fourth, he suggests that Africans need to return to African traditional thought, which still informs the lives of ordinary Africans, to help resolve many of Africa's social and political lives. This is not an exclusive "return to the source," since modern developments may dictate modification of those traditions. In this vein, he is particuarly interested in Africans "domesticating" the natural and life sciences. He also includes an afterword that addresses some criticisms of the work.

There are many places where I disagree with Wiredu's argument or the manner of the argument. Though he pays lip service to the diversity of Christianity, he uses descriptions of it that flatten that diversity. I am also skeptical about his portrayal of the role of religion (by which he seems usually to mean Christianity) in the West. I am unsure about his stance on language. In some cases, he treats it as little more than an accidental collection of sounds and in others attaches great importance to the culturally-derived meanings of those sounds. Finally, he has a tendency to base his claims on definitions of concepts that could be rather controversial. For example, he claims Africans are not religious based largely on his definitions of religion and the supernatural. With a different, but reasonable, set of definitions much of his argument would not hold. Ultimately, this book engaged me about ideas and methods, which is precisely what a good work of philosophy should do.

Wiredu does a good job of outlining and unpacking his ideas and approaches. The work also hangs together remarkably well for a set of separately published essays. The book can be read without any background in philosophy or African thought. However, it is probably more engaging if you do have some background in those fields. I certainly found myself wishing I had read more on Akan thought.

Even though I have not yet completed this translation of Dante's Paradiso by Mark Musa, I have read his original translation published several years ago. Knowing his first publication (especially the notes for each canto), I can say with certainty that this new edition is so much better. I have only completed the first five canto's, and I have learned a great deal from Mr. Musa's notes. This truly is his defenitive version of The Paradiso. I truly recommend this version to anyone who reads Dante's Divine Comedy as I do.

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
"The Divine Comedy" describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love and another of his works, "La Vita Nuova." While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" - "at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break from standards of publishing in only Latin or Greek (the languages of Church and antiquity). This break allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience - setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future.

Readers often cannot understand how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for several hundred years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature. Furthermore, the word "comedy," in the classical sense, refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events not only tended towards a happy or "amusing" ending, but an ending influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, the progression of Dante's pilgrim from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

The Divine Comedy can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternate meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem (see the "Letter to Can Grande della Scala"), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical). The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of "L'Inferno", allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poem "Comedy" (the adjective "Divine" added later in the 16th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of man, in the low and vulgar Italian language and not the Latin language as one might expect for such a serious topic.

Purgatorio
Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom, to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world (in Dante's time, it was believed that Hell existed underneath Jerusalem). The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere. At the shores of Purgatory, Dante and Virgil are attracted by a musical performance by Casella, but are reprimanded by Cato, a pagan who has been placed by God as the general guardian of the approach to the mountain. The text gives no indication whether or not Cato's soul is destined for heaven: his symbolic significance has been much debated. (Cantos I and II).

Dante starts the ascent on Mount Purgatory. On the lower slopes (designated as "ante-Purgatory" by commentators) Dante meets first a group of excommunicates, detained for a period thirty times as long as their period of contumacy. Ascending higher, he encounters those too lazy to repent until shortly before death, and those who suffered violent deaths (often due to leading extremely sinful lives). These souls will be admitted to Purgatory thanks to their genuine repentance, but must wait outside for an amount of time equal to their lives on earth (Cantos III through VI). Finally, Dante is shown a beautiful valley where he sees the lately-deceased monarchs of the great nations of Europe, and a number of other persons whose devotion to public and private duties hampered their faith (Cantos VII and VIII). From this valley Dante is carried (while asleep) up to the gates of Purgatory proper (Canto IX).

The gate of Purgatory is guarded by an angel who uses the point of his sword to draw the letter "P" (signifying peccatum, sin) seven times on Dante's forehead, abjuring him to "wash you those wounds within". The angel uses two keys, gold and silver, to open the gate and warns Dante not to look back, lest he should find himself outside the gate again, symbolizing Dante having to overcome and rise above the hell that he has just left and thusly leaving his sinning ways behind him. From there, Virgil guides the pilgrim Dante through the seven terraces of Purgatory. These correspond to the seven deadly sins, each terrace purging a particular sin in an appropriate manner. Those in purgatory can leave their circle whenever they like, but essentially there is an honors system where no one leaves until they have corrected the nature within themselves that caused them to commit that sin. Souls can only move upwards and never backwards, since the intent of Purgatory is for souls to ascend towards God in Heaven, and can ascend only during daylight hours, since the light of God is the only true guidance.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.