Indiana Books

This is wonderful, well researched book on Native American Place Names in Indiana. Very thorough. I learned not only about place names where I grew up, but for other parts of Indiana as well. Highly recommended!

This book is an amazing compilation of the natural history of Indiana. Well illustrated and very informative. A must have for any hoosier as well as environmentalists living in the Great Lakes Region.

Perhaps the most significant issue in the history of the Navajos is the tribe's success in maintaining its traditional culture while adapting to the massive pressures of Euramerican society. Few tribal groups have had to contend with as many and as diverse cultural and political competitors for as long a period of time as have the Navajos - Spain, Mexico, the United States, Catholic and Protestant missions, uprooted Indian communities striving for territory, all have pushed and pulled the Navajos more or less visibly since the middle of the sixteenth century. Acculturation never ceased and today the tribe's culture shows reminders of it's eventful history. Yet that culture is still unmistakably distinct and individual, as Professor Iverson emphasizes.

The Navajos has two main parts: an essay and an alphabetical list of all works cited. All citations in the essay are keyed by means of bracketed numbers to the more complete information in the bibliography. The book is immensely useful to the beginning student and advanced scholar.
--- from book's back cover

This well-coordinated volume, written by first class scholars in an easily accessible language and brilliant style, presents to the reader nearly all aspects of Husserlian phenomenology, usually linked up to the more overarching philosophical issues. The individual chapters are very much based on the extensive studies of the unpublished and unfamiliar material and thus provide the best to-date presentation of Husserl's mature ideas and lifelong reflections. A must for any scholar interested in consciousness research and excellent brief for analytic philosophers wishing a closer acquaintance with phenomenological thought. The picture of Husserl that emerges from this volume is of an extraordinarily profound thinker who kept revising own theories as his insights progressed, a picture quite remote from the standard analytic caricature of him as "obscure Cartesian idealist".

I most enjoyed reading New Media in the Muslim World. This bookexamines the recent introduction of mass education and theavailability of new media (including: fax machines, private and satellite Television channels, internet, desktop publishing as well as video tapes and telephone) in the Muslim World. These new media challenge existing modes of governmental and religious authority and creates new discursive spaces for the articulation of ethnic and religious identities.

This work starts with three theoretically oriented chapters and continues with ethnographies. All case study presented in the collection are immensely relevant to new media researchers, although only one of them deals specifically with the Internet.

Other themes consist of: the continuity between old and new in popular culture (Armbrust), interactions between technology and culture in the new "communication ecology" (White), how new communication networks have de-centered debates on the construction of ethnic identity to Europe (Yavuz), the narrowing gap between broadcast production and audiences and the intellectualization of Islamic discourse (both by Eickelman), the discovery of the civil society as a topic for debate in the Muslim world (Norton), etc.

One of the book's strengths is that no simplistic causal link is assumed between new communication technologies and their social impact. The essays are informed by a rich ethnographical context and an understanding of larger social and political.

This book comes to fill this gap with case studies of regions as diverse as diverse as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Arab world, and the United States...

This book explores the largely unfamiliar world of women in Anglo Saxon England and, to a lesser degree, Norse Age Scandinavia. On one hand, Anglo Saxon women could divorce their husbands and independently own property, while their conterparts in Latin-speaking countries enjoyed no such rights. On the other hand, female babies in Germanic societies were often left to die from exposure with only a bit of pork fat to suck on. This book reminds us that the world of our Teutonic ancestors is nearly as alien to modern Northern Europeans (and their American cousins) as that of distant cultures--and that the Norman Conquest obliterated the Teutonic heritage of the English as surely as white settlers undermined the heritage of Native American Indians centuries later.

The Washington Times, April 22, 1991

The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-role socialization in the U.S.S.R. by Lynne Atwood (Indiana University Press, $39.95, $14.95 paper, 263 pages). Reading this study of the plight of Soviet women after several years of Mr. Gorbachev's reformism is cause for wonder as to whether the liberation of women from second-class citizenship will be realized sooner in Kuwait than in the Soviet Union. Anyone who has read the recent book, "Soviet Women," by Francine du Plessix Gray, knows that their plight is rooted deep in Russian culture.

Miss Atwood, a British-trained Sovietologist, concludes that the present socioeconomic climate will drive women back from their supposed emancipation under Bolshevism to the more traditional female role of homemaker. It is not easy to predict the capacity of a social system to change, but if there is one area of Soviet social development where little progress will occur, it is likely to be in the area of women's rights.

I found this book extremely well conceived and substantively outstanding. It provides a set of essays by philosophers, lawyers, sociologists, doctors, theologians, etc. in which critical ethical and policy issues raised by the new reproductive technologies are addressed. Moreover, it provides descriptions of policies and procedures at four different sorts of egg donation centers in various parts of the country. Finally, it provides recommendations by a board funded by respected foundation grantors and composed of people who would have been appointed to a public board were Congress and the President willing to have one on this controversial subject. It's a must for anyone who wants to know what is going on in this field.

Good read about construction of a commuter rail line through southern Westchester County, NY. Its excellent historical references and good writing should make this interesting for non-railfans. Harwood's strength is his insightful business analysis of why and how this very expensive line got built and then abandoned. Reads like a good mystery novel in parts, with Harwood zooming back from fascinating minutiae about routing choices to J.P. Morgan's strategic -- but not entirely clear -- plans for his railroad investments. Fun to read.

Having read all of the Deets Shanahan series, I can comfortably say this series and its unlikely hero just keep getting better! Love has done good things for Deets and he is closer to acknowledging that fact now than ever before. Meanwhile, his cronies help the story move along briskly. Tense, realistic, at times comical (the bar owner is a favorite of Deets and of mine!), the latest in the series is a tribute to the very talented Tierney's hometown (Indianapolis) and the author's highly refined sense of character! Bravo!