Wisconsin Books

I truly wish that Sharon Hart Addy's "Right Here on This Spot" had reached a wider audience, as it deserves greater attention. Addy takes the intriguing question of "What happened right here on this spot--last week, last year, a million years ago?" and turns it into a meditation on change, time, loss, and more. She goes from pre-human history to native Americans hunting to pioneers to Civil War soldiers, all planting them firmly in the exact same spot, living their lives out, leaving their fragments of history for future generations to find.

Addy's tale is more than matched by the breathtaking illustrations of artist John Clapp. Clapp, who teaches illustration at San Jose State University, has done a superlative job of giving larger life to the text without overpowering it. His illustrations are not only incredibly realistic and beautiful, but they transcend their medium by having an almost emotive quality. You almost hold your breath to see the Civil War soldier waving goodbye from a field.

I can't recommend "Right Here on This Spot" highly enough, and hope that reading this review will spur more readers to purchase it. It will become a much-loved favorite in your family, too.

This award winning look at the past, winner of the Archer/Eckbald Children's Picture Book Award, is a touching look at the history of place. It was recently selected for Outstanding Achievement in Children's Literature by the Children's Book Award Committee of the Wisconsin Library Association.

Besides teaching the history of popular entertainment at the University of Wisconsin, I'm a writer and historian. There are a lot of circus surveys and shallow Ringling histories out there. No other circus book I've found has been so detailed and pleasant to read as "Ringlingville." It places the brothers in their proper context without being one of those rehashed "life and times" works that are short on content.

Especially interesting is Apps' look at the family's dynamics -- a three ring circus in itself. There's lots of new material here, with locations, dates and the wagon-by-wagon growth of this American icon.

Anyone interested in the Ringlings or American pop culture will find this a fascinating and important book!

Ringlingville USA is the fantastic true story of seven brothers' odyssey from immigrant poverty to immortality as the creators of an enduring circus world. Recently and for the first time, the brothers' financial records and personal correspondence have become available to researchers; Wisconsin and U.S. history specialist Jerry Apps consolidates information from a wide range of sources to offer an unmistakably human portrait of the Ringling Brothers and their personal challenges amid taxation, war, economic pressure, technological advances, and individual tragedy. An amazing saga of real-life legends, illustrated throughout with vintage black-and-white photographs, Ringlingville USA is a must for students of Big Top history and a "must" for all Wisconsin school and community library collections.

Readers of outdoor ethics and conservation philosophy have likely seen collections of Aldo Leopold's essays elsewhere, but I doubt you will find a more diverse and wide-ranging collection than this. Browse the brief chronologic summary of his life and then skip the lengthy introduction (for now), and you will get to the meat of this book. It starts with an essay written by Aldo Leopold as a high school student. From there, the path of essays winds its way like a river through his life, with many stops along the way. The reader can see how Mr. Leopold's outlook matured and changed over time; from such things as a letter to a newspaper editor, to my favorite: an introductory lecture from the first college course he taught. What I would give to go back in time and be a student in that classroom!

Aldo Leopold may be gone, but his body of work remains. His written work has proven to be prophetic. We still face many of the same conservation problems that we faced in the early 1900s; some of these problems have worsened. As a society, we have to realize that we cannot go on repeating our past mistakes. There are solutions to these problems. And the words of Aldo Leopold hold some of the answers.

"Sand County Almanac" presents Leopold's thoughts and impressions concerning nature and conservation. This book shows Leopold in a far wider context. Leopold held many jobs and had many hobbies in his full life: forest ranger, administrator, hunter, game manager, laboratory director, wilderness traveler, professor. Every time he encountered a new situation he thought about it deeply and creatively, and recorded his thoughts in vivid, non-technical essays, many of which are collected in this book.

I was particulaly impressed by Leopold's thoughtfullness -- that he reached his conclusions not by following the majority nor by catering to the powerful nor by jerking his knee, but by deep and clear thinking. Reading these essays renders vivid the fact that current public discourse is dominated by power play and snide insults rather than by civil, reasoned debate.

Readers of this book are drawn to a poetically rich narrative of a young boy's personal friendships and emotional maturation. Surreptitiously, a valuable history lesson is being absorbed about a culturally profound period in Wisconsin's past. River's Must Run brilliantly straddles the divide between a documentary and prose.

Dana Gretz, English Instructor Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College

A positively delightful story and one with considerable `food for thought.' While the principal confrontations are between loggers and dam builders, Dr. Kending gives us valid insight into the co-mingling of other groups--a bright young boy faces, and eventually joins, the adult world; non-Catholics share common problems and experiences with their Catholic neighbors, white families glimpse the culture of Ojibwa people and vice versa; townspeople meet their country dwelling friends; unlettered and formal school educated learn mutual respect; first generation immigrants assimilate into the new world--to name some examples. People of various ages and backgrounds will find things in Rivers Must Run to relate to. If you had the opportunity to roam the woods someplace in your own youth you can thrill to Ahmeek's summer experiences and even city youngsters will delight in this young boy's adventures complete with having real American Indian playmates. If you're old enough to remember back `before electricity' or `before motorcars' or when vast regions were not served by railroads you can relate to this tale which covers the advent of such life-changing technologies. There's even something for the scientist in each of us with veiled but authentic references to such things as sound Doppler, the difference between the speed of light and that of sound and the three-phase nature of alternating current power. To quote myself, "a positively delightful story which leads me to plead, "C'mon Paul Kending, when are we going to get another like Rivers Must Run?"

First off this book is an absolutely great documentation of this buildings, it has over 100 full color prints that fill entire pages. Every detail, plan, and section is also included. I bought this book for a project that I am doing for this semester and wow am I glad I did.

So if you are a student that needs plans/sections/elevations/details this is the only book that I have found that has good solid representations of each. Otherwise if you are a fan of the buildings or love the work of Calatrava this would be an excellent addition to a collection.

Absolutely beautiful book.

This cocktail table quality book is a must for anyone who has visted the Milwaukee Art Museum. It presents a stunning array of dramatic photographs of the Calatrava addition. It is a must for anyone interested in architecture and the Amazon price makes it a reasonble investment. A perfect Christmas gift!

If Shackelton made it across the antartic as planned he probably would not be as well-known as he is today. The feat he and his crew managed to pull is simply astounding. One of the most inspiring adventure stories of all time in my opinion.
Amru Albeiruti

The collective effort of Jonathon Shackleton (Antarctic special and a cousin of the famed explorer) and biographer John Mackenna, Shackleton: An Irishman In Antarctica is an informed and informative portrayal of Ernest Shackleton's historic, dramatic, highly dangerous South Pole expedition. Even though the voyage's ultimately failed to achieve it's stated goal, and Shackleton's crew were stranded on ice floes, all hands worked together to survive for a year before the perilous return to civilization could be made. Not a single man died in Shackleton's expedition, a credit to Shackleton's leadership and determination. His is a profound, inspirational, and keenly engaging story which is very highly recommended reading.

Sharing the Dance is in part a historical perspective on the origins and development of Contact Improvisation, but also an excellent cultural approach to a dance often misunderstood by the outsider. To the uninitiated contact can often seem insular, clumsy, reeking of the 'group grope' theatrical tradition of Schechner, and - for lack of a better term - just plain weird. Contact arouses the curiousity of many, but alienates a great percentage of the curious because of this.

I used to think that 'doing' was the only way to understand contact; while it may be the best, it certainly isn't the only. Moreover, for aforementioned reasons, those that feel alienated by contact will certainly prefer another approach.

Sharing the Dance is filled with a lyric tone that lends to the imagery of the form it seeks to describe. Aside from being a necessity to any CI practitioner, it is also an excellent introduction to a form otherwise misunderstood. Moreover, it provides insights into perspectives of human interaction through touch that shape our everyday actions. Countless photographs throughout the book offer excellent support to the content. I reccommend it highly.

This book brings insight to a dance form that remarkably integrates all aspects of awareness: the physical, the emotional, the social, the intellectural, the political. If we view contact improv as a form of expression, as a language then we can 'hear' the conversations between all dancers, unedited, authentic and sometimes disturbing. The book aptly shows that the dance is a reflection of ourselves and our society.

This book is a wonderful reference for any reader who wants to learn about Batavia (now, Jakarta) of Netherland Indies. The book explores the social life of the people who build the city. A must for scholars too.

The title of the book perfectly describes author's purpose: study the Dutch and Eurasian society in Indonesia. We live through the rough conditions of the early colonists under the stingy United East Indian Company (VOC), the lack of contacts between Dutch and Indonesian society, most of the relations being between non-Dutch mercenaries and local Indonesian people, the influence of Enlightenment on Batavia, the change with the bankrupcy of the VOC in 1800 and the British occupation. And then Dutch direct administration until 1942 which many Dutch and Eurasian remember as Tempo Doeloe, a magic era with European children being raised in a totally javanese world of music, gamelan, puppet theater, contacts with the refined Indonesian courts at their adulthood, a society obsessed by Dutch speaking as symbol of class and fear of indentity loss but mostly using Indonesian because the refined and ancient local society. This was not so dreamlike for the Indonesian (Dutch were nicknamed the Butchers of Asia). Anyway an excellent book on one of the longest Western presence in Asia that ended abruptly with the Japanese invasion in 1942 and Dutch final departure in 1949.

50

Russian is a language hard enough to learn. What really ... is if you find yourself in Russia, trying to converse with a Russian with the sterilized and watered-down Russian language you've been taught in the classroom. You'll find yourself tripping up your mental translation with every obscenity the speaker utters during a "normal" conversation in a bar after a couple drinks.
This is the kind of dictionary every serious Russian language student needs to have. It gets WAY down and WAY dirty, but it will save you from those conversational snags.
I mean, you don't have to USE these words. Just KNOW them so when they come about in conversation, you don't dwell on them and miss the point.
And how did these words come about? The authors go at length to describe how these words manifested themselves, with an interesting insight into Stalin's camps of the 20s, 30s and 40s.
The book is so graphic, my Russian teacher at the University of Central Florida had it banned from our library (all because I asked her if she knew what a "zalupa" was in class). It took me forever and a day to find Wisconsin Press and order my own copy. Now you guys can get it here. Oh, by the way, it's the same price now as it was back in 1992.

The first book that laid out the reasons behind the inconsistencies in spelling so that I could remember how to spell formerly tricky words. The exercises and self-checking quizzes at the end of each short chapter were fun and rewarding. The index of commonly misspelled words continues to be useful. I recommend it for anyone who never really learned how to spell well in school.

The first book that laid out the reasons behind the inconsistencies in spelling so that I could remember how to spell formerly tricky words. The exercises and self-checking quizzes at the end of each short chapter were fun and rewarding. The index of commonly misspelled words continues to be useful. I recommend it for anyone who never really learned how to spell well in schoo.