Indiana Books

I've read Gravestone and Bloodstream by this author--both are excellent mysteries. The heroine, Marty Hopkins, has to constantly work at getting the assignments she wants due to a protective sheriff. She also has struggles in her personal life to overcome--and this struggle--with a loser husband more interested in chasing dreams than in being a good husband, make the book a 5 rating. Marty must juggle raising her child, dealing with her wayward husband, solving the mystery, convincing the sheriff she is capable and surviving. The characters are real and interesting, even the mysterious professor who drops occassional clues before running of on "field trips" to study limestone formations.

The Great Indiana Touring Book: 20 Spectacular Auto Trips by native Midwesterner and Indiana travel buff Thomas Huhti is a first-rate guide to natural parks, Lincoln memorials, historical sites, art galleries, and much more that fill this proud state rich in cultural heritage. Maps, a color insert section, black-and-white photographs, explicit directions, and a wonderful narrated tour through all corners of the state comprise the superbly practical and informative showcasing twenty singularly impressive car-based excursions. If you are planning an Indiana-bound RV or automobile oriented vacation adventure, begin your planning with a careful reading of Thomas Huhti's The Great Indiana Touring Book.

This book contains an excellent selection of lyric poetry, spanning the entire classical period starting with Archilochus in 7th-century B.C. and ending with the Byzantine Paulus Silentarius in the 6th-century A.D. The topics are also well-varied, from war to women, from high virtue to the downright debaucherous.

Good for the "ADD" reader, who shuns long passages. Most selections are 2-10 lines long.

Part of the class of 1977 is holding a reunion at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Police Officer Jimmy Stewart and Private Detective Phil Knight are attending the gala when they find a dead man at the sixth green. The victim is Mortimer Sadler, who gave significant financial contributions to his alma mater. His water jar contained the deadly poison belladonna; the university asks the Hinekar Professor of Catholic Studies,Frank Knight, who also happens to be a sleuth, to investigate.

Suspicion immediately falls on Maureen O'Kelly, who was in the same class as Mort. The two argued in print and in debates back in school and in the present about females attending the hallowed halls. They even bet a hundred dollars on a golf game. Additionally it is common knowledge that Maureen has a garden back home; her daughter finds the fatal plant in her golf bag. Roger believes everything is too obvious so he sets out to prove Maureen is innocent and catch her framer.

The latest Fighting Irish mystery proves why Ralph McInerny is a highly ranked mystery author as the rivalries and hatreds of the past rekindle in the present. Frank has two roles: protect the college from being sacked by a media frenzy and identify the killer. This likable chap sets out to do both, which makes the tale believable. Mr. McInerny aces the eighth hole with this fine academic who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner

"Hale explains the importance and genius of the music and stories told by these unique community leaders in Africa."

Ted has done a wonderful job of bringing back those times from long ago....He has a great knack for details, and makes the reader reminisce about the "good old days". If only more were to write like Ted!!

I really enjoyed this book because it provided a thorough background of the formation of United States government. The saying "history repeats itself" is completely true because the problems that the Bush administration is experiencing are similar to those of the Cleveland and the Roosevelt administrations. This book really helps to put it all into perspective. It's an easy read and I would recommend it for college level political science, public administration and government intro classes.

It's a nice guide to the field of women's history and culture. Nice and precise. Very useful

John Calder, British publisher of Beckett, is ideally placed to provide his own determinedly secular reading of SB. I have my arguments about some of his stubborn persistence in removing God from Beckett to leave that Sartrian "god-shaped hole," but after all, Beckett is notoriously and delightfully difficult to pin down and resists easy categorisation about the presence or absence of the deity in his fictions and dramas and other unclassifiable prose. Calder's exegesis gains added conviction from the closeness between author and publisher for so long.

Calder raises an intriguing point: Joyce and Kafka were one-trick, if very talented, ponies next to the variety of genres assayed by SB. Calder delves into what J & K lacked (in his opinion) next to their modernist (and post-modernist, given his lifespan and continuing productions) successor: in Beckett, in his life as in his literature, we find a stoic, compassionate, and above all forgiving mentor. Like sincere religious gurus in the past, his message conveys a detachment from greed, solipsism, fanaticism in the pursuit of a cause or a creed, and care for creatures and the defenseless among us. Remember his early story, with Dante's lobster? Personally, I'd reinforce SB's own charity and thoughtfulness, expressed often without fanfare, and how he humbly practiced what he printed. Calder was moved by the author's morality, too, and he writes this study to promote an understanding of SB less for the literati than for the thinkers, and doers, who need guidance in a world in which faith cannot be thrown away to abstractions rather than channeled into action, responses to assuage real human agony now.

Calder explores philosophical, ethical, and religious sources for Beckett's early writings, and compares his own musings to those of Beckett on these matters. The resulting conversation of sorts between SB and Calder invites us to consider our own responses to human suffering, as limned in Beckett's creations and as influencing Calder himself as he became friends with SB.
While I disagree with some of Calder's readings, I fully support his aims, and stress that this is an excellent study that deserves an audience and incites a reader to return to Beckett for direction as well as out into the world to act as SB would. If this sounds like Calder makes SB a guru, so be it. For many otherwise in danger of meeting the tautological fate of many of SB's tormented characters, we can learn to read Beckett as a direction out of our own self-imprisonent towards selflessness.

I've read a shelf-load of Beckettiana, and I admit that this book, overlooked and not easily found, remains among the two or three to turn to after or during encounters with the primary texts. Not recommended as an introduction or primer (if you're starting from scratch, try Hugh Kenner's Student's Guide to SB); you must get your own bearings and learn to respond on your own terms to SB first. But, for a boost and a reminder of the challenges within--and I might add against reductive--existentialism, Calder gives us a heartfelt, eloquent, and accessible study of a man he knew well and, like many of us, loved for his inspiring humanism.

This was a wonderful find. The watercolor and pencil illustrations are beautifully drawn and executed, with especially good depictions of children and animals. Lots of details and interesting information. Kids and adults alike will truly learn from and enjoy this book. Would make a great gift for former Hoosiers now far away.