Berg Books

I bought this book because I was interested in finding information about a former pastor of mine, Paul Berg, who died a few years ago. He is the brother of Stanley Berg. This book filled in some gaps for me.

This account is for anyone who is interested in the family of Stanley Berg, the history of Glad Tidings Tabernacle or Teen Challenge in NYC.

I found it enlightening because I was somewhat familiar with the people mentioned. Stanley Berg's experiences in WWII as a chaplain were very inspiring. He gives some background from his perspective of the D-day initiative and his role in helping the troops.

It got a little tedious in places because of the mention of dates and places and events that not too many would be interested in. The book is only 128 pages.

The author died two weeks after I read his book, October 27, 2007, at the age of 91 in Springfield, MO.

My daughter, now 2 years old, has enjoyed this book for the last year. It is a very quick read, and I like the patriotic references and pride for our country that it demonstrates. The illustrations are charming, and the text contains numerous "catch phrases" that she will hear over and over as she learns our national songs. I'm giving it 4 stars instead of five because I think the brevity of the book makes it worth less than its retail price.

very easy to read, comprehensive, with a great clinical approach of images, not only interesting pictures with good details, also clinical explanation.

The premise of The Clothed Body is a simple one: fashion is a form of popular culture. This is nothing new. The presence of fashion magazines, fashion shows, and fashion museums tell us that something is happening here that goes beyond protecting our bodies from the elements.

From this obvious thesis, Paztrizia Calefato leads us into less mundane observations. She explores the meanings of tattoos, watches, sunglasses, Barbie, makeup, and trends in clerical dress, among other things. She uses movies, literature, and philosophy to examine the significance of clothing (or lack of clothing) and accessories. Sometimes it all gets very deep as she ponders the semiotics of clothing, especially when she turns to philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard to make sense of it all. As someone who is mostly superficial, especially when it comes to clothing, I had no qualms about skimming these esoteric sections and skipping right to the good stuff.

This included discussions of such seemingly trivial fashion choices as whether to wear a watch or not. Calefato thinks those who go bare-wristed are somehow rejecting the modern emphasis on precise time in favor of an imagined simpler era when we told time by the sun and stars. She cautions that these people are mistaken and that we are more likely to be heading for a Blade Runner universe in which we all have embedded microchips ticking off the time units. Yikes. It made me wonder how Calefato would react to Seinfeld's neighbor Kramer, who doesn't wear a watch simply because he can guess the time accurately enough for his vague purposes.

That made me think of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer is bullied by people who want him to wear an AIDS ribbon on his lapel. After 9/11 it became de rigueur in the U.S. to wear an American flag pin on one's lapel. TV news readers wore them and even the President sported one a few days later for an important speech. Since then, he has never been seen in public without the flag pin. Will there come a time when the lapel flag can be abandoned, like the flags that flew from so many car windows for months after 9/11? Fashions change, after all.

On an even more superficial note, I was delighted to learn that what in America is called a fanny pack and in Britain a bum bag (because "fanny pack" would be rude in Britain), is called a "marsupio" in Italy.

More illustrations would have been welcome - there are none, other than the cover photo of a tattooed model. The Clothed Body contains material for many potential discussions such as the watch/no watch or flag/no flag arguments. What about dress codes? School uniforms? Veils? It seems a bit ironic that something as literally on-the-surface as clothing should be the subject of such deep thought.

Lucas writes oddly, perhaps because he's an American who has spent many years out of this country.

His bias in favor of Ted Hughes is obvious.

Nevertheless, the book is indispensable for anyone interested in Hughes, Plath, and their relationship and poetry.

Hughes did not say enough, so it's up to those who knew them to tell the story of this doomed pair.

Sadly, the poetry of neither can be separated from the poetry of the other. Hughes should have published "Birthday Letters" so much sooner. As Lucas notes, it freed him. Unfortunately, it came too late to do much good.

Starting with a discussion of the centrality of fashion in dress to human behavior, independent scholar Clair Hughes takes a look at the employment of dress in select English fiction in her book Dressed in Fiction (Berg Publishers, Oxford-New York, 2006). Clair's work is a confluence of literary criticism and critical description of scenes of dress in a group of English fictional texts written over a period of about 200 years, from early eighteenth to the late twentieth century.

As the author admits beforehand, most of her discussion in the book is of fashionable, middle or upper class clothes; the reason being that dress of the underclass varies little until the advent of the mass market. The novels chosen for the bulk of the discussion range from Daniel Defoe's Roxana to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and the author sums up the topic in a quick glance at fiction from Samuel Richardson's Pamela to Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac.

While Clair Hughes makes women's dress the core of her consideration, she does not fail to relate the ideas of gender, color of the dress, technical terms for costumes, and the excess or absence of dress references. Thus an interest in history and society is at once sated through the medium of clothing. Literary criticism shows in the author's ingenious foray of the exploration of how fiction authors' employment of dress and its accessories can illuminate the structure of that text. Ultimately, human values of the specific social world that existed at the time of the text's creation are researched.

Supplementing the book's discussion are paintings or engravings of nearly the same date as the text in view, imparting a general image of the period and its particular style of dress. This is a merit of the book that counts.

Dressed in Fiction has its shortcomings. Devoting an appreciable amount of space to history and stories of the fictional works, it fails at places to relate strongly the employment of dress with the main frame of the novel's plot. An intrinsic connection of situations taken up for explanation with the dress described does not always seem valid.

Endnotes, a bibliography, and an index at the end of the book give an academically professional touch to it.

In its entirety, Dressed in Fiction is an experimental work following the lines of Gillian Beer's 1989 book Arguing with the Past. It opens up a topic for critical discussion to be fathomed by future studies.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved to San Antonio, Texas. Every year at the end of April, San Antonio holds "Fiesta Week" and the one of the main events is the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo. The Queen, the Princess and 24 Duchesses display the most unbelievable gowns made anywhere -- the trains alone are many feet long, and are covered with beads and rhinestones, all to illustrate an aspect of the theme of that year's coronation. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

This book is a serious sociological study of this event and its history, but it also sheds light on the context of Coronation within the history of San Antonio, with some surprising aspects -- read about "El Rey Feo", and the Hispanic community's response to Coronation. It is fascinating start to finish, and could only be improved by the addition of more illustrations.

Encyclopedia of Continental Army Units: Battalions, Regiments, and Independent Corps. Fred Anderson Berg. Stackpole Books, 1972. 160 Pages.

This is an odd book which I had on loan from the local library system. When it arrived it was much thinner than I expected it to be. Also it is an alphabetical encyclopedia just as the title indicates. Essentially it lists alphabetically all brigades, regiments, and independent battalions and some independent smaller commands.

Each unit has a synopsis of when it was established, who commanded it, how it was organized, and when it was demobilized. It tends not to list the actions and battles it was part of. There is also a listing of the major brigades and their commanders by date as well as a somewhat confusing presentation of the order of battle for the Continental Army.

What this book makes abundantly clear is that the Continental Army suffered greatly in a diffusion of its strength through the abundance of all these independent units. It is no small wonder that they were able to field as many regiments at 70% authorized strength as they did.

This book also does a masterful job of introducing the reader to the staff organization of the Continental Army. While it seems to have most of the components of a modern army it becomes a bewildering mess of overlapping responsibilities and troop drain when it comes to the issue of logistics and supply. This book provides through a history and outline of the major departments some insight into this muck.

It does suffer from a lack of tables and charts to graphically illustrate the various chains and organizational schema. However it is a good reference book to pick up for the more than casual student of the war. For those with a casual or passing influence it will merely confuse.

As a required text for my Post Grad Anthropology paper I dreaded receiving this book. However I've been happily surprised with it's readability. The intended audience is somewhere between academic and your every day Joe Blo and whilst this level usually bores academics, enough references to previsouly published works (everything from Pinker to Strauss) have been included to keep them interactive.
I would highly recommend this book both as a holiday text and as an addition to study.

Escape into War is comprised of nine papers submitted by various authors dealing with the pre-World War I era and why events occurred in Imperial Germany leading to the outbreak of hostilities. These pieces deal specifically with the diplomatic issues and decisions and were compiled in order to provide a German point of view. Each author, with the exception of the last two, presents a somewhat different perspective culminating in the central theme of Imperial Germany making choices to ensure their survival in the new industrial age. Some of the authors see the diplomatic solutions pursued by Germany with the intent of survival actually led to their demise.

Each paper clearly shows the circumstances present in Imperial Germany prior to the onset of World War I. Each author supports their argument with numerous sources in a clearly arranged manner, occasionally even providing a summary section. Several of the references quoted are works by scholars included in this compilation, adding credibility to each writer's stance. Schöllgen's choice of papers based on their diversity and collaboration further improves the value of his compilation and is recommended to anyone who is interested in the political policies of Imperial Germany.