Perry Books

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Anne Perry: Brodie and teh Regrettable Incident of the French Ambassador
Margaret Maron: The Stupid Pet Trick
Susan Dunlap:A Surfeit of Deadlinesand more by Deborah Adams, Teri Holbrook, Ann Granger, Margaret Lawrence, Veronica Black, Gillian Roberts, P. M. Carlson, Joyce Christmas, Jeanne M. Dams, Leslie O'Kane, Susan Rogers Cooper, Gallagher Grayand Elizabeth Daniels Squire.

Book 19 of this Space Opera is the middle of a trilogy of adventures with an Evil Mutant Master.

A conflict begins - and ends - between Rhodan's Mutant Corps and Monterny's mind controlled Mutants. The action is quite intense, but eventually Rhodan and his Mutant Corps triumph and most of Monterny's Mutants are captured and released from his evil control - allowing them to join with Perry's Mutant Corps. But Monterny escapes with one lone mutant whose face and powers we have not seen yet.

The final part of the trilogy continues with number 21 - "The Thrall of Hypno".

I've never been this impressed by a series. I'm reminded of old cliffhangers like "Buck Rodgers" or "Flash Gordon" when reading these marvelous books. This series is still being published in Germany and is now well over 2,000 volumes. It's too bad American publishers stopped these after only about 120 books. I had to learn to speak, read, and write German in order to continue reading Perry Rhodan.

This book also contains another editorial, and another science fiction movie section. There are also extra stories - one continuing adventure, similar to a serial, and some "Shock Shorts" - continuing a series of SF short stories at the end of each book. Although these stories have nothing to do with Perry Rhodan, they are worth looking at. It's well worth reading the entire Rhodan series.

Original version published by Paul Fessler in H-Net Book Review for H-GAGCS listserv

An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book. To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book. This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.

Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience. In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story. This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English. Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.

In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children. After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland. With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm. South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg". In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places. Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.

Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years. Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home. During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck. During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode. By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.

Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi. As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond. Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided. In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen". Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.

Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships. Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically). This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.

Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today. For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published. Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years. Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.

Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers. Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way). Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story. So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.

Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991).

This is a great book for young children
because they can relate personally to the
story and get a lighthearted perspective on
sharing and personal possessions.
Well done, Mr. Hanrahan!

My Wife is Pregnant reads like a page-turning mystery, yet packs plenty of helpful guidance for the expectant Dad. You'll find yourself smiling or laughing out loud nearly every page. Mr. Herman tells it like it is, revealing even the most private details of his life affected by his wife's pregnancy. Forget about How To Manuals or Joke Books on pregnancy, this book makes the nine months easier, more predictable, and more understandable: not a bad foundation for the upcoming eighteen years. I couldn't put it down and my wife's not due for seven months.

This book is an excellent reference book in studying present American diplomatic negotiation-way with foreign coutries pursuing only American national interests and in knowing that a most amazing advanced Edo's infrastructure and highest literacy rate in the world in spite of uncivilized conditions because of the Edicts of Seclusion and that there are some Japanese who were cultivated in Western scientic and technological knowledge and could speak and read English as well as Dutch in spite of the Edicts of Seclusion. MY surprise is also great to know a visit of the Commodore Perry fleet to Japan did not occure abruptly but it was announced to EdoGovernement throug Dutch factory in Dejima, Nagasaki.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scientific study of consciousness. Neurochemicals, as well as emotion, are the two long forgotten aspects in the field that might do much to see how the puzzle could be put together. But this book has merits on content as well. It is the most comprehensive review of how brain chemistry relates to consciousness. Granted, this relation is unclear (causation, modulation, colouring, facilitation?), but what is true is that consciousness is to most the result of brain activity (and hence, neuron activity), and that neurons comunicate and are heavily modulated by a variety of chemicals.

The book gives a good introduction to the major systems that irrigate the cortex with neuromodulators and neurotransmitters, like noradrenalin, serotonin, dopamine, acetycholine, etc. It is telling even here that most nuclei involved are in or arround the reticular activating system (raphe, meyenert, caudate), a structure long impicated with consciousness (even if only as a necessary condition of activation). There is a chapter on what is to me the most plausible quantum model of consciousness (but I remain sceptic), by N. Woolf, and proposes that acetycholine regulates proteins that bind to microtubules making these apt for quantum coherence (if this sounds complicated, it is).

The first section deals witj neurochemistry of memory, attention,spleep, dreaming, etc..., issues that obviously relate to consciousness in important ways. Attention for example, is to most essential to consciousness, given that unattended stimuli seem to not become conscious, whereas attended ones invariably seem to. Sleep is obviously a good paradigm for studying consciousness, given that it is characterized by changes in the conscious state itself. If we understood everything about sleep, we would be a long way into understanding consciousness.

The second chapter deals with how chemicals affect consciousness. Here I beliieve, anaesthethics are of primary importance. There is a chapter on anaesthesia, on neuroleptics, on drugs and plants that have them, etc.. Anaesthethics seem to abolish consciousness, so finding out why would at the very least tell us the necessary conditions for consciousness to occur. The papers on this section illustrate the role some neurochemicals might have in the regulation of the conscious state, as well as how when malfunctioning these can have effects on the conscious state.
The last chapter deals with brain diseases, (altzheimers, lewey bodies, schizofrenia, mood-disorders, autism), their probably chemical substrates, and how understanding them not only could bring relief to sufferers of these disorders, but illuminate the mechanisms of consciousness.

All in all, this is a wonderful book, and everyone that reads it will not think of consciousness again without including brain neurochemistry into the picture. It is clear that consicousness will only be fully understood when we have its neural correlates, its neurochemical correlates, its functional correlates, and a way to translate all this into a phenomenal language. This book is then an attempt into puting together one quarter of the puzzle. (For another half of the puzzle, see NCC by T. Metzinger, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, by S. Dehaene,In The Theather of Consciousness by Bernard Baars. Unfortunately, the last quarter of the puzzle, qualia, lacks a good representative in the literature. try Humphreys How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem, or maybe Carrunthers, Phenomenal Consciousness.)

New Perry Mason Omnibus

Erle Stanley Gardner was a trial lawyer who turned to writing fast-paced fiction using his experiences for the "Perry Mason" stories, a trial lawyer who always wins for his clients. They use dialogue to tell the story, few words are spent on characterization or describing the backgrounds. Gardner did not put dates in his novels, but the dollar figures and backgrounds do just that. Gardner's stories usually mention some new technical or scientific development, or some fact of law. These novels can teach about things like how to avoid leaving a back trail to evade surveillance. Some of the legal issues, like habeas corpus, have become obsolete due to the decisions of the US Supreme Court. Municipal corruption or shady business dealings often occur in these stories as a warning for readers. Mason's clients are mostly from the middle-class. There is no General Sternwood ("The Big Sleep") or a streetwalker named Red ("My Gun is Quick").

* The Case of the Reluctant Model. Perry Mason goes to see a witness in a case and finds a dead body. When Perry finds Maxine she is arrested for murder, her revolver fired the fatal shots. Perry's client is called to the stand and testifies. A new witness leads to new evidence and the exoneration of Maxine.
* The Case of the Amorous Aunt. Perry's client has an older wealthy aunt who has fallen in love with a stranger. This man seems to have a fictional name. When Perry investigates they find the aunt was arrested for poisoning this stranger. Further investigation reveals many surprises and leads to the solution of this crime and the exoneration of the aunt.
* The Case of the Beautiful Beggar. A young woman returned from a vacation to find her wealthy uncle was put in a nursing home. Could a drug cause senility in uncle Horace? There is a court suit, but uncle Horace has disappeared from that institution. After a dead body turns up Daphne is accused of murdering her uncle for the inheritance. Perry's investigation reveals the truth, exonerates his client, and results in a very happy ending for Daphne.

I teach CIS at a community college and, as a result, read a lot of books. I had read the Schneider and Perry book on Electronic Commerce that came out last year and thought it was fantastic, but it was a bit over the heads of my students. This book, which is an adaptation and updated version of that Electronic Commerce book, is just what we were hoping to find for our courses. We are teaching electronic commerce in our Webmaster certificate program and in our Internet Business certificate program and this book has worked out perfectly.

The book is up-to-date, filled with excellent examples, and explains the business and technology elements of electronic commerce better than anything I have seen in any book so far for students at a beginning level. The explanations of complex topics like digital signatures and legal issues are exceptionally clear and understandable.

My students love the online companion Web site that includes links to every single site mentioned in the book (the site is located at http://www.course.com/downloads/newperspectives/ec/).

The book also includes great step-by-step instructions for creating your own e-commerce site at Yahoo Stores and at BigStep. Some of my students have used these chapters to create their own businesses on the Web already (and the semester isn't even over)!

All in all, this is an amazing book. I haven't seen anything that comes even close to it (and, as I said, I read a lot of books).