Turner Books

This book was essential in writing my master's thesis. Why? The main reasons were how well written it is, how very detailed the descriptions of relationships between Galvestonian women are, and yet, how broad an audience (not just Texan historians) to whom this work speaks.

Turner describes in detail, and yet still concisely enough to keep the reader's undivided attention, how important pre-hurricane women's organizational structures became when Galveston crumbled post-storm. With death in the thousands and most local leaders killed, local government configuration disappeared. The social and civic aid of the women's organizations in the city had the experience to deal with the direct needs of people. Turner marvelously illustrates how these organizations soon became the life-blood of the city and essential to its resurrection. This is an excellent source for novice or historian, and comes highly recommended.

Edited by professor of economics Teresa Ghilarducci and AARP Public Policy Institute senior advisor John Turner, Work Options for Older Americans is a collection of essays by learned authors concerning the repercussions of demographic shifts and social forces that result in more and more Americans having to abandon the social expectation of retiring in their sixties and continue working later in life. Individual essays include "The Transformation of the American Pension System", "The Interaction between Health, Health Insurance, and Retirement", "International Responses to an Aging Labor Force: Lessons for U.S. Policy", and much more. It should be noted that Work Options for Older Americans is primarily a reference for economic scholars, policymakers, and problem-solvers, not a "how-to" guide for seniors. Black-and-white tables, charts, and graphics illustrate this serious-minded assessment grounded in hard data and extensive research.

This book truly brings history to life, through the interviews and letters of World War II veterans. The reader is able to share in the private lives, thoughts, and feelings of the men and women who lived through the horrors of war. It brings a more in-depth meaning to the war experience, not attainable through a history textbook. Reading of these experiences should remind us that history such as this should never be forgotten, but that we should learn from the knowledge that we have gained.

This book helped me a lot. It's awesome and I'm sure that it will help a lot of other people.

By Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
University of Illinois News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new book of previously unpublished writings details daily life at one of the weirdest creative writers' colonies ever to operate in the United States - or perhaps anywhere.

In the book, readers can sample the writings of some of the renegades who enlisted in Lowney Handy's dysfunctional little colony in rural Illinois in the mid-20th century. Against all odds, some of the men went on to successful careers in writing - including Handy's first student, James Jones.

In "Writings From the Handy Colony" (Tales Press), one quickly discovers that Handy's philosophy of teaching gives a whole new meaning to the term "struggling writer." More a warden than a muse, and untrained in teaching and writing, Handy drove her disciples hard and controlled their every move. She forbade alcohol and rich food, and prescribed enemas for writer's block. Once a month she'd haul her students across the border to a Terre Haute, Ind., brothel. Above all else, Handy stripped writers of their egos before building them up again. In 1964, she wrote to colonist Jon Shirota, now a successful playwright: "The secret is to offer as little hope as possible, the writer has such an abundance that he will cheat himself, in the exuberant and self-praise of his own enthusiasm."

Two of the three editors of the new book were colony "insiders": Don Sackrider was Handy's second student and Helen Howe was her close friend. George Hendrick, the third editor, is an expert on Jones and an English professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.

As evidenced in the book, Handy's own writing was often incomprehensible, but she was a perceptive, albeit unorthodox, editor, Hendrick said. In addition, along with her tough love and bizarre copying exercises, she gave her students the confidence to believe in themselves as writers.

While the most fascinating contributions to the book may be Handy's letters to her colonists, all of the works "carry the flavor of the 1950s," Hendrick said, "and show what one writer's colony was doing." Over 20 years, the Handy Colony drew some 70 drifters, rebels and struggling writers.

Even before her intimate and professional liaison with Jones, Handy lived in a subterranean world, drawn to unfortunates and misfits of all stripes, "so it was consistent that she would take on Jones, who had gone AWOL and was very troubled at the time," Hendrick said.

Handy's father had been sheriff in Marshall, Ill., and his family lived in the jailhouse. There, Handy observed all kinds of down-and-outers. Later, she became "a perfect housewife," Hendrick said, who helped her husband climb the ranks at the oil refinery in nearby Robinson. Once her husband succeeded, she became the outcast, working with pregnant girls, troubled soldiers and then writers.

The way Handy saw it, "There is no more than a hair's breadth between the artist and the criminal," as she wrote Sackrider on March 15, 1950. But "the artist graduates out of the criminal class and looks into his heart and writes - or else he watches those around him with a cold clinical eye and writes about himself as he sees them. That is the way Jim writes. ..."

This charming book transforms boring history into an entertaining tale of a girl and her family from Boston living in Charleston, SC during the months leading up to the beginning of the Civil War by the attack on Fort Sumter. The reader senses the inhunanity of slavery through Sylvia's experiences. Your child will understand history like never before after reading this book.

Author dudley c. gould, an 80-year-old veteran of the Korean war, has produced in his YOU TREMBLE BODY and extraordinary and highly individual account of what it's like to be an agnostic in the foxholes of Korea.

gould, who spells his name in lower case after a meeting many years ago with e.e.cummings, says in fact that the one thing never in a foxhole was a chaplain!

This beautifully written book is rich in quotations and philosophical observations and tells it very much as it is in war--ugly and miserable. Gould points out that the Korean war might not have been won without the Mexican-American soldiers who played such a part in it; and at one point he must deal with the sudden death of one such, Jesus Carlos Rodriguez:

"I learned unquestionably from Sergeant Rodriguez that night this is how worship and prayers got started--terrible cries of hurt from a mountaintop--and that night Jesus got it so savagely I learned for a fact, as Lucretius the Roman philosopher noted, fear of death is the mother of all gods....No concerned valkyries lifted our tattered heroes to Valhalla; no Greek maidens bathed them and anointed them in sweet-smelling oils and carried them on their shields to Elysium fields. No, they were poor abandoned puppies dumped beside a busy highway, crumpled, black dried blood, discarded lumps of trash; vain, choked-off cries to heaven, where art thou, father of dogfaces?"

Lt. gould's big, powerful book is illustrated throughout by dramatic, sometimes shocking photographs. The horrors and braveries of war are well-documented in a sometimes stark, sometimes poetic, text:

"...the cool Caucasian God watched wholesale dying with sublime detachment, day after unhappy day, night upon fearful night, there amid the stench of disappearing buddies and saith naught; and those marked by the evil one for the next deaths, trained by rote to beseech God, screamed his sacred name in angry goddammits!...They didn't die clean, white-sheeted deaths and come to rest in flower-covered pink-satin-lined polished mahogany caskets; they went twisting into the ground where they got it, some dead before landing, and there was no hallowed viewing of their cleverly waxed replacement flesh and rouged remains in well-staged funeral parlor dramas...rather the bedlam of hell erupting as they left us, an occasional curse or choked-off plea to save his life, surprise, half-angry reaction to pain and the terrible power of the hit, a sudden final, pathetic sinking, meeting Death lying down on bare ground...."

YOU TREMBLE BODY is a beautifully written, strongly felt autobiography of a brave decorated soldier who served his country beyond the call of duty but who did so with reservations about the presence of a deity who cared about soldiers, war, and death. The day-to-day realities prevented any such rosy-eyed fantasy. And the result of his philosophical queries, religious investigations and poetic excursions will surprise, upset, and recalibrate the reader's ideas about what many people take for granted about belief and imaginary religion.

It is a very good book, that helps younger children in a very good way. I have never read this book, but I have read book 1, and that is excellent. I would like to go on to book two. I don't have any money really to buy my book, so this is why I am entering. I am 10 years old, and I live in the UK.

From the the pages of this book Jesus come alive I could feel the words flowing softly from Jesus.

Your Musical Child: Inspiring Kids For Keeps by music educator and child development expert Jessica Baron Turner is a guidebook to nurturing musical talent in children. Practical advice concerning everything from in utero exposure; to music (while science has proven nothing about the effects of music on an unborn child, it is certainly a good thing if classical music relaxes the pregnant mother); to selecting an instrument that is right for one's child; to encouraging regular practicing without overdoing it; to selecting properly qualified teachers, and so much more, make Your Musical Child very strongly recommended reading for any parent or caregiver with a musically inclined child in their charge.