Wallace Books

This simple and beautiful bedtime story begins with the mother rabbit tucking in her little one and asking "What was good about today?". With simple text and lovely collage illustrations the rabbit's day is recalled. The little rabbit's day is a study in balance with time for work, play, music, dance, painting, time with friends and time alone, etc. At the end the question "What was good about today?" repeats and is answered with "A lot of things I would say".

My kids (ages 3 and 22 months) both love this story and insist on hearing it every night. It has sturdy carboard pages that they can turn themselves (but it is not a true board book). Our 3 year old attends a Waldorf preschool and the rabbit's day reminds me of the rhythm of her preschool day so much that I am planning on buying a copy of this book for each of her classmates. This book would make a great baby gift which I think could be enjoyed from birth to age 5 or 6.

This is a very calming book for small children, a good way for them to review their day before putting it to rest, and then their bodies to rest. There is time for play, time for singing, time for saying thank you, etc. I originally bought this book for my niece, age 3, who just moved here from So. America and is learning both Spanish and English at the same time. But I made the "mistake" of reading it to my 3 yr. old granddaughter; she cried when I sent it to someone else. Guess who is buying another copy?

Riley Wallace, the long-time head basketbal coach at the University of Hawai'i, is one of college basketball's best. What's more, Wallace is one of the true class acts in sports.

This book is a reflection of all that Wallace is, what he stands for and how he coaches. It is a very valuable tool for communicating to the young ballplayer (middle school and high school players should read this over and over), as well as provides insight for the basketball fan.

Highly recommended.

Imagine an audience that is really listening. Without compromising musical sophistication, you engage listeners of every age and experience level so that they enthusiastically embrace- and even perform or create- complex musical masterworks. Their applause and excitement rivals the crowds at major athletic events. They leave the performance gratified and have a new understanding and appreciation of music; you know you have reached them successfully.

This is no fantasy. Major conservatories and performers have developed entirely new ways to connect with and captivate audiences.

David Wallace has been teaching these techniques at The Juilliard School and to orchestras and conservatories around the world. For the first time, "Reaching Out" gives you access to the ground-breaking principles that will revolutionize your approach to audience engagement and interactive performance.

ENDORSEMENTS:

"Reaching Out will make a tremendous contribution to the growth in quality of arts education programs."
-Polly Kahn, Vice President American Symphony Orchestra League

"A must-read for any musician who wants to extend his or her audience beyond the traditional concert hall."
-Rebecca Charnow, Director of Educational Outreach at the Manhattan
School of Music

"The principles of Reaching Out have revolutionized my children's concerts."
-William Prinzing Briggs; Conductor and Music Director, Central
Kentucky Youth Orchestras

"David Wallace has made a major contribution to the field of orchestra education with this book."
-Jessica Balboni, Director, Educational Initiatives,
Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

"One of those rare, lovely occasions when the right ideas, the right messenger, and the right timing all come together to make a real impact on the future of classical music."
-Eric Booth, faculty, the Juilliard School; columnist, Chamber
Music America

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Whether playing classical viola with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center or Texas-style fiddle in his band "The Doc Wallace Trio," David Wallace is at home in front of an audience. He has been reaching out to new audiences since he first toured elementary schools with his junior high school orchestra. Now a faculty member at The Juilliard School and a Senior Teaching Artist at the New York Philharmonic, Wallace also has performed for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic, the Taos Chamber Music Festival, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Young Audiences Inc., and countless new music festivals, chamber music series, hospitals, schools, churches, libraries, community centers, retirement homes, and Texas-style fiddle contests.

This book is an outstanding analysis of "reading and writing nature" in the works of four great American poets. I found the book specific and compelling. It helped clarify for me the problems of perception and cognition as they have been analyzed, written about and lived by American poets. It enhanced my own experience of and appreciation for these writers. The book also opens a door onto the larger dimensions of nature that can become locked or occluded through disuse. I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the relationship between art, nature and the imagination.

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization. The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary. Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul. He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century. Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership. The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife. He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood. Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence. In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life. Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid. Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid. Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid. Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy. They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud. Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society. These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom. The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins. There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one. For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin. Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful. In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm. In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law. Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere. She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship. A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante. Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence. Farinata predicted Dante's exile. Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God. In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides. The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch. Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members. This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile. Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile. Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud. In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc. Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices. Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire. Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted. This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile. In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism. He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church. Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation. After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads. Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind. The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer. The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy. Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant. By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves. He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

This is a great little handbook I have used for years. There is an Introduction divided into three parts: 1. Proust and the French Novel 2. Marcel Proust the man 3. The literary and social background of the novel. The rest of the work provides a good summary and critical review of the grand opus book-by-book. A conclusion: The esoteric in Proust: symbol and myth. This rather inexpensive paperback is a real gem.

This book is the second collaboration between Gelukba scholar and meditator Gen Lamrimpa and B. Alan Wallace. The first, Calming the Mind, remains the single most helpful book on meditation practice that I have read. While that book focused on stablizing meditation called Calm Abiding, this book focuses on the discursive analytic meditation on empiness known as Special Insight. Also included are two very interesting brief essays on the Nyingma tantric meditation technique Dzog Chen.

Realizing Emptiness is a very technical work and will be of particular benefit to those who have some familiarity with Madhyamaka, especially the Gelukba formulation of this philosophy. For those who do this book is an absolute treasure. Realizing Emptiness fills a conspicuous void in the western scholarly discussion of Madhyamaka -- namely, it contains a valuable discussion about how it is that conceptual thought relates to afflictive ignorance. This occupies the first forty pages or so, and the rest of the book goes through the technique and reasonings on emptiness.

Recent Theories of Narrative, By Wallace Martin, reviewed by Allan Maurer

Wallace Martin summarizes the entire spectrum of narrative theory up to 1986 in his Recent Theories of Narrrative. His survey of the field covers narrative theories as they apply to history and biography as well as literature. While he admits that some of his summaries of various narratology theories are far from thorough in the limited space such a work can give them, he does a fine job of outlining their essential points and noting how they relate to other theories. Martin covers the Russian formalists (Propp, et al), the French and American structuralists (Barthes, Scholes, Culler) and semioticians, providing extremely useful charts showing how each analyzes narrative. He connects modern narrative theory to traditional criticism, Northrup Frye's archetypal approach, and Joseph Campbell's monomyth outline, again showing how they all compare in a chart comprehensible at a glance. His chapters cover previous theories of the novel (James and others) and then proceeds to look at various specific areas of narrative theory, such as point of view, time, characters, and setting. The section on the peculiar grammatical forms we all unquestioningly accept while reading or listening to stories (an apparently universal feature of narrative is the unusual way storytellers use tense) is particularly interesting. Martin considers the reader/narrator questions of Wolfgang Iser, Frank Kermode, and others in his concluding chapters. Throughout, Martin shows not just what has been done in narrative studies up to 1986, he also points out areas needing further clarification, a particularly useful feature to academics who might wish to work in the field. As Martin suggests, the best way to test narrative theories is to attempt to apply them to a narrative and note the results. He does this himself within the book by referring constantly to Katheryn Mansfield's "Bliss," which is included in an appendix. The annotated Bibliography is absolutely first rate. Here you'll find an excellent guide to further research or reading in every field of narratology. Personally, I suspect readers would benefit from perusing Roland Barthes' seminal essay on "The Structural Analysis of Narrative," Wayne Booth's excellent book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, and Seymor Chatman's 1978 book, Story and Discoure in Fiction and Film, in conjunction with this work. Modern narrative study is taking a distinctly scientific turn, and this is the only aspect missing from Martin's otherwise wide-ranging survey. Jerome Bruner's essay collections deal with the cultural importance of narrative in creating individual and cultural meaning and lead the reader to the work of psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists in narrative study. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote an exhaustive three volume analysis of time in narrative. One time Yale Artificial Intelligence researcher Roger Schrank wrote in his book, Tell Me A Story, "We think in stories." More and more, this interdisciplinary realization is leading to more scientific approaches to narrative study.In 1997, Mark Turner published The Literary Mind, which takes narrative study to a new level and suggests we think in stories because narrative thought is wired right into our brain hardware. Martin's book is nevertheless probably the best place for any narratology neophyte to begin exploring this fascinating and important area of study.

My husband and I bought this as a gift for my grandmother. We had such a good time listening to her stories!! I know that when our infant twins are old enough to appreciate their family history, they will cherish hearing her stories, as told by her. The guidelines for questioning were informative and set up in a way that made the "question-asking" so easy. I recommend this book to every family who wants to preserve where they came from, and where they are going.