Park University Books

Culturegrams is a "must have" for anyone in the travel industry, avid travelers, culture buffs and amateur anthropologist and teachers. Culturegrams introduces the reader, in four pages, to the daily customs and lifestyles of 174 societies. The background, the people, custom courtesies, lifestyle, society and "for the traveler" sections are found in each four page breakdown. The two volumes set (The America's & Europe and Africa, Asia & Oceania) cover the world by and large.

High speed travel has shrunk our world and made every other culture our neighbor. Culturgrams is a needed tool for all those in the travel industry and a wonderful reference guide for all who seek to understand their neighbors better. Highly recommended.

I am very proud of our (Northeast Ohio's) own National Park, Cuyahoga Valley, and truly enjoy hiking its trails all year round. It is an experience that we in the CVNP's home region should take advantage of, and one that others who appreciate our nation's parks have enjoyed as well (a recent CVNP hike I went on this past Fall included another hiker, who, like me, tries to get to at least one National Park per year). This handbook is filled with photographs capturing the unique essence of the park, and also features brief commentaries and essays decribing the park's long and rich history. I recommend this book to those who have already grown to love CVNP as well as to those who someday will.

I have read Fort Lauderdale and Broward County, An Illustrated History by Mr. McIver and thought that was a great book. But his newest one is even better! It is a fascinating story not only about the struggle between Walter Smith and Guy Bradley, but also about the plume trade and its major players, the Audubon Society's foundations, important people in South Florida's history who had their hands in the plume trade, and just interesting stories about "the way things were" in the late 1800s early 1900s.

He interviewed several significant historical people and their descendents, mostly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he originally attempted to write this book. 25 years later, he has created a masterpiece. He has obtained an amazing amount of research information, and the reader will be very happy he spent time to read it.

This is an update book on diseases of the small intestine in children. It summarizes the most frequent problems in the small intestine and gives guidelines to diagnostic approach and treatment. Excellent photographs and well-designed graphics. An accurate book for the Pediatric Gastroenterologist.

I bought this book about a year ago. I feel this book is easy to read, well written and told the story of the history of the black and grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park. I highly commend the author for not glossing over some of the ugly past issues of bear policy. I laughed and cried at the ineptness of park managers when learning to deal with bears and the public. I did not know a lot about the past bear management in Yellowstone and found it heartbreaking to learn how the bears have been mismanaged in the park, from feeding platforms to letting visitors hand feed bears by the roadside. I was shocked to learn the numbers of bears that have been destroyed because of these issues!! I am glad that the park has gone full circle and now cherishes the natural bear and are working to do all they can to preserve bears and relocate them rather than destroy them. When you see a bear, please don't feed it.

Nothing makes more depressing reading than the history of reform movements in China, but it's hard to stop, because of the never-ending fascination of watching a paltry few men and women attempting to turn around the world's biggest and, by any political measure, worst society.

In one sense, Parks Coble's "Facing Japan" is less depressing than other histories of reform, because in the 1930s one reformist element, the liberal, urban nationalists, achieved a measure of success. At least, they were able to channel the activities of government in the direction they wanted.

In another sense, this is the most depressing of all, because their success wrecked whatever government the Chinese had and also pushed Japan into a war of conquest that China lost. Japan didn't need much pushing, and it couldn't do anything but lose, either, but looking down on the wreckage from the fine height of moral superiority and rectitude cannot been satisfying for the reformists.

The fact that public opinion, in the same sense we use the term in the West, was so potent in the '30s comes as a surprise, but Coble, professor at the University of Nebraska, makes a solid case that it was, even while emphasizing that only a tiny fraction of the population had any input. The inert masses could be pushed around but not turned around.

Approximately the same group of reformists were much less successful in their contemporary drives to bring literacy, introduce science or teach hygiene.

It appears that they were able to succeed in thwarting Chiang Kai-shek's appeasement policy because of the difficult, perhaps impossible, position he found himself in by 1930. With Japan pressing hard, Chiang felt he had to appease, since he was in no position to mount a military defense; but at the same time, his divide-and-conquer tactics among the Chinese deprived him of any base upon which to build a nation during the respite purchased by appeasement.

Thus, the regime's critics almost always won the sympathy of urban opinion, which they used to force Chiang to make a stand.

"Peanut" (as his later American chief of staff, Gen. Joe Stilwell called him) usually managed to fake the shows of gumption that his public insisted upon. As a result, Japan again and again swallowed whole provinces.

This left public opinion in a better light, morally, but left the Kuomingtang worse off, physically.

"By the end of 1935, 'public opinion' became a dynamic addition to the previous actors in the Sino-Japanese drama," writes Coble.

Even a more self-confident society would have had a hard time resisting the cynical Japanese policy. As Chinese nationalist opinion grew, the Japanese began exporting matches to the Mainland stamped (in Chinese), "Down with Japan."

Today, the right wing of the Liberal Democratic Party still teaches young Japanese that Japan's entry to the Mainland was a noble crusade, proving that Japanese cynicism was not diminished by the events of 1945.

It may have been different in the academy, but nearly all the journalistic comment about the demonstrations for freedom at Tienanmen in 1989 treated that Chinese reform movement as if it were essentially similar to movements to the barricades in the West. China's reform movement has a much different history. It is one of the virtues of "Facing Japan" to make the difference clear; so, one would predict, it would usually result in different outcomes from our experience. And so it has.

Coble's specialist study could have been esoteric, but his deft presentation makes it readable. The tendency of Chinese politics to repeat itself makes it topical.

This is the best introduction to the field of mythology that I've come across.

Ms. Lowry starts off by defining what myths are, and what they do. She discusses how they provide personal guidance, support (or challenge) the social order, how they provide us with a sense of physical order, and how they help us face life's mysteries. She differentiates myth, legend, and folktale, and outlines the "diffusion vs. archetype" argument. The following sections cover the heroic pattern, the tension between chaos and an ordered cosmos, and the mystery of death. This is not merely an anthology of snippets from around the world; she discusses in-depth the underlying motifs, and the disguises they take on as they appear in different ages and cultures. The breadth of her scholarship is impressive...she's equally comfortable with Theseus and Gilgamesh, Horus and Beowulf. More than just a dry anthology, this book challenged me, taught me a great deal, and made me want to learn more. And you can't ask for much more than that.

This is one of the most lucid, extraordinary, and wonderful books of poetry I have ever read. Cecily Parks is an amazing poet. Everyone interested in poetry should read this book! Outstanding, remarkable! From "Self-Portrait as Seismograph":

there is no sensitivity in numbers.

only in effects. In the calm, let us speak
in effects: a ball drops

dragon's mouth to frog's mouth.
a pendulum swings on its knife-edge

pivot.


Perhaps not even the best poem in this book!

A Ph.D. Fellow

This is a good Flora, if you want to do some serious botanizing in Glacier Park and the surrounding area this is a must have. I highly reccomend it to botanists, botany students, those with a very deep interest in botany and especially to native plant gardeners in Montana. I have found a few errors in the three years I have used this book, but it is the best book to have if you are in Glacier. You might supplement with Flora of the Pacific Northwest.

"Neo-Confucianism" is a term that refers to a broad range of thinkers and intellectual movements that developed in the "middle ages" in China, and then spread to Korea and Japan. Neo-Confucians sought to explicate, propogate, and defend the Confucian tradition against Buddhism and Taoism, which they saw as decadent. However, many people (including myself) think that Neo-Confucianism is itself heavily influenced by Buddhist metaphysical concepts (especially Zen Buddhist ideas). Nonetheless, Neo-Confucianism is a very interesting philosophical movement in its own right.

As this book's title indicates, the "four-seven debate" is the most famous controversy in Korean Neo-Confucianism. The topic initially seems pretty dry. The issue is how to reconcile the list of FOUR emotional reactions that the ancient Confucian Mencius identifies as the basis for human virtue (e.g., sympathy is the basis for benevolence, disdain is the basis for righteousness, etc.) with the list of SEVEN emotions that appears in texts such as the Mean. Now, before you say "Who cares?" and click on another link, let me give you an interpretation of what this is really about.

Neo-Confucians think that everything in existence is composed of LI ("principle"), an underlying metaphysical structure shared by all things, and CH'I, which is variously translated, but refers to an intrinsically unstructured "stuff." "Principle" cannot exist without CH'I to inhere in, but CH'I cannot exist without "principle" to structure it. So far so good. But in both Chinese and Korean Confucianism a question arises about how principle and CH'I are related. People in one tradition (that associated with the philosopher Chu Hsi, see Daniel Gardner's translation, Learning to Be a Sage) hold that the principle can be conceptually abstracted from its embodiment in CH'I, and that doing so makes it easier for us to be guided by principle. However, those in the other wing of Neo-Confucianism (that associated with the philosopher Wang Yang-ming, see Philip J. Ivahoe's Ethics in the Confucian Tradition) hold that it is a distortion to separate principle and CH'I even conceptually.

The importance of this debate is that the Chu Hsi wing thinks you can read the classic texts to learn the abstractions of principle, and thereby cultivate yourself ethically. The Wang Yang-ming wing insists that all right action is inherently context sensitive, so you have to rely more on your innate moral sense than classic texts.

Scholars will note that I have oversimplified a bit, but I hope I've brought out some of the reason that this book is interesting. I should also note that the translation seems very good, and that the parties to the debater wrote very clearly about this issue, so if you're willing to think carefully about philosophical issues you can follow the debate.