University of Nebraska Books

Gailly writes bare-bones narrative - non-sequential with broken syntax. But do read the book before reading the introduction - the literary school and structural devices are not required to enjoy the book.

The narrator gives the story in third person - moving from the end of vacation to return of hidden letter to workers' strike to Asia road construction to civil unrest to reunion with love. The tone of the narrator varies from neutral observer to intimate knowledge of the inner thoughts of characters. At times the disjointed prose leans towards stream of consciousness; at other times, the punctuation severs relationships between elements of an otherwise normal sentence; still other times the disrupted syntax reveals pure perception without mental overlays of meaning.

Through it all, Gailly manages to create narrative tension in the reader - you want to know what happened/will happen. You want to understand more about the characters. In short, it is a very literary good read of a mystery-romance.

An example of the prose: "A name like this. Or like that. Sounded like this. She made some noises with her mouth while moving her fingers, then: I wonder, she said, what family of instruments, what coupling, or marriage, could make that sound." Or "Brought it to his lips. And. With a stiff movement of his neck. As if caught in a vice. He emptied it. Put it down. Then. A pause."

This is not a major work, but it is a nice little book, which presents some of Habermas's main ideas succinctly, and applies them to contemporary political issues. The reader is challenged to rethink the political situation. And, especially, as an American, I found the *German* political problems presented, and Habermas's approach to them, thought-provoking. The title surely resonates with Santayana's well-known dictum that those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. But the book also shows how even *remembering* is itself a part of the problem situation and not straightforwardly a solution to it.

Read some of the reviews for the book and see how it makes an important contribution to the field of musicology and text setting. Boone has more work on test interpretation and linguistics, which flesh out this book as well. Witnessing a number of graduate students internationally who are basing their work on Boone's thesis, it is clear this is a valuable work worthy of your time if you are interested in this field of musicology.

Who would want to read novels, or watch fiction on television when you can read the real life story of a famous western icon like Pawnee Bill? What a person to look up to! Western hero, defender of Indians, bison, savy businessman, millionaire, bucksins, gaunlets, Stetson hats, bison herds, courted and married a young Smith college beauty, bought a 2000 acre ranch in Oklahoma, bought out the Buffalo Bill wild west show, saved his friend Buffalo Bill from his debts! Build Old Town near Pawnee, helped the Boy Scouts of America with his generous gifts, friend to European heads of state and artists from Taos to Belgium. Highest recommendations, as a story of a western icon who outlived his peers. A tale of both triumph and sadness!

This work is the second volume in the Holme Trilogy. This is an interesting & unique body of work, because the hero in this Viking saga isn't the traditional warrior - his slave is. Holme has freed himself & his family from the homestead that kept them as slaves all their lives. Venturing to a fictionalized trade city, based on the actual town of Birka, Holme ends up becoming a master smith & a man well-respected (by some) & feared (by all). Holme is not satisfied with just his family being free, but goes on to fight for all thralls to become freemen. Another theme in the trilogy that gains more importance in this book, is the spread of Christianity into the heathen land where most people worship barbaric & crude wooden gods. As Holme gets used to being around people, his intelligence & philosophy become sharper, & as in the last novel, there's virtually no dialogue and the book will slip from a modern-day narrator to Holme or other character's own stream-of-consciousness narrating the tale. As in the first book, this is a wonderful story, loaded with beautiful & haunting imagry. The descriptions are vivid & striking. The author is a brilliant artist, making this one of the best books I've ever read.

In the cynical 1990's, a work like "A Pessimist's Handbook", a synthesis of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, would seem to be an ideal handbook for life. But this work provides as much food for thought today as it did in the 19th century. It seems to compel us to appreicate the freedoms this life has to offer, and for all of us the liberty to pursue our strengths. All else is transient and temporary. It rages against materialism and vanity, finding it a waste of our precious lives better spent in more fitting pursuits

As a teacher and researcher whose focus includes Asian education, I've always wondered about the role of sports in K-12 Asian schools, particularly those in Taiwan. With Taiwan's tremendous emphasis on academics, I wondered how it was that Little League Baseball could thrive there. In "Playing in Isolation," Junwei Yu offers readers insight not only into this question, but also into the entire history of the sport in Taiwan. Baseball came to the island with the Japanese and became very popular in Taiwan even in the first half of the 20th century, especially among the island's native population. Yu describes how baseball offered a cultural and political outlet for these people, as well as how the ruling KMT party gradually co-opted the sport for political purposes in the 1970s. Also describe in fascinating detail are the corruption scandals associated with sport. This is a terrific read for sports fans, political buffs, and sociologists.

This was the key early (1951) study of Pound's poetry and Cantos upon which all subsequent studies built. The author found so much that sheds light on Pound's poetry from reading Pound's prose, at the time lost pretty much in out of print books and gone periodicals. Now, however, Pound's prose is pretty readily available in book form from New Directions and this through Kenner's pioneer work does make Pound's poems and Cantos far more comprehensible.

Dr. Christopher S. DeRosa of Monmouth University provides an important contribution to the study of civil/military relations with this first ever published monograph on Army Troop Information and Education (I&E). While the services during the thirty years covered in his investigation always described themselves as "explainers" rather than "persuaders," DeRosa claims that the management of opinion always lay at the heart of each program. (xi) The basic problem facing the Army, however, was "how to go about indoctrinating soldiers with an exclusively tailored set of opinions when the freedom to hold and express different opinions stood so high among the propagandists' and soldiers' core political values." (14)

DeRosa begins his examination of WWII political indoctrination efforts with an examination of a Guide to the Use of Information Materials. In it the Army urged its officers to remember that the first principle of American information was truth as it outlined the themes and methods needed for wartime propaganda. "Indoctrination of Hatred" should be considered a practical training issue and not a moral one, according to the authors of the guide, in order to prepare the soldier to not just be willing but to be even "anxious to work bodily destruction upon the enemies of his country."(16) The author provides a thorough analysis of Capra's Why We Fight series that includes particularly valuable responses to the series from veterans compiled by the Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.

The richest material is found in DeRosa's anaylsis of military political indoctrination during the early Cold War. According to the author, during this period when the American public embraced a peacetime military of unprecedented size, the army expanded its information programs to not only communicate with its personnel but to also include civilians. He sees the service's attempts to influence soldier opinion during the Korean Conflict as relatively modest. But following the war, DeRosa claims that political indoctrination efforts increased dramatically as the Army reacted defensively to criticism that it had done too little to prepare its recruits for ideological warfare. The author's careful survey of the era's anti-communist materials, which often were laced with religious undertones, is truly the book's greatest strength. In no other source will students of the cold war find such a complete analysis. DeRosa's chapter on Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker's notorious "Pro-Blue" program that incorporated materials from the John Birch Society is the best treatment of the subject that I have seen. The author claims that the Army had great difficulty during the Vietnam War indoctrinating its men and women because the public, troubled that the conduct of the war did not reflect their values, rejected the "comparatively superficial anticommunist indoctrination that justified the war."(256)

Well written and with an impressive bibliography, I highly recommend Political Indoctrination in the U.S. Army: From WWII to the Vietnam War, to any student of the history of the Cold War or scholars interested in American civil/military relations. It well deserves 5 stars. Dr. Lori Bogle, United States Naval Academy

Loveman & Davies are pioneers. They establish a trail that is difficult to overlook. I know of no book in the nation that covers so much ground with such a wide array of experts. This is clearly an important book for anyone who wants to understand the Military in Latin America.