Mansfield University Books

This is a very important book. It is very well organized and shows the entire spectrum of this treasured corner of NH. From geologic history through the Paleo Indians, and up to Fort Number 4, we learn the background of this region. When it gets to Thoreau climbing and staying around the summit for a while, we are camping out with him. Later visitors show us all aspects of this important mountain and lead us through the eras that follow. The mill period with its inherent waterpower and young girls coming from the farms into these buildings is an important cultural aspect of NH's development. When the group that put this book together features the North Country's background and authentic aura in its next edition, I want my brother Tom Eastman and his expertise on the skiing history of the White Mountains included as well as they constructed and edited this book. I made sure I bought it for him as a Christmas present.

The sense and importance of "place" so present in all Howard Mansfield's work goes a step further in Where the Mountain Stands Alone. A compilation of stories, essays, historical documents, illustration and accounts by locals, this book allows the reader to embark on a journey not only through the history of Mount Monadnock, but through the hearts and souls of the people whose lives in the shadow of the mountain are as important as the mountain itself. Much like the mountain, the people are often mysterious, hard on the surface yet soft in nature, inspired and misunderstood. In this wonderful compilation the reader is invited to dive in and experience the Monadnock region as never before. From its history, through numerous failed economical enterprises, all the way to the present times, the mountain has remained the same. So are the people, towns and villages spread around its base. Unchanged, yet evolving, never giving up and always trying to swim up the stream. From quarries and stone walls, to barns, mills and farms, the region is rich in history and human perseverance, inspiring many great writers and artist, both past and present and Mr. Mansfield did an amazing job to capture it all in this exceptionally well made book.

"Renew Your wonders in this day, as by a new Pentecost." was the prayer of Pope John XXIII one year prior to the start of Vatican II. Many people believe this prayer, and the Holy Spirit's response, were the beginnings of charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church.

"On Friday, February 17, 1967, approximately twenty- five (Duquesne University) students left for retreat along with the campus chaplain, a Holy Ghost priest, the two faculty moderators, and one of their wives."

Their destination was the Ark and Dove, fifteen miles north of Pittsburgh. Photos show a large but simple three-story frame building and smaller cottage placed in a snowy setting - peaceful and serene in contrast to the life-changing power displayed inside during the weekend.

Two days later, following a remarkable outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church was set on a course that few perhaps could have imagined. For example, the author describes the reaction when she spoke to a charismatic prayer group of teenagers in New Orleans in 1991.

"My teenaged friends seemed surprised to learn that prior to 1967, spiritual gifts such as prayer in tongues, interpretation of tongues, healing and prophecy were unheard of in the average Catholic parish. Now, just twenty-five years later, there are few places that have not at least heard of this work of the Holy Spirit."

Furthermore, it is estimated that there are now well over seventy-five million Catholic charismatics.

As By A New Pentecost describes the events leading up to this remarkable retreat and then proceeds to tell, through the personal witness of twelve men and women who were there, a compelling drama of spiritual hunger, surrender, and empowerment.

This book is distinguished by the ability of the contributors to vividly recall the events of that weekend and the remarkable story they have to tell - a story in which God's power and grace are abundantly evident. And yet a story that is all too human, for not everyone who was there was transformed.

Most of the participants tell of an experience similar to that of the author.

"As we knelt [in the chapel], a number of things were happening. Some people were weeping. Later they said that they felt God's love for them so intensely, they couldn't do anything but weep. Others began to giggle and laugh for sheer joy. Some people, like myself, felt a tremendous burning going through their hands or arms like fire. Others felt a clicking in their throats or a tingling in their tongues. We didn't know anything explicitly about charismatic gifts. I suppose we could have spoken in tongues right away if we had understood how to yield to this gift."

For others the weekend served more as an affirmation.

"I was moved deeply by the experience I had when I returned to the chapel that night. But for me it wasn't a totally new experience of the Lord. Rather, it was a re-affirmation of my relationship with Jesus which began in the sixth grade. It was a quiet and deep re-dedication of my life to God, not a first time encounter as it was for some of the other students....What I saw in the others who were praying in the chapel that night was a very deep devotion and reverence for God. When people become aware of the Lord's presence, it shows in their faces. You can see they are experiencing Him. Something important was happening for everybody. I knew it was a significant event."

Yet others were affected in a completely different way.

"Someone asked me recently if I would say that the Duquesne Weekend had no impact on my spiritual life since I did not become active in the Charismatic Renewal afterwards. I would have to say that the Duquesne Weekend was a landmark for me, because up until that time I had always seen myself as being very committed to my beliefs. After the Weekend, I felt as though my faith commitment was limited, because I wasn't willing to take that further step like [the] other[s]...."

As one reads this account of the movement of the Holy Spirit, it is important to remember that the people who participated in the retreat were intelligent college students from traditional Catholic backgrounds who had no idea of what speaking in tongues was all about. And that's what makes their stories so powerful - God did a new thing, a quite unexpected thing.

In the words of another participant.

"When I got to the chapel, about 8:00 p.m., there were already many others praying. I knelt there with them thinking, 'I don't understand all of this, but whatever You have for me, Lord, I want it. I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.' After a while, we were holding hands as we knelt around the altar. Paul Gray was on one side of me. Suddenly it felt like an electric current was flowing from his hand into mine and surging through my whole body. I was crying again in sheer joy as I realized for the first time in my life the overpowering reality of God. Somehow I found myself prostrate before the altar, with only one joyful thought in my mind, 'Praise, God! Praise, God! Praise, God!' I had no sense of time or of other people around me. I was enraptured in the presence of God.

A well-written account of a modern-day Pentecost.

Concise, well written. Gives pertinent data accurately and the discussion is to the point and not verbose. The information contained can be easily utilized by a surgeon for patient education. A must for any physician, specially surgeons that practice vascular surgery.

This book is for anyone wanting to research the origins of Western musical culture in the Antipodes, with a close look at "the grandfather of Australian music" the composer and teacher Alfred Hill. Almost forgotten by his countrymen today, author John Mansfield Thompson acknowledges for the first time in this authoratitive book the importance of a fascinating life in music lived "down under" far from the more universally known and appreciated cultural mainstreams of Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Hill used enormous personal influence and creative resource to initially help found the early orchestras and choral societies in Australia and New Zealand and was a revered teacher and conductor in his own time. Receiving his musical training in Europe at a time when names like Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Grieg were around, he is in some ways the creative figure who brought the flavour of all this music and the culture surrounding it to his antipodean home. An important chapter in the musical history of "down under" for anybody interested in knowing what was going on there musically in the early part of last century.

Macchiaveli shows in this book a great deal of his capacity to use history as an instrument of analysis of the politics. I would recommend the book, although I would also recommend to have read a couple of other Macchiaveli's works in advance in order to better understand his particular -and clever- way to analyze history. The Prince would be, in my opinion, the least of his workd that should be read in advance.

Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 of tuberculosis while still a young woman, gave us many glimpses into her private psyche when her celebrated "Journal" was published. But editor Margaret Scott, in assembling "The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks" gives us a more intimate perspective by supplementing the already famous journal entries with poems, half-finished stories, and even recipes and shopping lists. The result is an addicting mix of literary divinity and the charming mundane.

These faithfully reproduced writings reveal Katherine Mansfield to have been a highly strung, creative genious with an obession about her own mortality. Equal parts tragedy and comedy, reading "The Notebooks" is the closest that any of us will ever come to knowing Mansfield herself. It's an advantage that not even her husband, J. Middleton Murray, experienced during her lifetime.

This book adds significantly to the understanding of Katherine Mansfield and her New Zealand stories. I enjoyed it very much.

The return of this book to print is a great boon to anyone interested in Machiavelli, or who has ever struggled through the Discourses wondering just what Old Nick is getting at.

Originally published more than 20 years ago, "New Modes and Orders" remains the only full length commentary on the Discourses ever published in English. As such, it is indespensible, for the Discourses is at once Machiavelli's most difficult and most important book. Those of us who until now have had to rest content with rumaging through library copies dreading the due date will gladly shell out...to have a copy on our own shelves.

"New Modes" has often been critized for its reserve bordering on circumspection. There is justice in this criticism. This book is not an easy read, and it does not "explain" the difficulties of the Discourses in a way that readers who are not willing to work will find helpful.

But despite his overall reserve, Mansfield is surprisingly candid on a few points of extreme importance. My own impression is that his method is to state baldly a handful of broad but essential points, and then elusivley wade through a host of details the understanding of which allows us to fill in the gaps between the broad points.

One example will suffice. You don't need to be well versed in military affairs to realize that practically none of Machiavelli's arguments in Book II of the Discourses makes any sense. Mansfield helps us resolve this difficulty, right at the outset of his treatment of that Book, by plainly stating that Book II is an argument not about physical warfare but about spiritual warfare. It is in fact a long, sustained metaphor in which certain topics and terms serve as stand-ins for Machiavelli's real subjects. Then, having drawn the curtain completely open, just for a second, Mansfield lets it close, and proceeds to his line-by-line discussion of Book II--but only after he has let us know what is really going on, thereby giving us the tools to understand for ourselves what will be discussed in this all-important section.

I wish also to note that Mansfield is a masterful writer, and that few books--and almost no scholarly books--can claim to be this well done. He is also a very funny man. Machiavelli is lucky to have found a commentator who not only appreciates his sublte jokes but contributes some delightful jokes of his own that are worthy of the master.

In sum: this book will frustrate you. It will make you sweat and curse and fume. But it rewards the patient.

This is one in the Cambridge University Press series of all of Austen's novels. For my comments on the series, please go to my review of "Sense and Sensibility."

Edward Mansfield argues in this book that there is a curvilinear relationship between the concentration of power and war at the level of the international system, based on data for 5-year periods between 1825 and 1964. That is, war is most likely at intermediate levels of power concentration, least likely at either high or low levels. He also argues that war is more (less) likely when there are relatively low (high) levels of international trade flows. The two variables -- power concentration and trade -- explain a high percentage of variance in the war data. Thus, Mansfield concludes that a combination of neo-realist and political economy perspectives is needed to explain war at the level of the international system.

The path to these conclusions is lengthy and difficult, given the disparate approaches to measuring war, but Mansfield does an excellent job of explaining his steps along this tortuous route. An entire chapter (Chapter 2) is devoted to describing and comparing war data collections by previous scholars. Five different definitions of war and nine data sets derived from them are discussed in this chapter. It is interesting and somewhat disheartening that the correlations between system war measures in the different data sets is low. According to the author: "Given the low correlation between these data sets, analysts should be hesitant to use them interchangeably. This is not to imply that any of [them] is "wrong" or misleading. Each is useful contingent on the objectives of the particular analysis." [p. 43]

One of the major subsidiary arguments of the book is that scholars have paid too much attention to "polarity" -- the number of poles (sometimes equated with the number of great powers) in the system. Mansfield agrees with these authors that the distribution of power is a key potential causal variable but disagrees with their contention that polarity is the best way to measure that distribution. He argues instead for using a measure of concentration which takes into account both the number of great powers and the relative distribution of power across them. This argument is made quite persuasively.

Mansfield also suggests that other scholars have erred in testing only monotonic relationships between the distribution of power and war, demonstrating that a curvilinear model explains more variance. Again, I found this demonstration convincing.

Finally, Mansfield shows that multivariate models which combine economic variables (trade levels in particular) with political ones (the concentration of power) explain a higher percentage of variance in systemic war levels than models that do not. This suggests to him that "interdisciplinary research between political scientists and economists needs to be conducted, and is likely to foster a fuller understanding of the relationships among power, trade, and war." [p. 253] Again, the argument was quite convincing.

There is only a short discussion in the book of its implications for current policy. Mansfield implies that the breakup of the Soviet empire "bodes poorly for the avoidance of war in Europe," but that "continued expansion of international trade offers an avenue for improving political relations while, at the same time, increasing global welfare." [pp. 252-3]

What is missing here, unfortunately, is a careful discussion of how far one can generalize or extrapolate from the type of systemic data used in the various data analyses. For example, Mansfield mentions briefly that there are reasons to believe that the introduction of nuclear weapons may have changed the relationship between the distribution of power and war, but does not go on to explain why he fails to take the argument seriously.

Still, Mansfield should be praised for the care and skill he demonstrates in dealing with a wide variety of theories, data sets, and statistical methods. The prose is a bit tortuous, and therefore not suited to use in introductory courses, but as an example for graduate students about to undertake their own empirical quests, it would be hard to find a better exemplar.