Indiana Books

In his first book, Gary Lee Smith writes a fascinating memoir of what it was like to grow up in a small Indiana town and be smitten by Hoosier basketball. His amazing memory and obviously well-reserached details of his time in Indiana reveal a nostalgic look back into what is now known as the Golden Era of Indiana basketball. He cleverly ties in the culture of the times and builds up to a vivid description of the then one-class high school basketball tournament. This book is a must read for anyone interested in what the culture was like in the 1950s, but also for those who would like to know how Hoosier Hysteria got its grip on the state. Dr. Norman Jones - author of Growing Up in Indiana: The Culture & Hoosier Hysteria Revisited

James R. Peva and his family have been a regular fixture at each and every June festival since the event's inception in the 1960's. The Peva family knew Bill Monroe, and many of the artists that performed at the park, personally.
Filled with excellent photographs and fascinating recollections related by the author, this is a valuable resource for fans of the music. Told in an accessible style that is conversational, this is a fun read. It felt much more like sharing a chat over the campfire with Col. Peva (while the bluegrass pickers played Mr. Monroe's music in the background!) than sitting at a history lecture, though the content was no less credible.
This book is a treasure!

This compilation of essays is accessible for the non-scholar and covers a wide range of topics related to beauty and aesthetics. It touches on both traditional aesthetics and more inclusive aesthetic systems, and the various authors draw on everything from biology to popular culture. The approaches encourage us to think about our visual environment and the arts in new ways and remind us of how important, in today's world, are a fluency with the languages of beauty and imagery.

As an amateur pianist, Professor Drake's book is proving to be a useful adjunct to my understanding, enjoyment and performance of Beethoven's monumental compositions.
James L. Franklin, M.D.

This book opens a wondow to the world of Berber culture. It is written with love and care about local people. Like those who this book is about are family members of the Author. And you know, what if family for North African - is may be most important in the life.

I loved cooking all the food and the ones i could not cook i sat for hours and stared at the pictures wishing i could.m Very Good job.Know i havemto go and eat dinner and make one of the many recipes i love. To eat all day they are tasty and youm yum yum. Mushi Mushi Ano Nay

Between the Hammer and the Anvil? Chinese and Russian Policies in Outer Mongolia, 1911-1921 by Thomas E.Ewing

Few Americans have seen Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi's films and Kevin Dwyer is an anthropologist. But you needn't be a specialist to find this book fascinating. As Tazi's career is described, readers will also learn a great deal about film making, Morocco's colonial hangover, and the effects of globalization on Third World culture.

Dwyer is well qualified to write about Morocco and its arts. He has spent much of his professional life there and in other North African countries and is now Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. As demonstrated in this and previous books, he is also well qualified to conduct the interviews on which much of Beyond Casablanca is based. Thoughtful questions and comments put his subjects at ease. There is organization and direction, but we feel we are privy to the conversations of friends -- without the grinding of personal or academic axes.

Foreign film producers often take advantage of Morocco's exotic settings and lower production costs, and so Tazi has worked with Scorsese, Coppola, Huston and others. His credits include "The Last Temptation of Christ", "The Black Stallion Returns" and "The Man Who Would Be King". On the latter, a John Huston film, Tazi assisted with casting, recommended shooting locations and managed portions of the production effort. As he describes his early practical experience we begin to appreciate the logistics of creating a film. Whether in Morocco or Hollywood the basic requirements are the same. Casting, scene location, lighting, shooting sequences, props, continuity, sound mix, camera angles and perspective are some of the elements discussed here.

It's intriguing to hear a director talk about technique. Tazi tells us he tends to shoot from a distance rather than close in. He believes close-ups ruin "objectivity" and intrude on more appropriately private space. It's even more intriguing to learn that early in his career, lacking guide tracks and Steadicams, the director shot from the trunk of a moving car or from a wheelbarrow pushed by an assistant. I won't take the cameraman for granted the next time I watch Indiana Jones tearing away from a mortal threat.

Dwyer knows that the technical problems of a Third World film maker are a good stand-in for the more general challenges faced by ex-colonies. That wheelbarrow is a not so subtle reminder of what they face as they adjust to independence. Dwyer traces Tazi's evolution from wheelbarrow to digital editing, a difficult trip that remains incomplete. The parallel journey from colony to viable independent state is unimaginably more challenging and happy endings are far from given. Physical infrastructure, the economy, and governmental and educational systems must be rethought and made more effective. Pessimism and frustration have many thousands of Moroccans taking to small boats to cross the Mediterranean on dangerous voyages to Spain as illegal immigrants, a problem Tazi highlights in two of his more serious films.

The film maker's career also demonstrates that globalization can add to the woes of a country such as Morocco. It makes digital technology more readily available so it's easier and less expensive for Tazi to create the movie he wants, but at the same time he must now compete with U.S. media giants. Because of the limited number of screens in Morocco and the lack of foreign interest, Moroccan films invariably lose money. That means funding is scarce and only 10 or so films are made each year in spite of strong domestic interest. American films, profitable because of enormously wider distribution, fill much of the vacuum. Over 95% of the movies shown in Morocco are by foreign producers. Analogous problems plague many Third World industries. Proponents, including me, believe globalization will be for the best longer term, but there is increasing recognition that governments must intervene to temper market forces as long as there are huge imbalances in relative strength.

Fighting through the paucity of funding, weak technical support and strong foreign competition, Tazi has produced and directed five feature films. Beyond Casablanca describes the plot and circumstances of production of each in some detail. One of the clearest messages is that he makes movies that tell stories about, as he says, "... what haunts me". That's one of the reasons he is a frequent winner at various international festivals.

I think some American films are terrific and many more are entertaining, but few American directors make films because they have stories to tell about what haunts them. Even the most successful, and therefore independent, check marketing studies before they get very far into a new project. It's a business with big stakes. Film company managements have input and writers tend to come in teams designed to ensure something for everyone. M. A. Tazi on the other hand knows even his most popular films won't breakeven. He makes them because he has to. That's a pretty good definition of being an artist and Beyond Casablanca is well worth reading for its insight into an artist's mind and for the light it sheds on some of today's most difficult and controversial international social and economic issues.

Well, I am not an academic, and certainly not a biblical studies scholar, but I really enjoyed reading this book.

For anyone with more than a passing interest in the forms of language (narrative, story-telling, and so on) found in the Tanach, this is a remarkably accessable treatment, putting these long-studied texts in context with other forms from antiquity. In the later chapters, there was much that I could not fully appreciate with my amature background, but that didn't detract from the overall trajectory of the work, or my enjoyment of it.

It is difficult to determine where to begin addressing a review as contradictory and pointless as the one offered by Kirkus of Suarez's exciting new focus on kitsch, camp, and fetishism in the Gay Underground Cinema of the the 60's.

To begin with, Kirkus misses or entirely avoids recognizing that this "slightly new conception" of the history of this cinema is an immanently Queer one, fixing as it does on those aesthetic elements which even most theorists of the avant-garde would have preferred not to let out of the closet. The Kirkus review fails to acknowledge how and why Saurez's reassessment of this tradition bears upon the object of this inquiry-- why Peter Burger's notion of the avant-garde as a rejection of decadent aestheticism is particularly problematic for the queer underground-- why Clement Greenberg's derogation of kitsch cannot possibly account for this cinema-- how Theodor Adorno's strictly negative dialectic fails to record the more positive relations established between the avant-garde and mass culture.

Though Kirkus seems to regard the first fifty pages of Suarez's book as pointless, I see them as absolutely essential. Without the context of these earlier notions of the avant-garde, Suarez's formulations would seem to have come out of thin air-- devoid of any relation to those earlier discourses formed and informed by particular socia land ideological circumstances. Instead, Suarez not only offers a new account, but also reveals how and why a number of elements particularly important to the study of Smith, Anger, and Warhol have been systematically overlooked in the theory which precedes him. Ideas never come out of thin air; it is difficult to understand how the detailed framing of a discursive context could be a waste of time.

This rebuttal itself would be meaningless if the Kirkus review hadn't preceded it.