Indiana Books

Intensely personal, theoretically sophisticated, and written in absolutely gorgeous prose, SAMBA explores the intersections of spirituality, human embodiment, and politics through an extended meditation on the author's coming to know Brazilian Samba.

Unlike many railroad picture books, the captions in this book contain detailed operational information. The equipment is downplayed; rather, the focus is on commodities, routings, tonnage, and schedules. Nonetheless, the photographs, mostly by the author, are a wonderful and rare look at the Penn Central's Southern Region trains.

If you like this book you may also enjoy Conrail Commodities.

Polzin's work is brilliant, but intended primarily for serious scholars who have a good knowledge of the text. His analysis of the language of the text as well as exploring the multiple possible meanings of the original Hebrew are only part of what makes this an important text.

Polzin's literary analysis is also a tremendous addition to the field. In many areas where the text has been generally thought of as contradictory, he finds plausible interpretations that create continuity and add to the meaning of the text. Further, his understanding of the redactors possible intent greatly enhances the readers understanding of the primary text.

Finally, the theological implications of his commentary deserve consideration. Polzin brings the characters of Samuel and Saul, two of the Bibles most interesting personalities, fully to life. His exploration of their flaws and failures as well as their successes makes his interpretations that much more meaningful.

While not always easy, the text is a must addition for any serious or aspiring scholar of these texts. If you are a beginner, begin with a good translation and easier linear commentary like Alter or Fox. If you want to go deeper, I urge you to purchase this important text.

I've had this particular edition of Juvenal on my shelf for at least ten years, finally picked it up, and was stunned; take away some of the Roman references, and it's as if Juvenal is writing in the next town today. The 1958 Rolfe Humphries translation is also strikingly modern, even hip. Yes Juvenal is cynical, but it's the kind of attitude that makes one think. His world 1900 years ago is so much like our own; the phrase "bread and circuses", reflecting both civilizations, is one of a number we get from Juvenal. Both the original and the superb translation are biting stuff, not for tepid constitutions. If you are a thinker, however, buy and keep this volume. It's has the value of a stiff drink.

The murder of a young child in Canton, Illinois in the 1950s led to the conviction of Lloyd Miller for the crime. The real explanation was pretty wild with the UFOs and all the probing and mutilation and all. I got pretty confused in trying to figure out how a man wearing a pig mask could eat over 190 hamburgers from some guy's taco stand "on Elm Street" in something like 3 hours. But President Eisenhower was really the star, and when his wife visited Canton and testified on behalf all alien space commanders AND underground lizard people, even though they were arch enemies, I nearly stood up and cheered. Surely Ike was a great American and continues to dance on the grave of communism.

The Scenic Route: Stories From the Heartland is an anthology of stories gathered from the twentieth anniversary of Storytelling Arts of Indiana, an organization founded to promote the art and wonder of storytelling in daily life through its annual festival, concerts, workshops, programs, and other events. A diversity of authors contribute their slice-of-life impressions written with earthy realism and flavored with dashes of wit, wisdom, irony, and enigma. "In adulthood, I learned the real Crockett was a man of mixed qualities - an ambiguous fellow. The old Disney movie showed Davy going down in glory, swinging Old Betsy at the attacking forces of Santa Ana. In reality, he was among a small group taken alive. Likely he tried to talk his way out of the predicament, but he failed. Like him, I, too, met my Alamo. Unlike him, I lived to prevaricate another day." Highly recommended.

D. Ralph Appleman, a fixture in the (excellent) vocal department of Indiana University for some three decades, published this work in 1967 in an attempt to bring the science of acoustics, physics, and physiology to bear on the challenge of teaching people how to sing. The result is this book, which is essentially the "grandaddy" of scholarly texts on singing. (This review is based on the original hardcover.)

Take care: this is not an easy read. It is a cogent, well-researched textbook on how the vocal apparatus works. After covering respiration (proper breathing technique) and phonation (how the vocal folds vibrate, and how they relate to all the surrounding muscles, bones, and cartilage), he delves into the physics of the sung tone. To make his text clear and consistent, he uses IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) throughout the book.

The real meat of the book (at least for this singer and teacher) is his discussion of the various vowels and their proper production up and down the range of singers. He spends much of the book explaining "vowel migration", which is a technique of singing that requires each vowel to be adjusted as the singer ascends from chest voice into upper-middle and then head voice. (To reduce the chance of confusion, he refers to these different registers of the human voice simply as "stable vowel", "first migration", and "second migration".) The copious details regarding how the various parts of the singer's instrument (principally the positioning of the larynx - neutral, high or low, and the shape of the mouth) include such things as the frequency of the overtone that the throat and the mouth are "tuning" to (in his vocabulary, the "formants"). This research is helpfully illustrated via radiograms (an X-ray-like technology), which show the positions of the tongue, lips, velum, etc. of a singer in real-time (not just some theoretical drawing of where things should be).

Appelman set a high standard in explaining how the voice works. This is not a book for someone who just wants to learn how to sing. His primary audience is teachers of singing, many of whom (in my experience, anyway) have no clue about what is really going on physically when people sing. If a teacher tells a student, for example, to "sing in the mask", that is all well and good if the student already grasps that abstract concept. If the singer doesn't understand what "the mask" is, or how to "place the tone" there, the teacher can give such "imagery" instructions until they're blue in the face, and the singer will not improve.

Teachers: Know What Your Students Are Doing. This book will help, if you take the time to absorb its concepts. Once you know what your students are doing with their body, their "instrument", you can use any number of techniques to adjust their production technique.

I've never read a book that touched me so much! Gibran writes in vivid figurative language and lots of imagery. He strums strings of the heart with his insight into situations and stories. Also, if you like this, you'll love Broken Wings.

`Seizing the New Day' is a wonderful book about enslaved southerners of Charleston, South Carolina freeing themselves. They are 'seizing the new day,' no gifts are discussed here. They are a somewhat surly group, quick to anger, but careful to keep long term goals in mind. They are still a surly group at the book's end, but they have made a lot of progress.

The focus is very narrow, but richly detailed. We only follow the events in Charleston. Who lived next to whom? What church did they go to? What school did they attend? Who did they marry?

This is a story of the `Civil War.' Told from the street level of Charleston between 1850 and 1870, it twists the `accepted story' presented by Hollywood. I'm used to the Civil War starting with the shelling of Fort Sumter and ending with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. This version of the `Civil War' starts with the Nat Turner rebellion and ends with the 15th amendment. Instead of the great establishment leaders like Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, this war is fought by people that won't abide with bondage. It is a war between slave owners and those they seek to dominate.

There is no talk of a Northern Army `freeing' people, the most prominent army unit mentioned is the 21st United States Colored Troops. The mayor of Charleston surrendered the city to them on February 18, 1865.

The book is organized into 7 chapters. The first two and last are narrative, the war story. Chapters 3 through 6 develop sub themes regarding how the winners of the war (remember, the Mayor surrendered to colored troops) went about establishing economic, educational and community institutions for `the New Day.'

The book is careful to bolster its case by retelling hundreds of stories pulled from contemporary sources; autobiographies, newspapers, government documents, etc. Anyone writing a civil war film script would find this book a welcome source of authentic street scenes.

Despite the bold title, the notion of `seizing liberty' is rather hidden in the multitude of individual stories recounted here. It's easy to read the book as a colorful recap of many small and disconnected efforts. I suspect this reflects the author's desire to maintain academic respectability. The story about Lee and Grant is, after all, the accepted version.

If you want to know what meaning 'means' in linguistics inquiry then this is an incredible volume. Eco's discussion of theories of meaning based on dictionaries and encyclopedias and the relationship between the two shoud be read by linguists and computer scientists alike as this debate (which is really the heart of much of the book) has direct bearing on theories of grammar and artificial intelligence (much to the detriment of most modern theories of the latter). The only real complaint I have is that the initial chapter is quite dense and definitely not understandable for the reader not versed in at least some of his concepts--I had family members who wanted to know what I study and so I gave them this volume and they could not get past the first chapter to the meat of the book, which is very well written.