Kansas Books

written to portray life as lived by Afican -Americans from the perspective of the boy/the man who searched constantly in his work for truth,for reality and to artfully paint the word pictures which he labored to make the real stuff of life.not sweet or easy.

Carlos Martinez's "Meanwhile Back in Kansas," is a must read. The poems are so engaging and well crafted it is hard to put down. This is one of those books you will continue to go back to, and each time you will see details he's slipped in that you missed in previous readings. His poetry is easy to connect to because of thematic universals, a man's struggles with age and family. His language is beautiful, an auditory delight. These poems are not just for men but for all people of every ethnicity. He most eloquently takes us back to what it means to be human in a contemporary world.

This is a remarkable book for several reasons. It constitutes in itself an impressive example of the history of ideas stemming from the twentieth century reaction against the notion of inevitable progress, which Dean Inge labelled a superstition, and others thought an ersatz religion. It provides us with an exposition and analysis of not only the ideas of four different figures of great mark but also of their histories, and thus invites us into the creative thinking of a Russian philosopher, an American - born British poet and dramatist who won the Nobel Prize, a brilliant novelist and mystic from England, and a world - famous Swiss pioneer of psychoanalysis.

What provides the unity of this well written book and its absorbing interest is that all four of these thinkers argued against the current domination of time for a way out of time which would not be social escapism. In so doing each underwent a "conversion" of sorts. Berdyaev escaped from a Marxism that would establish a classless society into the spiritual conviction that God would apocalyptically turn time into eternity. T. S. Eliot's disillusionment with The Wasteland of post - war Europe and The Hollow Men was also converted to Christianity, as an Anglo - Catholic, and came to believe in the non - discursive circle of the dance, which imaged for him the transcendence of the linear mode of time and history. Both he and Berdyaev had known the mystical moment when time was overcome. Aldous Huxley's original fascination for the natural sciences (in which his brothers were such distinguished names) led to a conviction that Eastern mysticism - of the Vedantist variety - with the aid of mescaline, could lead to a transpersonal unity with the Ground of Being. Jung, himself the son of a Protestant minister who lost his faith, came to believe that individuation of the personality was possible by appropriation of the unconscious archai or patterns, thus also conquering time. These fundamental changes are analyzed with subtle nuances, and incidentally provide the reader with an introduction to the genesis of a philosophical theologian, the development of a great poet, the efflorescence of a novelist - philosopher who expounded the wisdom of the East to the West, and a psychoanalyst who pioneered a journey into "the mind of God," if one may use St. Bonaventura's title for the pilgrimage of Jung.

The book is written with a vivid and pellucid style combining reason and imagination. My only criticism is to wonder whether the anti - temporalism of the four authors is so exclusively a twentieth century phenomenon on a large scale, as Wood suggests. In the Roman empire it was apparent in the gnosticism of an alienated elite incapable of coping with time. In the eighteenth century Romanticism glorified nature, intuition, and imagination in a Promethean rebellion, while later still in the nineteenth century the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Carlyle, and Nietzsche sought to attain transcendence of time and the self. In any case, this is only a fly in amber. This book should be of absorbing interest to those who like to think.

Horton Davies
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.

The Meridian One is a novel about the men and women who stayed behind on the Great Plains during the destructive dust storms and droughts of the mid 1930s. This is an intimate story of what Kansas farming life was like during the century's seminal years and how people continued to have fun in spite of the hardships born of the Great Depression. communities formed their own entertainment with folk music and stage presentations, charlatans in medicine shows and on the radio appealed to men's sexual weaknesses with promises of reliable cures, preachers warned that the dust storms were signs of the world's end nearing, kids entertained themselves with old fashioned games and made toys from scraps found in farm yard junk piles, and made pets of farm animals. The Meridian One is an engaging, exceptional, nostalgic novel of an American yesteryear when the times were tough but the folks still had fun.

The Meridian Two by Clayton L. Hogg is an enthusiastically recommended novel about farm families who toughed out the dust storms that ravaged Kansas in the Great Depression. From the taste of farm water (unique to each farm), to the ominous threat of impending war threatening to draw young men away from the family farm and plunge them into the lethal heat of combat, to the experiences arising from an earth-shaking faith of religious revival, The Meridian Two offers an historically accurate picture of what it was like to endure through tough times, clinging to hope for better days ahead. Also very highly recommended is Clayton Hogg's The Meridian One, the first novel in the "Meridian" saga.

Great book with diverse research and comprehensive. Easy to read and understand. Recommended for those interested in our indian past in the US.

James Shortridge employs unique research techniques and an innovative way of thinking to provide an original perspective on what and where the American Middle West is. He studies popular literature to search for the prevalence of the term "Middle West," and he utilizes survey techniques to measure how people define where it is. He finds that its image has remained fairly constant--American pastoralism--but its location has shifted from the edge of the Great Plains toward the east, and then back toward the west once again. Similarly, its image has waxed and waned in American culture, from being the paragon of the real American character and soul to being a rural backwater. This book provides tremendous insights into the meaning of the one region in America whose self identity remains uncertain.

This book is a great tool for spiritual teaching. It provides the reader with uplifting poems and a brief two page inspirational story dealing with subjects of Beginning new again, faith, Jesus, love, inner strength and basically everything that you need to face any circumstance. My favorite quote is from one of the poems entitled "If life were but a day" this is the last stanza :

" In Truth we've but today to live, the present moment's all,
tomorrow never seems to come, it always eludes our call.
We need to get the good we can from all that today can give,
so let's resolve that we today will love God ,rejoice and live!"
Page 114

This book is a classic, you've got to read it or share it with a friend, it will change your life!

You may have heard of military courts-martial, which in U.S. practice have evolved into something parallel to other U.S. courts, with independent judges and defense counsel, rules of evidence and procedure, military courts of appeal, and rooted in case law and applicable Constitutional law. The tribunals -- "military commissions" -- were different: an extraordinary and special proceeding with none of those guarantees, and, until 9/11, a freak wartime event last seen in WWII (Mr. Fisher's recent and excellent "Nazi Saboteurs on Trial" addresses one such case). Now the Bush Administration has revived the military commissions and this book is a timely (mid-2005) re-telling of the history and practice of these tribunals. I've written and researched on this topic and find Mr. Fisher's book is possibly the best single volume on the subject. His prose is clear to the layperson, he is brilliant in putting the tribunals in context, and is quick to find parallels in the detention (WWII + post-9/11) case law.

(Postscript: the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, June 29, 2006, was directly on point to military commissions and Presidential powers. The book is still very worth reading in light of possible attempts in Congress to address the issue.)

Joan Frank's first novel, Miss Kansas City (a wonderfully ironic title), is a masterpiece. I read her award-winning short story collection, Boys Keep Being Born, and loved her writing so much that I've been waiting for another book from her. Now, with this one, I am even more awed at her range. Along with the drama of love and loss and resilience (that quality - that almost infinite adaptability - which, uniquely, makes us human), she leaves us with a wealth of insight and of wisdom. She's wonderfully good at delineating what she calls the "unconscious male" (in spite of her love for those pesky trouble-makers). Yet she allows us into the inner spaces of both her male and female characters, each caught up in love (or obsession) and yearning. She opens us up to the gulf of loneliness within each isolated sex. She keeps us on our toes, surprises us. Then, reaching beyond the personal, she gives us wholly believable scenes of California's takeoff into its heady new computerized world, along with, already, intimations of its collapse. She's the true chronicler of our twentieth-century nation-state and of the human soul.