Wisconsin Books

This review will be pretty simple. Merelman knows what he is talking about. Though he may walk quietly and appear rather unimportant under the bill of his hat, this is a man who can be learned from. Read this book. Then, try to find other things by this scholar. Overlooked too often, don't be the next to do so.

What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provacative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world.

Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Morever, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America's most eminet literary artists.

In arguing for the prominence of this idea in the history of American culture and literature, Pastoral Cities has a twofold purpose. First it analyzes and explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Combining mythographic and formalist criticism with intellectual history, Machor explores a wide range of sources, from urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James to demonstrate how they reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the ideal as cultural mythology. "The resulting dialogue between the culture and its artists over the viability of fusing the city and the garden," the author asserts, "has woven an important and richly textured pattern in the history of American ideas." Pastoral Cities will interest scholars and students of urban history, intellectual history, English and American literature, urban sociology, and American studies.
--- from book's back cover

A few years ago I read John Womack Jr.?s ?Zapata and the Mexican Revolution? which struck me as being the ultimate book on the subject. While Vansina?s PATHS IN THE RAINFORESTS bears little similarity to the former book, it does resemble it in one way: it must change the way people look at its subject, it is an earth-shaking work in tropical African history. As an interested, but non-specialist reader, I found PATHS IN THE RAINFORESTS extremely hard going, though the writing is clear. The volume of unfamiliar names of peoples, rivers, and other geographical features is overwhelming, despite the many excellent maps provided. Vansina backs up his arguments about political evolution in rainforest Africa with an enormous array of facts, Bantu linguistic transformations, and difficult kinship terminologies. The system of using semantic innovations and transformations over centuries to ?excavate? knowledge about economic and political changes in tropical African societies is extremely impressive, but must have been incredibly hard to do. Except for serious students of history or African history, the volume will not appeal to many. However, if you are a reader of challenging books, rather than those which take the ?easy path?, then you will find this particular path through the rainforests both rewarding and eye-opening.

After first contact with African cultures in the equatorial forest zone of central Africa, Westerners tended to regard them as 1) being cut from a single cloth, 2) unchanging. Albert Schweitzer?s view of Africans as sick, poor, primitive, and never-changing permeates Western thinking beyond academia. ?Tradition? meant that they had no history, but had lived the same way for thousands of years. As no written records existed, scholars tended to write central Africans off, saying that they were people ?without history?. Vansina shows, in a most scholarly way---mustering thousands of facts, using every possible technique except DNA research (which didn?t exist when he wrote)---that these presumptions are all products of ignorance and prejudice. New crops, new technologies, political and social innovations abounded. The first two chapters explore the rainforest environment and the original Bantu tradition, several millennia old. The following three chapters show how the tradition changed in separate regions of the equatorial forest region. The changes encompass an amazing variety of political innovation. Chapter Seven deals with the arrival of the Europeans on the Atlantic coast and the challenge that their slave trading and new material goods posed to the African societies of the time. The next chapter, most grim, describes the destruction of the African societies during the colonial period---wars conducted by colonial armies exterminated over half the population, while missionaries who scorned everything African tried to erase the culture of the survivors. The region?s suffering today stems from this history. The last section of the book discusses trends and patterns in history and tradition in general. While historians have often written as if the process of political development in the world, from tribe to empire, is known and set, Vansina questions that assumption. If major kingdoms appeared in the Kongo area, but did not elsewhere, should we regard their absence as a case of abnormal or arrested development ? Or should we presume that many roads are possible ? This and many other questions abound in this seminal book. I cannot imagine the amount of work and accumulated scholarship necessary to complete it. It is surely a masterpiece.

Two important elements of social "habit memory" processes strike me in Pathways of Memory and Power. The first is the apparent ease with which the colonial power asserted its program for "social amnesia" through a physical restructuring of social space (rectilinear, functional living spatial constructions) and time (the marking of Church calendrical and daily time, basically obliterating indigenous conceptions of time). The second is the reinterpretation of public and private to suit a colonial "moral code" based on the ritual performances of excessive drinking and bloodletting. These systematic, institutionalized policies effectively dismantled the indians' social habit-memories-replacing them with new ones modeled on Castilian life.

The long-standing issue of religious syncretism is (thankfully) questioned, through an understanding of how the indigenous people create distinctions between the "more Christian" and "more Andean" aspects of their deities and religions. The quipu system of knotting preserves a physical remembering which was transformed, but not destroyed, by Christianity. As Abercrombie states, "the techniques may have remained the same, but the content, the memories, were changing" (p. 260). The "imagenes de bulto," which were introduced by colonial priests, replaced the indigenous idols with Catholic saints, and initiated a long process of revisionist iconography for the indians from one source to another. The llama, as an animal that closely (to the indians) resembled humans in their social interactions, acted as a replacement for the human sacrificial victim; this helped ease the sacrificial rituals into a more acceptable Christian realm of possibilities. The origin myth, with its "multiple, not unique" origins was contentious; although re-reading and appropriating the Christ-like image of Tunupa, and the "great flood" and "tower of Babel" stories, led to a deeper understanding by colonial powers in the religion of their subjugated workers.

The historical grounding in colonial documents led to a deeper, richer, fuller picture of present-day ethnography. I think this method serves to illuminate so many elements in everyday life that seem otherwise "meaningless" or where pre-literate peoples have not developed a "linear" sense of history, as their colonizers encouraged. The ability to recreate, from historical documents, a more complete view of indigenous concepts about space, time, self, and history, is invaluable. It strikes me as a process of reading "through" (not between) the lines of the colonial texts-into the minds of the colonizers-in a way that is instructive in both the development of colonial systems for creation of dominant ideologies, and how the indigenous people actual recreated their colonizers through an adaptation of their habit-memories into a new (world) context.

This is a very stimulating book dealing with a realm of history that I never really thought of previously. Iniatially, I picked this title up becauseof the rare information on the great whig martyr Algernon Sidney, but I was pleased to find the entire volume well worth my while. I was especially fond of the authors discussion of changing ideological cultures and the popularity or lack thereof of statist and antistatist heroes.

Phelan's scrupulous research in primary sources in Colombia and a thorough reckoning of the secondary literature make this a "must read" to understand the late colonial society in Nueva Granada. He brings to this book decades of knowledge and research on the Catholic Hispanic culture that was the ethos for European culture in Hispanic America.
This is a work that treats both local history, the history of a region that formed a nation, and a broader culture that has an enduring impact on the hemisphere's cultures and history.

In 1998, I was fortunate to take an athropology class ("Inside/Outside the Middle East") with Prof. Dominguez at the University of Iowa in which we delved into the many layers of this text.

Not only are the ideas and concepts (the perspectives and variants of comprehension) facinating, the issues that arise provide an excellent basis for hours of debate and dialog.

Anyone interested in the complexities of Israeli society or in creative and exploratory anthropological methodologies should strongly consider adding this book to their collection.

Several vignettes of various lives taken from a seemingly magical summer eve in a masterfully described Finland countryside. This ain't no ordinary prose! While reading this book, I experienced emotions usually felt while listening to my favorite music, looking at a desert sunset or drinking a fine nut-brown ale. The words jump off the page, straight into your mind and create the most vivid, colourful images imaginable. Track down a copy of this book, it's definately a masterpiece!

Geneticists James Crow (professor emeritus of genetics and zoology, University of Wisconsin - Madison) and William Dove (professor of oncology and medical genetics, University of Wisconsin - Madison) have collaborated to assemble a compendium of more than 100 essays whose contributors survey the history f modern genetics research and the rapidly evolving and expanding science in Perspectives On Genetics: Anecdotal, Historical, And Critical Commentaries, 1987-1998. Every aspect of this specialized science is covered from Dr. Crow's Seventy Years Ago in Genetics: H. S. Jennings and Inbreeding Theory; to Burke H. Judd's Genes and Chromomeres: A Puzzle in Three Dimensions. Perspectives On Genetics is a benchmark publication and an essential, core title for all academic or community library science history collections.

Mahatma, the great soul epitomizes the meaning of a man who was possibly the greatest human being the 20th century has seen. Mahatma Gandhi was a modern messiah whose life became the message to the world. The message was truth and freedom through non-violence. Non violence is the most beautiful gift mankind has received since the existing of civilized evolution.
Violence, wars, terrorism and human injustice still focus the central issues of world problems. The constructive aspects of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy can regenerate a world bordering on the chaos. Gandhi altruistic philosophy may appear to be a utopian ideal. However, if we want to find permanent solutions to life's problems, it is essential to adopt universal welfare as a central precept. Only an individual with considerable self-respect, unshakable faith in human nature and detachment can find sanity where alienation, soaring crime and unmitigated violence are ripping the society apart.
Today Mahatma Gandhi is no more a person, he has become a phenomenon. In his lifetime he fought for many causes; colonialism, racial discrimination, economic exploitation and the Indian Independence but predominantly human rights which was the pivot of his existence. His weapons were Satya (truth) and Ahimsa (non-violence).
Gandhiji's entire life was a powerful message for mankind. His every breath was dedicated to the pursuit of truth (god) in its most pristine manifestations, justice and liberty for man.
I will inco-operate (combining) both books Gandhi's Truth (Erikson) and An Autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Gandhi) in my review, because this approach seems best suited for my topic and books. In these books Erikson & Gandhi write about the sin in his childhood which become a lesson for him and he learned so much from them that in future he became a successful man. These sins played a important role in his development. These books also tell the story about the life of Gandhi, his experiences, his mistakes and also about his succession & failure in life. They are about the power of truth & peace. These books tells that if the words fail to convience an adversary perhaps purity, humility, and honesty will. These books also tells his experiances with violence, to find the origin of Gandhi's militant non-voilence . These books also tells about the books which had a great effect on Gandhi and changed his life & perception towards it. These books also tells that he also took the vows of celibacy and poverty.
Erikson central argument is that the basis in Gandhi's later life he was madly rushing about doing good, and his trying to settle down, which never lasted very long, and he (Gandhi) also felt that he was always needed by someone or something. Also Gandhi learned by his mistakes, sins and unsuccessfulness develop himself into a great leader and a great man. Erikson also emphases on Gandhi's life.
Other author is Gandhi himself, in his own autobiography, his central arguments are, his sins, mistakes, achievements, truth-force, non-voilance, poverty.