Wisconsin Books

The first English translation of history and archaeology professor emeritus Jean-Rene Jannot's "Devins, Dieux et Demons", Religion In Ancient Etruria is a masterful examination of Etruscan religion, closely scrutinizing Etruscan beliefs with regard to death, ritual, and the nature of the gods. Expertly translated by Jane K. Whitehead into a new updated edition, the text offers students, scholars, and general audiences alike an overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, funerary customs, concepts of an afterlife, and mythology. More than 100 black-and-white illustrations including photographs of Etruscan artifacts add a visual dimension this heavily researched and footnoted perspective. A"must-have", highly accessible account for any reader interested in better understanding the nuances of an ancient civilization's beliefs and the connections between those beliefs and modern theologies.

Fleda Brown's poems contain a lyric gift that lifts our spirits and encourages coontemplative examinations of self and community. This book should be in everyone's Poetry Gift Bag for 2007.

--Robert McDowell is the author of a book on poetry and spiritual practice due out later this year.

In River Life: The Natural And Cultural History Of A Northern River, naturalist and ecologist John Bates takes the reader on a fascinating and informative exploration of Wisconsin's Manitowish River. Packed with historical and environmental information, River Life carefully examines current ecological studies, draws upon fur trader journals and archaeological surveys, and is replete with Bate's own personal observations to vividly describe the "life" of this small northern Wisconsin river. River Life is enthusiastically recommended for students of natural history and river-based ecological systems, and would serve as an ideal template for similar historical and environmental accounts of other small to medium sized rivers throughout the United States.

RIVER STORIES is a heartwarming collection of an adventurous family's life on the river; their perseverance to fulfill a dream and their tremendous endurance to make it come true while experiencing the best life has to offer...the love of family, fresh woodsy air, the peaceful stillness of the forest, wildlife, sunrises and sunsets, the marvelous joys of achievement, but most of all, sharing togetherness on the river. Though poor in material goods, the family rejoices with a richness of spirit, a wealth of love shared, devotion in their faith in God and in each other and the respect they share for each other.

RIVER STORIES was a joy to read. Dramatic, yet humorous with strong characterization throughout, especially Dace, the father who taught his family survival with grace and love. As each character is introduced, one feels a kinship to them, almost as if one is sitting on the riverbank, looking in, taking part.

I highly recommend this book for children and adults alike...to share together. There should be more of this type of literature for families to share in the market today. I am looking forward to reading more Dee Chamberlain stories.

-Carole La Flamme Beighey Amelia Island, FL

This is a story of dedication and public entrepreneurship at its highest level. It's an essential book that should be read and studied by every student of America's social safety net.
Douglas Wilson

Edna Meudt's biography was completed shortly before her death. She was a personal friend and I find her work moving and eternal. Not formally educated in writing, this farm wife wrote of the world around her. And in it she tells of her life-long love for Father Dan, a priest. A must-read for anyone wanting to write poetry

Sailing solo off the coast of New England in December, Alan Feldman wonders why and answers: "...Only at sea/ does the brain become what confronts it"; the poet-sailor feels his "...bones turning to steel/so I can't be rattled"; "I come back from a sail, feel nothing's complicated, and that I'm sane/ even if the world's not."

Of course Feldman sometimes wonders what drives him to such death-defying adventures, and realizes that he knows: "The sea is bigger than I am,/and I always do something to reawaken a sense of contingency."

One of the qualities which makes A Sail to Great Island such a wise and mature book is that the poet has come to understand how the contingency of life in dangerous moments at sea is really the contingency of all of our lives, all of the time.

In many instances throughout the book, poet Feldman reacts to life from that place of awareness. He's a middle-aged man now who's seen enough joy and pain to realize there's more to life than his own ego. Aware of his own quirkiness, he has learned to live with the quirkiness of others. His adventures, on land, in ponds, at sea, have made him a sweet, helpful guy, a mensch.

For instance: One day he needs solitude and escapes to a quiet pond; he's the only one there - great. Then a woman arrives with her young kid and proceeds to leave the kid in shallow but dangerous waters while she goes off for a swim. Instead of criticizing the mother for jeopardizing her child, Feldman understands the woman's need for solitude and sacrifices his own to keep a watchful eye on the kid. With characteristic empathy and humor, he addresses the muse of this ode: "Solitude,/there's only so much of you on earth to go around,/ but I don't want anyone dying on your account."

And even when his thoughts and actions are not quite so helpful or heroic, he's open to self-examination and figures out quickly what might work better. Example: It's the first day of spring in New England and Alan's driving his son Dan to temple. Dan is in his twenties and thinking of moving to Vermont, where his girl friend lives. Alan has worried over Dan all their lives. Now he can't help suggesting therapy instead of the move to Vermont. Oooops!

But later, in temple, Alan thinks it all over and - as happens frequently throughout the book - inner-voices (from beyond!) offer wise, mellifluent answers.

.... Godliness begins in humility. That said,
how does it apply? On the ride back, do I try to find
a way to persuade him, or practice the small courtesy of silence,
and give him a chance to breathe, to think? The air says,
He'll survive, even if he moves up there.

"The air says"! Yes, but you have to have learned to hear it!

Wise, mature, soulful, beautifully written, Alan Feldman's A Sail to Great Island is a great book.

Ably translated into English by Peter Grandbois (Assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento) and provided with an informative Foreword by Antonio Skarmeta, "San Juan: Memoir Of A City" by Edgardo Rodriguez Julia is a combination travel guide and memoir of Puerto Rico's capital city. More than just a guidebook for tourists, "San Juan" presents a personalized perspective on the city's history and culture by a gifted author who has created a unique work of literary merit as he describes everything the city has to offer from cockfighting clubs and smoke-filled bars, to cabarets and street traffic. The reader is vividly introduced to a living city conflicted with its colonial past juxtaposed with aspirations for a 'commercial future'. Also available in a hardcover edition (9780299203702, $45.00), "San Juan" is rewarding and highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in this fascinating, complex, colorful, and sometimes contradictory city.

For anyone interested in the ethnology of South America, this book is essential. Although Ramos spent less time among the Yanomami than anthropologists such as Lizot and (the now discredited) Chagnon, hers is the principal work on the Brazilian Yanomami, and is a beautifully written, very philosophical book which not only discusses the culture, but includes some very insightful remarks on the nature of anthropological research. The final chapter describes her exhausting and nearly fatal trip with a medical team to help the malaria-stricken Indians during the Brazilian gold rush. Also an impressive translation by the author.

The modern theory of mechanics, due essentially to Isaac Newton, is usually presented in textbooks as a large seventeenth perturbation that was a totally new outlook on physical motion, as one that was opposed to the Aristotelian conception that dominated before Newton's time. This view is completely refuted in this book, as the author gives a detailed overview of the struggles of the medieval physicists to understand the nature of motion. Clearly their thinking on mechanics influenced greatly the work of Galileo and Descartes, and consequently that of Newton. Even though some of their ideas of the medieval scientists were based on mistaken notions, many of them had just enough truth to allow the correct formulations to be accomplished later. The author gives a fascinating discussion of how medieval mechanics, which was predominantly Aristotelian with "some traces of Archimedean character" was subjected to so many changes that it eventually was undermined, forcing a new outlook.

The author explains that it was the work of the French scientist Pierre Duhem that first took a look at the contributions of the medieval scientists. Duhem's work though, according to the author, was flawed, in that it inputed too many modern viewpoints, such as a theory of inertia, to the medieval schoolmen, especially to the Oxford professor John Buridan via his impetus theory. The author admires greatly though the work of Anneliese Maier, who greatly scrutinized the work of Duhem, and the author draws greatly on her work. The translations of the Greek works due to Islamic scholars clearly allowed the medieval scholars to engage in their thinking on Greek mechanics.

Most interestingly, the mechanics of the inclined plane was, as the author shows, solved correctly in the Middle Ages. He also shows that the concept of virtual velocities had its origins in Aristotle's Mechanics and the Mechanics of Hero, and that this concept was applied in the Middle Ages to obtain mathematical proofs of the law of levers and theorems of the inclined plane, setting the stage he says for the latter work of Bernoulli and Lagrange. The thirteenth century saw the origin of the thinking of velocity as a magnitude.

The author attributes the real advances in kinematics in medieval times to the academicians Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, and John Dumbleton of Merton College in Oxford, who developed concepts of instantaneous velocity and analyzed various concepts of acceleration. The author attributes these advances partly to philosophical discussion on the "intension and remission of forms", which led these scholars to differentiate between the "quality" of velocity from the "quantity" of velocity. These scholars proved the somewhat long-winded "Merton theorem of uniform acceleration", which gave an equality with respect to space traversed in a given time a uniformly accelerated movement and a uniform movement where the velocity is equal to the velocity at the middle instant of the time of acceleration. The author attributes a restatement of this theorem to Galileo and is fundamental to his theory of freely falling bodies. Galileo used a kind of two-dimensional geometric proof for his law of free fall that was similar to the proof of the Merton theorem by medieval scholars. Thomas Bradwardine also presented a kind of law of force that related velocity to force and resistance. This law, argues the author, related velocity to instantaneous changes, foreshadowing the use of differential equations in modern mechanics.

The impetus theory of John Buridan in the fourteenth century takes on a special status in the book, as he views it to a large extent as the origin of the modern view of inertia. Buridan's description was in terms of the quantity of matter in the projectile, similar to the Newtonian notion of momentum. Interestingly though, Buridan's thinking was abandoned, according to the author. Buridan's thinking though is definitely not Aristotelian, and was a symptom of the end of the latter.

The lesson to be learned from the book is that despite the errors of the medieval scholars, their efforts eventually brought about the correct view of physical motion. Researchers in all areas of science need to keep in mind that although their ideas may be shown to be weak and not compatible with experiment, as shown later, their research restricts what is possible, and insures the same mistakes will not be repeated. The discipline of thought required by the medieval scholars, and that of modern researchers, is certainly something that is to be admired and be grateful for.