Duke Books

Written with great style and humour this is one of the most intelligent books on running a small business and the art of customer service. A must read for anyone in the service industry.

Duke was the student football team dentist at The Ohio State University during the Woody Hayes era. He has taken some of Woody's core ideas of "Winning with People" and applied them to help coach committed christians in the art of witnessing. Every christian family, congregation, or individual who wishes to increase their "batting average" in the bringing of saved souls to the Lord will find this book most helpful. The book is a delightful and instructional collection of Duke's own personal quest to become the very best he could become in bring individuals to the Lord. A must evangelical read. Dr. Arthur c. Huston DDS

You will love this book whether you are a dog lover or not! It's guaranteed to make you smile! I love Shadow!!

This book is a great book for children learning their addresses or just to read. It is entertaining and drives home the need for knowing essential information in a way the children enjoy. My friend's 5 year old daughter refused to learn her address or phone number so I leant her this book. She loved it and decided to learn her address. It's a great book for kids.

I was driven to read this book by the author's appearance on Turner Classic Movies' month-long "Asian Images in Film: Race & Hollywood" (June 2008). When Mr. Feng was asked to comment on or introduce each film he selected, I felt he wanted to say more, but was tempered by the constraints of mainstream programming demographics. So I feverishly acquired this book and, I'm happy to say, it does not disappoint.

Any Asian American who has ever watched the sparse appearances of their "representation" on the American screen, and was confounded - time and again- by the misrepresentation, will find a clear and cogent analysis to their situation in Identities In Motion. I found myself often nodding in agreement throughout the book, as the author articulated the problems inherent in films about and by Asian Americans.

Feng argues that one shouldn't look to Asian American movies as historical truth or depictions of fixed identities. Instead, he inspects Homi Bhaba's term "splitting" to separate the repetition of colonial discourse from the resistance to that discourse. Viewed under these conditions, Asian American movies may be read as one would read literary criticism, as opposed to literature. For example, he mentions that certain "historical" Asian American movies reveal more about the politics involving Asian Americans (at the time the movie was made), than "the historical periods they purport to represent." It's a tough task to break free of that discourse; some Asian American movies fare better than others in resistance, thereby escaping the trap.

A range of movies from what may be perceived as biographical videos (aka Don Bonus, China: Land of My Father, Made In China, The Way to My Father's Village, From Hollywood to Hanoi) to feature films about immigrant lives (Thousand Pieces of Gold, Picture Bride), the Japanese Internment (History and Memory, A Family Gathering), commercial films (Wedding Banquet, Joy Luck Club), and the well-crafted, successfully metadiscursive films (Chan is Missing, Surname Vien Given Name Nam) are interrogated.

The book is written in an academic tone, with wording that sometimes seems densely packed. Don't let it intimidate you; Identities In Motion is a rewarding read. Even if one manages to absorb a small percentage of Peter Feng's observations (many of which also come in easy-to-digest sentences), his or her perception of the Asian American landscape (and an awareness of why and how you arrived at the identity of "other" if you are an Asian American) will be vastly altered. When the author quotes Charlie Chan "perfect crime like perfect doughnut - always has a hole," we can apply it to the mission of this book.

If cinematic representation is seen as that crime, then Identities In Motion shows you how to find the hole.

In addition to a crisp survey of photography in Latin America from the earliest days in the 1840s to the 20th century, the author shows how the photographic images may be used as social documents for historical research. This path-breaking approach values the visual images for what they reveal about society and people's lives. Of great value to researchers and readers who wish to know about how photographs--even if not taken by famous photographers--tell us about vanished times. A must read for students of historical methodology and visual sociology.

Riley is profound and hilarious in these essays, turning her most lucid philosophy of language into vignettes from ordinary life and thus quite brilliantly establishing a philosophy of language for emotional vexations that emerge from and against impinging social and linguistic conventions. Her work on the passions follows from her quite fine work, Words of Selves, showing how our most intimate and wordless encounters are orchestrated by the workings of language. These are breathtaking essays in their frankness, incisiveness, and relentless affirmative questioning. She scours the bottom of the linguistic pan and comes up with curious and unexpected gold. The daily vexations portrayed by her insistent vignettes are narrated with philosophical acumen and everyday folly. And then there is is rare pleasure of Riley's sidesplitting humour working in such close tandem with her characteristic lucidity and politically trenchant analyses. Bravo!

It's rare and wonderful to be able to read an author's own translation of his work into English. This was especially wonderful to read as part of a second-year Spanish class, as I began to learn enough grammar and style to understand the nuances of the original Spanish, and how Dorfman managed to capture them in English. Even for a non-bilingual reader, however, these poems are beautiful and well worth reading.

In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia Edited by Professor Neil Whitehead (U of Wisconsin) and Assoc. Professor Robin Wright (Brazil), 2004.

The Greek god Asclepius could appear as a serpent and is often ichnographically depicted as a serpent (or with a serpent). The serpent-entwined staffs are the symbol of Asclepius. And he is also the Greek god of medicine, and his association with medicine is his association with the serpent. He can be the administer of medicine (venom) or can be the medicine himself. The staff of Asclepius has but one snake, but the myth involves two snakes, one that dies and one that appears and heals the other with plants. Ophiuchus saw this, and learned how to use herbs to cure people. Snakes can be associated with good, healing, and wisdom. Asclepius is attributed all of these positive characteristics. Using a snake to heal someone from the venom of another snake mythologically demonstrates that snakes are both good and evil. And that venom (drugs/medicine) can harm as well as heal. From my own research, this has shown to be symbolized in the form of the caduceus.

Dr. Neil Whitehead and Dr. Robin Wright have edited together the most fascinating research into shamanism I've come across in years.

The research brought forth by these two professionals shows how shamanism has its dark side, just as its good or healing side. It reveals many aspects of shamanism that have often been overlooked by entheogenic researchers, and completely ignored by the neo-shamanism New Agers. My comparison above to the caduceus and Asclepius reveals this same concept of good and evil. But what is good or evil?

The act of curing in Amerindian shamanism requires two primary aspects, that of the shaman to cure, and that of the witch or sorcerer who created the illness in the first place. All illness, as it is believed in Amerindian cultures, is here shown to be caused by acts of sorcery or Dark Shamanism. Part of the role of the healer shaman is to reveal the guilty sorcerer who created the illness. This act of sorcery could have been performed through the knowledge of the plants that kill, the poisons, as well as spells or other acts. Once the sorcerer is identified, assassination is often not far behind, warranted or not. Cannibalism may or may not follow.

The book details the importance of these acts in the socio-political role of maintaining the society's status quo. Those on the fringes of society, those who don't conform to the A-typical idealism as a member of the tribe are most often the first to be accused. Sound familiar?

The book is completely unbiased in its presentation and descriptions and presents its information as mater-of-fact. Whitehead and Wright combine the research of many other anthropologists in this pan-Amazonian study, dedicating a chapter to each essay by each anthropologist; all of whom lived and studied with the tribes they write about.

While my description of the profundity of this text does the work no real justice, I will say with all sincerity that if you take the study of shamanism seriously and have not read Dr. Whitehead's research, you don't have an inkling of understanding regarding shamanism. If this is the case, you'd better put these books at the top of your must read list.

As the last paragraph on page 311 states:

"For some time it has been apparent that any cross-cultural definition of shamanism is difficult to establish, and as Vitbesky has argued, it is characterized by a "chameleon-like elusiveness". Besides confirming Vitbesky's observation, the essays in this volume also demonstrate this elusiveness to be true for cross-cultural definitions of witchcraft and sorcery. On the other hand, it does not support Parkin's suggestion that witchcraft and sorcery deserve no privileged place as analytical categories. The ethnographies here move beyond categories and focus on secret assaults as forms of symbolic, social, and political processes."

Dr. Whitehead has become a "favorite author". 5 stars!

"How could I think to marry an honest man if I do not keep my virginity until the wedding?" "You should find a lighter skin husband for the good of the children that will come. Otherwise, they would be subjects of discrimination, and they would unnecessarily suffer for your mistake..." I remember these debates as part of the everyday conversation of the teenagers when I studied in a Peruvian middle class Catholic school ten years ago. A Peruvian talk-show presented some young adult males who tried to explain that their teenager girl-friends got pregnant because they asked them for what they called "prueba del amor", that is having intercourse as a proof of the chastity of the girl. However, because of these girls seemed to be non-virgins they would not honor their promise marriage. Some elements from an old discourse of family honor based on women chastity remains these days in the mentality of many Latin American women and men. Sueann Caulfield in her recently published book In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil is concerned with the importance given for different classes to women's chastity as the basis of the family honor and the notions of an "honorable" marriage, in Brazil between post World War I period and 1940s. In those terms, the author make an effort to trace the history of women's place in society to understand the ways in which gender roles are constructed in terms of power relationships related to the state, the law, and the nationhood discourse. Focusing on the cariocas urban lower classes, Sueann Caulfield is concerned with the adoption of these debates about marriage and women's respectability into the working class values and the personal responses to this norms in the everyday life practices. Caulfield focuses on the crime of deflowering -extramarital sex with an "honest virgin" woman between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one-, analyze the relationship between "the role of sexual honor in everyday personal choices and conflicts of people...and its role in public debates over the modernization of the Brazilian nation" (Caulfield, 4). This relationship takes place in the context of a national discourse that identifies the family as the basis of the nation and the sexual honor as the basis of the family. The notion of "honest women" as a juridical subject is central in this discussion to teach the population "civilized" behavioral norms and moral values, as part of a discourse of sexual honor that is "used to reinforce hierarchical relations based not only on gender but on race and class as well" (Cauldfield, 4). For Caulfield, it bring us an example of how the elite build a discourse of national identity through the construction of gender roles imposed to the lower classes to control them, even though this class adapted the discourse to their realities, possibilities and prerogatives. Virginity, the base of the sexual honor, or to be more precise the lost of the virginity is throughout the book used by different women and families as a tool to claim their honorability, and in most cases gain a marriage proposal with a desirable partner. Nonetheless, the possibilities of the lower class to behave under the bourgeois norms of propriety for women were simply limited beginning with their necessity to go to work and the meaning of this in terms of presence in the public space. If middle and upper class daughters were not allowed to go out without the company of a chaperone, working-class women going out alone to go to work, gave them the opportunity of social interaction and courting on the street or in public plazas. Another important aspect is the possibility and necessity of marriage to be considered an "honorable woman" among the working-class population. Traditionally formal marriage was usually beyond the economic and social possibilities of the lower classes, because of the variety of legal documents necessary to perform it and the indirect economic cost that it represent. However, even when it seems a desirable aspiration for most of the women involve in this defloration trials, women and men assume that "honorable women" not necessarily have to be legally married. In my opinion, one of the most important aspects analyzed by Caulfield is the absence of race and class discourse to refute the charge of deflowering among the accused men. Nonetheless the absence of references coexisted with a very racialize discourse among "middle- and upper-class white men that saw black and especially mulatto women as sensual and easily accessible, in contrast to the chaste white women they would marry" (Caulfield, 152). A racialized discourse that probably could ever be more beautifully portrayed than in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado. In that sense, it is necessary to remark the perfect equilibrium get by Susan Caulfield using gender, class and race as tools of analysis of the sexual honor among the carioca society. Analyze these deflowering cases gives Caulfield the opportunity to show tendencies to endogamic racial marriages, and how a discourse of racial democracy made class boundaries more rigid.

Through this dedicated study Sueann Caulfield shows us how gender and class are mutually complementary to understand political and social constructions as law, state power and nationhood, illuminating the links between gender and power relationships.