Campbell Books

Grady McKinney was born in Crystal Creek, but feels the road is his home. However, an injury has sent him to the last place he wants to be: his family home. While Tara works on turning the former dude ranch into a thriving equestrian school, Grady helps her. They fall in love and her son worships him, but Grady cannot commit to staying in one place though the temptation is great and Tara still tastes the bitter herbs of her last marriage.

Though the relationship between Grady and Tara seems too soon as she recovers from the nastiness of her divorce, fans will appreciate this Texas romance between a commitment phobia rover and a scarred marital victim. The story line is typical of the Crystal Creek tales as the lead couple seems an unlikely matches yet love ties them together. Del is a delightful child, perhaps a bit too precocious, but the audience will want to hug him as he turns to Grady for fatherly attention. HOME TO TEXAS is a delightful romantic soup with several tasty ingredients making for a fine entry that mini-series fans will appreciate.

Harriet Klausner

Who this book is for---anyone who remembers flannelgraphs of Jesus, Sunday School in the church basement and potlucks with lots of macaroni salad.

Who this book is NOT for---Anyone who had no emotional response whatsoever upon reading "Who this book is for." It's also not for those who fit the bill "who this book is for" BUT who take themselves way too seriously and have no sense of humor. The genius of this group of "born again" authors is that they manage to poke fun ad infinitum at the "if you're saved and you know it" generation with complete hysterical...I mean historical accuracy while maintaining a spirit of absolute fun and not an ounce of disrespect or guile. They're not poking fun at God. Their humor is aimed at us, the people who in our sincere attempts to love God, tend to say and do things that are quite frankly fertile ground for laughter.

Again a word of caution, do NOT buy this book if you are easily offended, especially by religious matters. On the other hand, BUY THIS BOOK NOW "if you're saved and you know it" and you want to grin about it until your mouth hurts.

Lisa from California

Indologist Heinrich Zimmer provides an easy to comprehend text taking four time-out-of-mind-myths and relating them to the esoteric "grail" path! It makes an excellent study for the seeker/student who would wish to follow Wolfgang Von Eckenback's "I learned my ABC's without the use of black magic".

In this writers opinion very few scholars have been suited to blend eastern thought processess into western concepts. Zimmer adeptly crosses this void as if stepping over a puddle of water, making "The King and The Corpse" highly informative and a joy of the heart to ponder.

If you are a seeker on any esoteric path you will find yourself and your 'map' within it's cover.

Shri Rajeshwari Pujari Maharaja

The book describes the author's experiences with a project that started out by trying to reduce the risk of infection by HIV amongst three groups in a mining town in South Africa - female sex workers, male miners, and young people. There were two approaches to doing this: peer education and the "promotion of partnerships between a diverse array of community groupings of stakeholders to coordinate and support the variety of local HIV-prevention efforts in such a way that maximized their overall cumulative effectiveness". The interventions chosen were all invested with the glowing approbation of the international `AIDS project' community as prime examples of what should be done in such situations. In terms of having any impact on the epidemic or on the sexual culture of the area the project has so far been a failure. The author analyses the reasons for this failure in a number of analytical contexts.

The author is very well placed to analyse the history of the project. She herself as a social psychologist had been involved in the township in 1995 in trying to understand the reasons why there is such a high prevalence of HIV infection amongst the miners and sex workers despite their obvious knowledge of the existence of HIV and the ways in which it is transmitted. The studies themselves form part of the opening chapters, and provide very good insight into the conditions of these people's lives and the enormous social factors that influence their lives and decision-making. The following chapters describe the way the project grew as a result of a drive from some local people for work that would affect the growing numbers of people with AIDS and from a group of scientists and professionals (including the author) who had an interest in the area. One chapter provides the initial theoretical justification for the various actions that were taken, with heavy leaning on the writings of Paulo Freire on the conscientisation side, Pierre Bourdieu for social capital, and on the experiences of peer education with sex workers in Zimbabwe of David Wilson and others.

The book will be invaluable for the discussion of the importance of the social context for behaviour, and indeed will be read by many for that alone. It also details the very many ways in which the project's ideals fell by the wayside (the rates of sexually transmitted infection in miners actually rose during the period of the project, there were many difficulties with the peer education approach for young people in school, the stakeholders were far from unified in their vision or even interest) or were partially successful (there were several changes amongst the sex workers), and again these experiences will be as interesting as they are familiar to many who work with such projects.

However this book goes far beyond such a discussion. She points to the inadequacies of our current theoretical and modelling frameworks for such interventions; to the fact that the stakeholders who were involved did not see themselves as part of the epidemic or as people whose behaviour had to change; to the fact that the designers and researchers of the project had much discord and competition amongst themselves; to the great mistrust that developed between the researchers and much of the `community'. In fact, although the author tries to scotch the problem with the definition of `community' by stating that in this case the term `community' refers to the people in a geographic area, the tension behind this definition continues throughout the book as it is acknowledged that only a few of the many individuals and groups in the area were in fact being requested to change their ways - the paternalism and continued power of the `senior' stakeholders continuing throughout.

The value of the book is still more. The lessons drawn in the concluding chapter smack of a level of desperation in the author to find lessons, and this may perhaps be the only weakness of the book. In these lessons the author still struggles to keep the idea going that somehow in a better world the interventions could have had an impact if only people had carried them through according to the wishes of the project designers. The deep question the author raises in the mind of the reader is whether such approaches can ever work in relation to an epidemic (as opposed to being valuable for a few individuals or groups). This question is not actually present in the book (although there are numerous hints of the author's disquiet concerning the mismatch between the daily reality of people's lives and the wishes and interests of the project managers) but it hangs over ever sentence as did the sword over Damocles. As for Dionysius in relation to those who wield power, it is a question hanging over all those who praise mindlessly the black art of development.