In this analysis of the Old Testament's Joseph and his eleven brothers, one of my favorite authors from childhood (A Wrinkle In Time) has pursued a line of questions worthy of a family therapist. L'Engle essentially explores the patriarchal legacy of Jacob and his sons on a level that blurs the line between spiritual and psychosocial development. She expresses faith that God knows where He is headed with Joseph, yet allows plenty of room for us to enjoy how much these biblical characters resemble our own families. Jealousy, murderous intrigue, envy, revenge, retribution, redemption, and forgiveness all are present. Sexual politics in a two-wife family (not so different from today's divorced, blended, and/or affair-tainted marriages) and the complicated half-sibling relationships that result are clearly presented. L'Engle intersperses her commentary on Joseph with autobiographical material regarding her widowhood and changing sense of family after the death of her husband. At one level, this makes for a rambling and almost chatty work; at another level, it adds intimacy and makes for a sympathetic (rather than judgemental) reponse to the foibles of Joseph's family. Like an old favorite aunt, L'Engle sometimes repeats herself, overgeneralizes, or wrongly assumes that her faith is the same as ours. Oh, but would that we all had a favorite aunt with this much compassion for the human condition to which this epic story speaks! My spiritual journey has been enriched.

discovered this last night at the university library and spent a few hours in alison's world. a lot of the poems are straightfoward. but some of them are powerful, especially when she recalls her chldhood and going to school in the bronx. she also seems infactuated with seventies culture and loves to give a shout-out to the old school.

This book was an excellent way to introduce someone to basic musical concepts. There were clear, interesting, examples, and it was easy to read. I recommend this book to anyone who is learning to read music or someone who would like a better understanding of music.

The decline of a private system of social welfare on southern cotton plantations, Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie maintain in this sprightly institutionalist history, was the prerequisite for the rise of the national welfare state in the United States.

Three conditions, they argue, supported southern paternalism. First, white and especially black tenant farmers and sharecroppers needed well-connected patrons to protect them from antipathetic laws and adverse economic and social norms--laws and norms fostered and enforced by the privileged class from which patrons could be drawn.

Second, plantation owners had an incentive to provide their workers with protection and to facilitate loans to them in order to reduce labor turnover and the monitoring costs of a decentralized production process. Paternalism bought loyalty and hard work.

Third, owners opposed any extension of national welfare benefits to southern farm workers because such laws might interfere with patron-client relationships or even substitute a governmental for a private patron. Fortunately for the plantation owners, the South's one-party politics and the House and Senate norms designating the most senior members as powerful committee chairmen gave white southerners effective veto power over national social welfare legislation.

The combination of these three factors allowed the paternalistic equilibrium to be maintained for a century after the Civil War. Only when an exogenous technological change, the perfection of the cotton-picking machine, disrupted the equilibrium in the 1960s could the American welfare state mature. Plantations no longer needed workers with "farm-specific" skills, and they required far fewer total workers. With nothing to gain from paternalism any more, planters could transfer the costs to the public. The plantation elite and its political minions in Congress therefore finally allowed comprehensive welfare bills to pass.

Offering a tidy explanation for puzzling and significant regional and national trends, integrating politics knowledgeably and seamlessly into an essentially economic analysis, interpreting paternalism as an economically rational bargain, rather than a misty ideological-cultural construct, and avoiding mathematicized theory and statistical estimations, this short, provocative book should fit well into courses in economic history and American political development, and it deserves the attention of nonacademic readers interested in American history. But its omissions make its arguments less than wholly persuasive.

Perhaps the boldest claim in this book is that it was a shift in the attitudes and behavior of the plantation elite, not the reenfranchisement of southern blacks or the increasing political potency of northern black and white liberals, that led to the full-blown national welfare state, which Alston and Ferrie associate with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (p. 120).

Although it is true, as they emphasize, that southerners did retain considerable power in congressional committees through the end of the 1960s, their constituencies were changing and becoming more complicated, and they were by no means as responsive to cotton plantation owners as they had been earlier. The combination of the boll weevil, the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s, and New Deal agricultural programs diversified the region's agriculture. Even before the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, nearly 40 percent of African-American adults were registered to vote in the South. Urbanization, suburbanization, cracks in one-party control, and the anticipation of political upheaval to come also helped to change politicians' strategies.

Mechanization was important, and Alston and Ferrie's discussion of it is nuanced and provocative. But even assuming that the pre-1960 expansion of the welfare state can be largely ignored, it will take more evidence, including direct evidence from the mouths or papers of members of Congress, to establish mechanization as the sole or chief cause of southern political change that allowed the expansion of governmentally provided welfare.

Professor Robert C. Tucker's thin book, "The Soviet Political Mind" is an important commentative piece about the role of Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, in the nature of the development of the USSR's political landscape. This book is not meant to be a history text, which is not to say that the test is not factual. Tucker's claims about the leadership's role (as opposed to ideological or Russian historic forces) as the primary catalyst of state driven developments rests on the evidence of outward historical appearance and psychological presumptions. For example, Prof. Tucker makes claims about Stalin's disposition as an individual and the nature of his internal motivation to act in the way that he did without giving credence to, or even consideration of, his subsequent argument about the legitimizing power that his ideology possessed. Simply, Tucker argues, at times, that Stalin was a condemnable, aberrant personality in the Soviet experience, thereby undermining his later argument that Stalin was a natural outgrowth of the Soviet political landscape. This book is important because of its interesting unabashful approach to rational argument, however it should not be read without a serious critical eye.

If you thought they just build the Hubble Space Telescope and launched it, you're wrong. This book let you see what all such projects got to go through from the first bright idea and to the actual launch of an earth orbiting space vehicle. Sander Elvik, aerospace engineering student

This book was relatively dry but that can be expected with an economic/historical topic. It did, however, give an informative look at Spain's economy in different subjects such as Agriculture and Industry. I learned a lot about Spain's economy and Spain in general from reading this book and I recommend it for anyone who wants to fulfill that purpose as well.

I have borrowed this from the library and wish is were available in CD form. The way they put the lessons together has made it very easy for me to learn in the car. It was very hard for me to find tapes that started at the advanced beginner level. So many of them were so basic they were totally boring.

This text is a selection of studies originally prepared for journals and conferences. The chapter topics address selected and interrelated perspectives from cultural anthropology and the history of religions. These topics then demonstrate how Native American spiritual heritages are situated within the context of world religious traditions. All the chapters elaborate on this central concern by means of a wide range of specific examples drawn from selected Native American cultures.
It is a fundamental and universal characteristic of Native American cultures that "religion" is not a separate category of activity or experience that is divorced from culture or society. Rather, religion is pervasively present and is in complex interrelationships with all aspects of the peoples' lives. Each chapter focuses upon specific examples of this integration of religion, or the sacred, with daily life in the context of a particular tribal group.
These fundamental principles, expressed in different cultural contexts through differing formal expression, not only provide a thread of unity throughout the book, but collectively, also represent a model of the multiple dimensions of the sacred which come together in an organic interrelated manner in any one Native American culture

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