This beautiful book includes Finnish communities from Florida to Minnesota and Michigan to Thunder Bay, Ontario. People from many states contributed the traditional Finnish recipes. The recipes are edited by Beatrice Ojakangas, nationally known food editor and writer from Duluth, Minnesota. The wife of the former Finnish ambassador to the U.S. contributed several recipes.

The colorful covers show Finland State Forest in northeastern Minnesota and a Finnish-American child in a Lapp costume. The inside covers show scenes of Minnesota's Voyageur National Park, an area settled by Finns, resembling Finland's lake country. The Finnish embassy dining room in Washington D.C. and Finnish Canadians in full costume are shown.

About 20 pages of articles detail the history and traditions of Finland and sites of Finnish interest in America and Canada to visit.

Finnish Americans and Finnish Canadians assisted in the editorial preparation of this soft-cover book.

Hundreds of color photographs document the American family farm and its passing way of life. If you're planning a country building this book's crisp shots and close-up details of beautiful barns, outbuildings and cupolas are sure to inspire you.

When Sean and Brian stay with their friend Alan and his family in the wooded area of Grizzly Hill for the weekend, they are told to stay out of the woods, but their curiosity leads them to the edges of the woods where they see glowing eyes and clawed footprints.

What happens when the doctor gets sick? Who "doctors" the doctor?
In this extremely personal book, Dr Joam Johnston takes you on a journey of the disease known as anorexia nervosa. The drive for thinness toke a large toll on Dr Johnston's health as well as helped destroy her marriage.

Dr Johnston guides you thru the slow path to recovery and also educates you along the way. She also feels that anorexia nervosa is an addiction and should be treated in that manner. She even suggests an "Anorexia Anonymous" as "the only avenue to recovery."

If you or a loved one suffer from this deadly disease, you must read this book. She offers much hope for recovery from this mostly misunderstood disease.

For those of you who are already interested in post-structuralism or French Feminism, this book is a must-read. The essays in this book are written by the most important contemporary feminist thinkers out there, including (most notably) Judith Butler, Joan Scott, Gayatri Spivak, Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Drucilla Cornell, and Donna Haraway.

The essays in this book really help to fill the space that Judith Butler opened up when she wrote "Gender Trouble," clarifying post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity and the relationship of discourse to reality, and exploring the ways in which these understandings can advance feminist goals.

Martha Nussbaum has argued that post-structuralism destroys the foundation upon which feminism necessarily rests. But, this book asks, what is the value of this feminism, and what group is it "representing?" To those who question whether political agency can survive the post-structuralist critique of subjectivity, this book responds by questioning the political implications of sealing off a self-identical human subject. Those who would attempt to save the category of "women" are forced to ask to what extent a feminism based on "woman-ness" is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive, and to what extent this understanding of an essential "woman-ness" closes off possibilities for critique and politicization.

Traditional understandings of subjectivity and identity claim that we are all subject to a set of irresistible truths that we can never escape. These truths determine our identities, our experiences, and our interests. But can this really be the case? Do femininity or homosexuality or Judaism already place limits on subjectivity, or are these identities created by the very actions that purport to follow from them? Why must we pursue an empancipatory politics from a pre-determined standpoint? Why can't that very standpoint be open to political contest?

This book grapples with all of these questions in a series of brilliant and yet very readable essays that revolutionize the way we understand political action and identity. These essays are part of a political practice that seeks to open taken-for-granted meanings up to resistance and contest, and thus open up new spaces for self-definition and political action.

Full of useful information for tourists, including ratings and reviews of places to stay and sites to see. The authors have a very down-to-earth, honest approach to the reader and some of their comments had me laughing out loud. For example, in commenting on the kangaroo, the book reads:

"To give you an idea of what you're dealing with in a tame kangaroo, just watch them with children--even when...[they]...pull their ears and walk on their tails, they just get up and walk away. If they wanted, they could open the kids up like a tin of sardines--they have claws like a saber-tooth tiger's tooth."

Combined with the Frommer's Australia books (both the 4th edition and the 'for about $50 a day' edition) I've found tons of useful information and probably won't even need to resort to a travel agent next time we visit.

I loved this book as well as all of C.W. Andersons books. He is the best childrens writer in the universe. There will never be another writer who will be able to capture the wonder and innocence of childhood past.

But for that life ...I wish much

Rudolf Steiner described Fingal's Cave as "a temple built by the spirits of nature". Anyone wanting to understand Celtic Christianity should read this book, and anyone visiting Scotland should visit this sacred site, only 5 miles from Iona. This site has had a profound influence on many artists and writers, and the Poems of Ossian are one of the great treasures of spiritual literature. Read, learn and enjoy.

Now in a revised and expanded edition, Finnish Touches: Recipes And Traditions blends Finnish traditions and lore with mouth-watering recipes. The first half of Finish Touches is devoted to engaging anecdotes, thoughts, and introductions to beloved Finnish cultural icons such as the sauna. The second half proves authentic Finnish cuisine ranging from Kaljakeitto (Finnish Beer Cheese Soup); Klimpit (Finnish Dumplings); and Rieska (Finnish Flat Barley Bread); to Sillisalaatti (Herring Salad); Lammasmuhennos (Finnish Simmered Lamb); and Illmapuuro (Finnish Air Pudding). Color and black-and-white photographs enhance this joyous and highly recommended celebration of Finnish cultural and culinary heritage.

'Why not be completely turned into fire?'

This was the response when one holy man went to another holy man asking what else he could do -- he practiced a disciplined rule of life, prayed, meditated, fasted, and did all that was expected, required, and good for spirituality.

'What else should I do?'

The response is a telling one, and the one from which Joan Chittister, OSB, derives the title of her book. Chittister is a well known author and lecturer on topics of spirituality, religious life, peacemaking, and social justice. The OSB that follows her name stands for Order of St. Benedict -- a monastic/spiritual framework that informs her work thoroughly.

Part of Chittister's work is to recover the connections between this ancient form of religious life and practice for today's world. 'The world that spawned religious life, even the religious life of this century, is not the world we're living in. If religious life has anything to do with real life, the hope of recasting it in old molds smacks of pure fantasy. Spending time and energy yearning for the return of the mythical past while the present swirls perilously around us, awash in the debris of rationalism in the social order and dogmatism in the church, only holds us back, I think, from moving in holy ways in a post-modern world.'

This is a hard statement to put into practice. What we must do, in very simple terms, is eliminate from our lives those things we tend to make into absolutes and idols (of particular danger in the present world, worldly and church-bound modes of thinking) so that we can reach into something more divine and lifegiving. However, this is not without similar traps. 'To attempt to fabricate a vision of religious life for a world, and for a time we may never see, takes as much power out of the present as a nostalgic commitment to the past. What's more, the fabrication, I think, is not for us to make. That is the work of the people who live it.'

In her beginning essay, Chittister takes on the issues of modernity in and outside the cloister, issues of feminism/anti-feminism, identity, enculturation, and the virtues of religious life for today. She expresses the fears that many feel, in and out of religious communities, that there are too many things being irretrievably lost from the past, while we have no real direction or guide into the future. Particularly for institutions, which tend to see institutional survival as the highest priority, there is a sense of survival mode existence that contaminates the larger purposes. 'The purpose of religious life is not survival; it is prophecy. The role of religious life is to bring to visibility what is Good News for our time now, not to preserve a past long gone and no longer germane to the challenge of new questions.'

Indeed, every generation has to address questions that prior generations either found irrelevant, unquestionable, or unspeakable. These always present new challenges, and one of the new challenges as we enter the next century and millennium is the questioning of institutions and foundations themselves, and the very idea of such. The question is no longer 'which institution?', but 'why institutions?' The constant search for 'why?' brings us back to the original intentions of the religious impulse.

For the stewardship of the globe, the extension of justice to all people regardless of age, race, gender, creed, location, and for the true purpose of call to all people, Chittister calls on us to recognise that this is a time to become a new people. 'The truth of the matter is that we cannot claim to be building the new religious life until we call for and form for the new direction. It is too late now to rebuild in the shell of the old. It is time to become a new people again.'

Continuing with the idea of the fire, she relates the story of the Irish custom of starting the first fire in a new home from the already heated coals of fires from other homes of family or community members. The fire must come from somewhere, but in each new home, it blazes anew. The same must be true for the religious life. The first fires are drawn upon, but the current fire is its own blaze. This must be recognised and cultivated. 'We are not the first generation for whom this is the content of our lives, but unless we do it with all our hearts, another generation may not get the opportunity to do the same, to warm themselves at the same fire, to heat the world with the coals of their lives.'

Reading this book has helped stir the coals in my own life, in my own quest. I must re-read it in greater detail and attention, perhaps several times before I get the fullest benefit. I recommend it most highly to those who are seeking, and those who have yet to seek, and those who don't know they should be seekers. While this is done in the context of Benedictine spiritual practice, it is by no means an exclusively Benedictine, or even exclusively Christian, task.