A most up-to-date-source on modern African cinema. Selects several films for critiques and gives personal insights on the filmmaker. We couldn't do without it! The Atlanta African Film Society

I asked for this biography as a Christmas present 20 years ago. I finally got around to reading it, and I was not disappointed. Dr. Vandiver has written an first-rate biography which compares to Dumas Malone's sextet on Thomas Jefferson and Douglas S. Freeman's classic four-volume opus on Robert E. Lee. John Pershing probably has languished in obscurity in recent times because of the events which followed World War I (the Roaring Twenties, the Depression) and World War II, which resulted from, as Pershing himself warned, failing to fight World War I to a decisive finish. He is also denigrated by some as not being able to chase down Pancho Villa during the Punitive Expedition. Vandiver sets the record of history straight on Pershing, though, as nearly all biographers of great men are wont to do, he does lapse into hagiography and glosses too readily in many instances over his faults and weaknesses. Nevertheless he fairly portrays Pershing as the simple, direct, honest, energetic, efficient, and dedicated man and soldier who rose to the rank of General of the Armies, a rank attained only by George Washington before him. Vandiver traces Pershing from his youth, his sojourn as a teacher in a small school, and his cadet days at West Point, showing how his values and experiences moulded him well for the service and duty he would render his country for decades. From West Point, Pershing went west to become an Indian fighter, to Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and then to the Phillipines, where he conquered the wild Moro tribes of Mindanao. Pershing performed each of his assignments with excellence and bravery, always earning the highest praise from his superiors. He was a spit-and-polish martinet, insisting that his subordinates conform to the highest standards set at West Point. He never asked of his men anything he would not ask of himself, and he honestly believed that all that drill, efficiency, and discipline put his soldiers at the minimum risk when the tasks of campaigning and battle were at hand. He had no patience with slovenly subordinate officers who let their commands slide. Pershing did have a knack for selecting excellent subordinates, and rarely had problems getting his overall plans and objectives executed. The best part of Vandiver's work is that which describes Pershing's command of the AEF. The general did an incredible job of commanding the mobilization, buildup of troops and materiel in France, and ensuring the training of his Doughboys, all the time holding off repeated French and British attempts to siphon off and amalgamate the arriving American soldiers into their forces. Had the French and British succeeded, it is not inconceivable that they would have wasted thousands of American soldiers in the grinding, failing trench warfare the French and British were accustomed to on the Western Front. Pershing's dogged insistence on an American army angered the Allies, but proved decisive and effective in the last five months of the conflict. To their everlasting credit, both Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Wilson also never wavered from this course, and backed up Pershing fully whenever Lloyd George or Clemenceau tried to press their case over the general's head. Vandiver fully portrays the human side of General Pershing, including his marriage to Frances Warren, their brief 10 years together, and his grief at losing her and their three daughters in a fire at the Presidio in 1915. He also depicts Pershing's social circle as a young man, and the fortuitous friendships with men who became extremely influential and helpful to him later in life. Many of the subordinates he mentored and nurtured all either proved essential to the building and command of the AEF and/or became the pillars of America's armed forces in World War II (Marshall, Patton, and MacArthur, for example). This biography does have a few editorial flaws. Dr. Vandiver, who was a prodigy who never attended high school or undergraduate school, does some excellent writing for having had no formal coursework, but he does have a shocking weakness in writing subordinate clauses as separate sentences. Of which this is an example. A good editor would have caught the few dozen instances in this work and revised the grammar. Also Dr. Vandiver sometimes drops articles from a sentence, resulting in some clumsy passages. Again, good editing would have corrected these. At the end of the second volume, as Pershing's retirement approaches, Dr. Vandiver omits the necessary explanation that, in 1924, the mandatory retirement age in the armed forces was 64; the reader has to infer that from the narrative. Nevertheless Dr. Vandiver hit a home run with his biography of Pershing, and it deserved far more acclaim and exposure than it has enjoyed in the past 20 years. Reading about this genuine American hero was a breath of fresh air in these times of antiheroes. America today surely needs more men like General Pershing. Thanks to Dr. Vandiver, he will not be forgotten.

"Black Sunday" was a fascinating study of a dust storm of mythic proportions. I enjoyed reading the recollections of the storm from many of the people who experienced it. As I have never lived in the prairie states, I had no idea these "dusters" even existed.

This work is essential to an understanding of the impact on the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It focuses on Mississippi, the state where African-Americans were almost completely disenfranchised as late as 1965. It traces the efforts of the Mississippi political establishment to evade the implementation of the Voting Rights Act and the persistence of the Civil Rights community in making certain that it be enforced

It starts out briefly with a myth and it sticks to facts not fiction about the Blackfeet. It's not a very recently published book but it is good for a paper.

This book was a gift and I had never heard of the author before, but from the very start I was hooked on the story and the interplay between characters. The end was a nicely brought off suprise. Based on this book I have ordered her other books and can't wait for them to arrive. I'm sure that they will be a great summer's read like this one was.

I have given this book to so many friends who are moving into a new house, loft, apartment. Or, who have just built or bought a vacation home. Without fail, they have thanked me for giving them the delightful idea of blessing their home. Mrs. Frank's little book is a little gem. Buy it and use it to bless any space in which you live. You will discover the blessings of preparing your sacred place for the year, the new milinimum.

As a student of how mainstream science treats subjects supposedly hovering hopelessly on its fringes, I found Frank McGillion's latest non-fiction book captivating.

At one level, Blinded by Starlight is a straightforward account, from a scientist with long medical experience, of the history of that hybrid of astronomy and astrology that our ancestors termed astronomia and how discoveries about the pineal gland and its regulation of melatonin have identified the influence that this previously mysterious gland exerts on our lives.

But McGillion has taken his account to an even more fascinating level by showing how and why the traditional ideas of the physician-astrologers may very well have a basis in solid scientific fact.

The discoveries with which his book primarily deals concern the pineal gland in the human brain -- the 'third eye' venerated by mystics of east and west. The name is not merely fanciful since the gland actually is light sensitive (and even used for vision by some species). However, in humans its primary function is that of regulating the production of melatonin: the hormone that, amongst many other things, profoundly influences human sexual behaviour and reproduction.

The first clues as to the effects melatonin exerts on human fertility came from a study of Eskimo women which found that menstruation ceased during the long arctic winter. Blind women, too, have been found to be less fertile than sighted women.

Repeated studies concluded that the longer hours of daylight in summer causes a decrease in melatonin production. Since melatonin inhibits fertility in women, the decrease makes women more fertile. More simply, the longer the daylight hours, the more fertile women become.

Further research found that melatonin influences a number of other endocrine glands, such as the thyroid and adrenal glands, and also affects a variety of brain hormones and neurotransmitters.

It was also found to have effects on more general processes such as the overall balance of chemicals in the body, and the function of our body clock.

More surprising is the discovery that some of the effects of melatonin can take years to come about. When melatonin was administered to newborn rats, for instance, it was found to delay the onset of puberty much later in life.

Crucially, however, this effect only took place if the melatonin was administered in a critically short period of days around the time of birth.

It is at this point that the ideas of the physician- astrologers make an appearance. If exposure to melatonin during a critically short period around birth can affect important developmental stages in later life, and if melatonin production is controlled by day length and other cosmological factors, then crucial life developments are indeed determined by the state of the heavens at the time of birth, just as the physician- astrologers claimed. And if this is the case then what other, similar, long range effects might be determined by the time we enter the world?

Another main plank of McGillion's argument is that we now know it isn't only sunlight that affects the pineal gland and hence production of melatonin, many forms of electromagnetic radiation and magnetic fields have similar effects - as indeed may other putative fields that appear to interact with living systems, but have yet to be comprehensively investigated - as in the case of the fertility test that mysteriously stopped working in 1938.

McGillion describes, for example, the work of Professor Michael Persinger at Canada's Laurentian University who has carried out strikingly original investigations into the effects of magnetic fields on the human brain, promising in the treatment of depressive illness and -- even more interesting -- affecting our perception of consensual 'reality'.

And it isn't only in the laboratory with experimental magnetic fields that such effects have been observed. There is now persuasive evidence that the Earth's own geomagnetic field can cause a wide range of phenomena, including increased aggressiveness in some animals. This discovery takes on greater significance when you know that some mainstream scientists believe the planets may influence geomagnetism, and that formal statistical studies have found a correlation in the Twentieth Century between wars and increased geomagnetic activity.

The incidence of seizures and death in animals and humans is also increased during periods of geomagnetic fluctuation. One theory is that this may be partly due to the suppression of the production of melatonin by geomagnetism -- melatonin having a pronounced anticonvulsant action.

It's not just homing pigeons that are sensitive to magnetic fields. The iron compound magnetite is present in many of our body tissues and forms receptors called 'magnetosomes' which detect changes in magnetic field strength. Brain tissues, too, contain magnetite, especially the pineal gland.

A study of water diviners showed that when their heads were shielded, they no longer produced muscular responses to weak magnetic fields; the effect was attributed to magnetosomes in the area of the pineal.

In the light of findings such as these, McGillion says; 'We know the exposure of new born babies to light changes melatonin secretion, which can lead, in turn, to alterations in development. We also know that ambient electromagnetic radiation at the time of birth alters the circulation of melatonin in humans, and that the planets - certainly as the physician-astrologers understood this term - influence this process.'

'So is it possible that the cosmologically controlled radiations which new-borns are exposed to could predetermine their future physical, psychological, and indeed, spiritual, development as our forebears claimed? Some medical and scientific professionals certainly think so.'

It is likely that many more will think so when they've read this highly original and utterly fascinating book.

Richard Milton is author of Alternative Science....