Reviewed by Daniel Dervin, Ph.D. Mary Washington College for the Journal of Psychohistory, 26#3(winter 1999), 746-49

One of the best aspects of this far ranging collection of essays is the engagement with cultural diversity, shorn of the usual ideological trappings, hidden agendas and reflexive splitting into oppressor/victim, routinely produced by cultural studies.

It seems clear that the migratory impulse has been a factor in human history from time immemorial. The original Diaspora out out-of-Africa, doubtless driven by changing climate and food supplies, led to further dispersions, racial mutations, and to the rise of distinct cultures. Migrations continue to thrive, only now they are fueled by complex mixtures of external forces and internal motives, culminating not in the creation of new cultures but in countless, often unforeseen blendings of existing ones. In one way or another, everyone is an immigrant or somehow tied into the process. The contributors to the volume seek to enhance our in-depth understanding of this complex continuing process on cultural, personal, and emotional levels.

Perhaps someday the editor's will share the secrets of how they were able over such a wide spectrum while keeping their contributors focused, succinct, and yet highly original. We can all be grateful for this rich tapestry of immigrant experiences to which so many skillful hands have contributed. This book is a work of seminal importance, to be read, cherished, reread, and confidently recommended.

Born of educated German parents before World War II, Peter Petschauer describes being boarded-out for health and safety reason during the war in the Tyrolean village of Afers, an experience, akin in many ways to living in the 19th century. In this rural, somewhat matriarchal environment he underwent a degree of reparenting. Separated from his parents who were imprisoned for a time after the war, he attended monastery schools, eventually came to New Jersey to live with relative while struggling through the history program at NYU. He married a German women and reconnected with his parents. Eventually he settled in North Carolina to teach history, divorced and married an American southerner.

Nobuko Yoshizawa Meadows, a Japanese-American psychoanalyst, helps us, via her story, more clearly conceptualize the changes that Peter went through. She offers a three phase description of the process: an "initial immersion in the new culture," she calls "Survival of Identity;" followed by a straddling, back-and-forth, conflictual process, called "Bicultural Identity;" culminating in an integration of both cultures, called "Transcultural Identity." Although the person who chooses to migrate may be less susceptible to trauma than the refugee, "all immigrants come with various conflicts." They "share the trauma of separation and loss and its attendant psychological consequences such as depression, anxiety, and disorientation of the self."

Danielle Knafo and Ariella Yaari examine issues among Israeli's who have emigrated to America. They define four phases: Planning. Adjustment, Mourning, Acceptance/Assimilation. Mourning, which mediates the idealization of the past as well as moderating the magical appeal of the adopted culture, is crucial for working-through the experience of loss. Their final phase involves retention of "firmly grounded aspects of the original identity," reducing ambivalence, healing, and assimilating elements of both cultures into a newly integrated whole. As Paul Elovitz notes in his Introduction, immigration is not just adjustment, it is an adaptation -- a re-inventing of the self.

Olga Marlin, who came from Prague, completed her psychoanalytic training in New York, and recently went back to her homeland., expands on fantasies felt by many immigrants about a "land of milk and honey, of love and peace, and of freedom and happiness," a lost paradise projected from idyllic childhood fantasy onto a magically gratifying new land. Her odyssey echoes major themes of this study.

For Indian immigrants, Bindignavle Ramanujam observes a three-stage process of euphoria, followed by disenchantment, and - insofar as issues are resolved - a more objective position of equanimity. Alan Roland examines the miscues and dissonance's these immigrants' more inclusive "we-self" may encounter in America where intimacy is often subordinated to autonomy and self-advancement.

John McInerney is acutely sensitized to the distinctive inner conflicts of Irish immigrants. One's leaving the original community -- cohesive but often suffocatingly insular -- is felt by many Irish to be a self-inflicted punishment, a self-banishment. Somewhat analogous to the tightly communal cohesion of Ireland is the Zionism of Israel: to join the community is to ascend; to leave is to descend. Thus many Israelis in America cannot come to terms with their separation from the "motherland who cannot afford to lose her offspring," and subsist for years "out of their suitcase" abroad.

"I became a historian to discover my family secrets," writes Paul Elovitz. He may also want to avoid discovering such secrets, since history, along with all intellectual pursuits, can serve as displacements, sublimation's, and compromise formations. He seems to be suggesting that psychohistory aims to uncover history's secrets and, in the process, our own. His compelling narrative shows the immigrant baggage of parents can evolve into their children's burdens, the parents story his and his story theirs.

Though frequently evoked in positive terms, the ideal of assimilation has had ominous significance for Jews, who have historically faced dilemmas of assimilation or forced exile, of conversion or death. Thus, as Roberta Ann Shechter writes, a once nomadic people can be marginalized into permanent immigrants by anti-Semitism. Even among other immigrant groups, Jews have been scapegoated; thus the price for preservation of ethnic identity may be purchased with the currency of masochism. But a "tolerance for pain" can have a positive side, because the seductive appeal to assimilate may be based on flight from a beleaguered family.

Charlotte Kahn contributes two essays. The first about cross cultural marriages concludes that such unions "might be viewed as the building blocks of a multicultural society." Her second piece on the reunification of Germany is more engaging. She convincingly shows how reunification turned East Germans into anxious ambivalent immigrants without having to move.

The overall effect of the material in the book is dual: the importance of factoring in culture sub species immigration is an invaluable resource for understanding individual personality; yet, at the same time, a psychologically-attuned approach reveals how individuals use the old and new cultures uniquely personal ways to represent, defend-against, and, occasionally, to resolve inner conflicts.

If we look at IMPRESSIONISM: BENEATH THE SURFACE, we find an art with more going for it than a permanent record of how atmosphere and light change over time. The word comes from Claude Monet's pioneer "Impression, sunrise 1873," where we also find landscapists Eugene Boudin- and Johan Barthold Jongkind-type boldly painted nature from having sketched one's first impression, at one moment in time, on the spot and outside, for strong rivalry to the age-old road to artistic success by meeting carved-in-stone standards based on conservative, classical training, as in Jean-Francois Millet's divinely ordered "Autumn" praising the dignity of labor. It meant painting moments of one's own experience, as in Monet's "Women in the garden," as the way real people really looked through sharply contrasted dark and light under harsh summer sunlight so that the viewer also knew what went into getting the painting done, not as Marc Charles Gabriel Gleyre's "Minerva and the three graces," with ideal types under studio light gently going from light into shade and hiding how the painter got the painting to end up looking that way. It also made for a very personal art that was actually not so spur-of-the-moment as it seemed: Monet told American painter Lilla Cabot Perry not to paint the world as events and objects but as patches of color. But what with years of seeing things as things, Impressionists had to change their usual way of looking, which they did by studying both aesthetic and scientific theories and Japanese sources. I particularly like where the author talked about the successes with this retrained way of looking by Paul Cezanne, whose completely different style my sculptress mother loved and my artist sister still does: he painted nature in color patches, with unusual perspective and without lines, so he flattened the background and foreground with a back apple looking quite big in comparison to front apples and tilted the table top in "Still life with plaster." He put nature's organizing color by contrasts and relationships into "Park of the Chateau Noir," with complementary and nearcomplementary side by side. I also like Paul Smith's specific examples from Camillo Pissarro's art: his local colors showed light changing normal hues, as in "Cotes Saint-Denis," with everything touched by the silvery autumnal light made from warm sunlight and sky blue toplight; that same blue toplight colored "The shepherdess," but without sunlight making it through the painting's thick tree growth. In "Young peasant girl drinking coffee," the sitter's face reflected the green from the grass and trees outside her window. The anarchist painter also said that art not coming out of real experiences or looking at the real world was actually escapism. It is easy to see where Impressionist art could be non-escapist what with new ways of interpretation: anthropological, feminist, psychoanalytical, and social-historical ways, of which the book has especially telling examples of how art let on where men and women got to go; public places tended to be for men to look at and paint women, as in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "La loge." Female Impressionist painters Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot therefore tended to paint homey scenes that sometimes showed women getting ready for the places that were seen as their social space, as in Mary Cassatt's "Girl arranging her hair" and Berthe Morisot's "Yong woman drying herself." But viewers pick up on how aggravating it was to be caught in a routine of set places to go and things to do, as in backgrounds cramping the women in Mary Cassatt's "Five o'clock tea" or Berthe Morisot's "Summer's day" and "View of Paris from the Trocadero." So the book has a fresh look on a beautifully illustrated, logically organized and well written topic: readers might want to go on to Michel Melot's THE IMPRESSIONIST PRINT, Julian Moore's IMPRESSIONIST PARIS, and H Barbara Weinberg et al's AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM AND REALISM.

The story of Christo Kulichev is inspiring for people of any faith who have undergone persecution for their faith. It is particularly inspiring for those of the Christian faith, challenging every believer to consider the role of suffering in the life of faith. In the end, it left me asking the question "Will those who come behind me find me faithful?" Kulichev can answer that question in the affirmative. By God's grace, may more of us be able to do so also.

"How to make your training creative, flexible and spontaneous" is the subtitle, and indeed the aim, of this new release from arch-training-publishers Gower. There is a great deal of excellent wisdom about training here which would serve any trainer well.

Jackson's background as a BBC producer and a journalist serves him well. Not only is this book unusually well crafted, but he brings his experience of working with leading impro comedy performers like the London-based Comedy Store Players (Paul Merton, Josie Lawrence et al). The basic thread of the book is the parallel between designing and running a training event and performing "impro". Jackson manages to address this parallel philosophically as well as practically, resulting in a book which will satisfy a range of audiences (trainers, HR staff, performers, people people) at different levels - no mean feat. As such, this is a rare beast - a book that says something genuinely new.

The book takes us through the various roles of the trainer - setting things up, bonding the group, acting as a model for the learners, setting goals and supports, creating novel activities, keeping the group's (and their own) energy up, drawing out resources from participants, and being spontaneous through to the final "performance" and subsequent reviews. NLP trainers may particularly enjoy the variety of thoughts and practical suggestions in the book, all of which would fit well into NLP contexts. I personally enjoyed Jackson's sections on the impression of confidence and spontaneity - these tricky subjects are dealt with simply yet subtly.

Impro Learning is unusually well-crafted as a piece of writing. Jackson's journalism background is an asset, and the words are well chosen, clear and at times unexpectedly witty in a rather understated British way. This allows the author to cram a great deal into his 200-odd pages. There is a great further reading list, along with full references and an index. The only potential downside is the rapidity with which Jackson leaps from, for instance, the philosophy of rule-based games to some basic discussion of icebreaker exercises - I was occasionally left dizzy, but elated by the melange. The price (£42.50) is outrageous, as with many of Gower's books which are clearly aimed at corporate training departments with budgets to match. However, it's only rarely that a really new idea appears in print, and this is worth a place on any discerning trainer's bookshelf.

This is a remarkable and insightful book detailing the extraordinary work of a truly important theater artist of the 20th century. Mike Leigh created his own highly developed method of improvisation for creating character and dialogue. He has used these methods to "devise" a remarkable body of work for both stage and film, whose hallmark has been extraordinarily detailed acting. Concise, provocative, and thoughtful, this book changed the way I thought about improvisation and character development. If you have become a fan of Leigh's film work, such as "Naked" or "Secrets And Lies", this will explain the method behind the remarkable performances he elicits from actors. If you live in the NYC area and have seen any of Scott Elliot's work with The New Group, you will have a greatly enhanced appreciation for the remarkable plays Leigh devised. This book is an important and sadly neglected document tragically out of print.

Paul Bryers weaves an engrossing story around the return of a successful Hollywood filmmaker (Adam Epstein) to Berlin - where he had been born in the horrific final days of WWII. It is now the late 1990s and a murky,unsettling and slightly sinister post-reunification Berlin serves as the background to a story of ambiguous parentage and personal redemption. A growing sense of menace (neo-Nazi activity flourishes, Adam is drawn into what appears to be an intricate web of deceit...) and the cooly ironic tone of the (Merlin-like)narrator combine to make this an above average 'literary' novel with thriller overtones.

Lothane has brilliantly researched the most written-about of all psychiatric patients. The author has webbed together a fascinating account from multiple perspectives, including historical, legal, psychoanalytic, political, and medical. It is the first source to consult about Schreber. Lothane has painstakingly researched his subject, has made important historical discoveries about Schreber and his times, and has given us a valuable commentary on issues such as diagnosis, Freud's formulation of paranoia based on the Memoirs, and the influence of Schreber's famous father. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in this fascinating man and his work.

This book has sixteen short stories told by American soldiers who survived German POW camps in World War II. Both air and ground troops tell their stories. All the soldiers in this book were from the Pennsylvania and Ohio area, so I imagine people who know them or their relatives would find this book particularly interesting.

What I found most interesting were the stories of combat missions and the various challenges the men had to overcome when they were captured and brought into the camps. Most of these men had to march around in sub-zero temperatures with only the occasional slice of "sawdust bread" to eat, often with injuries from combat or from landing improperly after parachuting. Lack of heating, disease, and lice were also major problems the POWs had to deal with. In one camp the men did not take a shower for an entire year!

Not only did they survive, but they are still alive and well 70+ years later to tell us about it. Amazing.

Absolutely the most brillant piece of histo-drama ever written on the political affairs of men and their madness.

Paul Wilkes, often seen in the pages of the New Yorker or the New York Times Sunday Magazine writing on issues of faith in the modern age, turns in a compelling biography of a modern-day Catholic cleric. Entering the priesthood in the idyllic 1950s, Joe Greer's expectations were completely upturned by the dramatic changes of Vatican II and the wrenching realities of ministry in inner-city Boston. Rather than enjoying the peace of a well-appointed rectory, Fr. Greer winds up riding the stone-pelted school buses of Boston during the angry days of desegregation. Never claiming sainthood for himself, Greer struggles with very human temptations -- and occasionally falls to them, only to repent and try again. Finally, as the pastor of a suburban Boston church, Joe Greer faces the greatest challenge to faith anyone can confront -- he is diagnosed with a rampant and unyielding form of cancer. How this good man of a faith always open to doubt deals with the most dangerous temptation -- the temptation of despair -- shapes the crux of this well-told spiritual biography