One of a series from Dover that includes Cassatt, Dali, Degas, Gauguin, Homer, Kahlo...you get the idea. Ridiculously inexpensive, you should collect them all. Once you have them, you'll resist ripping them out of the cute little booklet & mailing them. Maybe, like me, you'll keep them in a drawer by your computer as handy fine art stress relievers.

Bob Rixon

What makes this book extra valuable is it's introductory material on WHY the recipes in the book are healthful and it's glossary-like listing that details the benefits of particular ingredients. Also unique; there is a chapter devoted to "meals-in-a-muffin" with unexpected recipes (rice & bean muffins, muffins w/veggies...)that defy traditional muffin making. Every recipe I've tried has been so yummy, that, per suggestion of the author, I've taken to baking in bulk & individually wrapping my muffins to store in the 'fridge/freezer!

I grew up in the 50s and 60s. I was a member of the USAF Nurse Corp from 74-80 and can relate to Claude's book. His journey around the world from his humble beginnings in the French Colony, the island of Mauritus, to the success of being a major player in the technical advances in US/Euopean radar communication from pre-Telestar to our preasant technology read like I was talking to a friend. The book provokes questions about how much of your time is enough to devote to family and how far is too far to further one's career. It is an informative true American success story with a twist of sadness and loss.

In 2001, the National Gallery of London and the National Gallery of Art in DC exhibited about 70 of the most important 19th-century paintings from the Nationalgalerie of Berlin, Germany. The SPIRIT OF AN AGE catalogue grouped them, as Romantic landscapes; Nazarenes and late Romantics; Color, light and air; Biedermeier realism; the Kaiserzeit; Escaping to Italy; Pure painting; Embracing the French avant-garde; and Secession.

Caspar David Friedrich was at the core of German and European landscape traditions. His first landscape, The cross in the mountains or Tetschen altarpiece, was of a mountain, on top of which the sun's rays shone on a crucifix, above the trees.

In 1810, Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr went to the Franciscan monastery of Sant'Isidoro on Monte Pincio, Italy. There, they and 3 others were known as Nazarenes, for their Biblical-style clothes and devoutly communal lifestyle. They favored friendship pictures and reciprocal portraits, such as Overbeck's The painter Franz Pforr.

Color, light and air were what Carl Blechen's 3 fishermen on the Gulf of Naples was about. The trio became dreamy white notes in a red, white and blue fanfare. The brilliant blue sky gave airy space and light undimmed by clouds to the darker blue sea.

Gottlieb Biedermeier was a minor literary character standing for middle-class values. So Biedermeier art meant keeping things simple, as in Johann Erdmann Hummel's grinding and installing of a great granite bowl.

With the Kaiserzeit, the German present became an obsession. Huge reparation payments from victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war went into rapid industrialization, as in Adolph Menzel's The iron-rolling mill.

Escaping to Italy was what young German artists did so well. One of these German Romans was Anselm Feuerbach. He painted characters from antiquity, as his Medea, in a beautiful Italian seascape. He also painted Italian common people, such as his mistress Nanna Risi, as Iphigenia and Madonna.

Gustave Courbet's visit to Munich in 1869 brought on Pure painting. Young painters tried his directly applied painting out on domestic portraits, humble still-lifes and simple local landscapes. So without preliminary drawing and with broad, short brushstrokes, Leibl brought the Burgomaster Klein's face to life just by the play of light over it. A few sure brushstrokes formed the hands just by fine shades of color.

By century end, artists ran secession movements, for progressive art, such as Fritz von Uhde's Little heathland princess. He painted, close-up and full-length, a country girl about 6 years old. Holding her hands behind her back and her upper body straight, she seemed to stare back at the viewer. What a way that would have been to end the exhibition!

The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion. By Claude F. Jacobs and Andrew J. Kaslow. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991 [paperback edition 2001])

Anthropologists Claude Jacobs and Andrew Kaslow undertook their study of the black Spiritual churches of New Orleans between 1980 and 1983. Since the initial publication of Spiritual Churches of New Orleans in 1991, I have turned to it frequently in the pursuit of my own work. The book has now been re-issued in a more affordable paperback edition. Even though the research is twenty years old, it remains the authoritative work on a subject that is of great fascination to those interested in African American religious practice. Jacobs and Kaslow's highly readable text is augmented by the outstanding photographs of Michael P. Smith.
New Orleans' Spiritual churches are a unique combination of Roman Catholicism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, and Voodoo. The Spiritual churches honor God the Father, Jesus, and an array of saints, ancestors, and spirit guides--particularly the Native American chief Black Hawk--by whom worshipers become possessed and through whose power they heal and prophesy. The interior of a Spiritual church is dominated by elaborate altars dedicated to the saints and the spirits. Services are characterized by ecstatic music and dancing, and spiritual "work" may include the use of candles, incense, oils, baths, and herbs. Many Spiritual congregations are led by female ministers and bishops, positions denied to women in some mainstream Christian denominations.
While the Spiritual churches were ostensibly founded in 1920 by Mother Leafy Anderson, a black minister from Chicago, the components of the belief system had long existed in New Orleans. Most of the city's downtown Creoles of color were Catholic; some members of this group were also attracted to Spiritualism. Pentecostalism was popular among uptown working -class "American Negroes." While virtually all New Orleanians of African descent were Christian, many were also devotees of Voodoo, an African-based religion heavily influenced by Catholicism; others dabbled in hoodoo, a system of magic by which individual "workers" serve their clients.
Jacobs and Kaslow provide valuable historical background on the formative years of the Spiritual churches, using newspaper articles from the African-American Louisiana Weekly, as well as interviews with early church leaders conducted by fieldworkers from the Louisiana Writers' Project under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. The authors also report on the many church events they attended as participant-observers. In addition to regular worship services, they describe baptisms, Holy communion, ordination of ministers and consecration of bishops, and feasts in honor of various saints, the Old Testament Queen Esther, and Black Hawk. There is a detailed examination of spirit possession, prophecy, and healing as it occurs in church services. Also included is a discussion of the practices of ministers known as "workers" who address clients' difficulties with rituals and charms that resemble hoodoo. The final chapters provide a statistical analysis of the clergy and membership of the Spiritual churches by birthplace, religion of origin, gender, age, and occupation.
The Spiritual churches are other worldly in their outlook; they do not attack the social and economic problems that plague a congregation that is black, predominantly poor or working class, and overwhelmingly female. Jacobs and Kaslow conclude that the Spiritual churches, like other African-based New World religions, allow ordinary people such as these to transcend these difficulties by experiencing direct communication with the Divine, achieving the ideal balance of the body, mind, and spirit, and harmony with the human community and the dead.

Carolyn Morrow Long
Research Associate, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Author of Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce, University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

This is a book I saw on the shelf at the public library. As I thumbed through it, put it down, and wrote it on my list to pick up at Amazon.Unlike some business books regarding spirituality, Saks writes from a grounded perspective, both both feet firmly on the ground. I highly recommend it.

If you are taking a music history course that uses A History of Western Music (Grout) then this would be a helpful study guide. It has a brief overview of the main points of each chapter. There are then many questions to answer about that chapter. It also uses the Norton recordings and Anthology of Western Music. If you did all the work in this book you would definitely do well in your course. The chapter overviews do NOT contain enough information to avoid reading the Grout text in case you wanted to be lazy.

I would highly recommend this for undergraduate or graduate music students taking a general music history course.

This is a wonderful piece of music if you love the idea of playing jazz but do not know how to improvise. The jazz purests would condem music like this...not improvised, but it is good and absolutley fun to play. It is necessary to get a good jazz trio-(piano,bass and drums) to accompany the flute. The feel must be right so the flute can sound its best!

Very practical textbook reviewing all the scope of coloproctology for every day practice.