"Makers of American Diplomacy," edited by Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson, collects 25 essays each of which focuses on a particular "maker." Here is the roll call: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Charles Wilkes, James K. Polk, William Henry Seward, Hamilton Fish, James Gillespie Blaine, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Willard D. Straight, Woodrow Wilson, James T. Shotwell, Henry L. Stinson, Stanley K. Hornbeck, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, John Foster Dulles, John F. Kennedy, J. William Fulbright, and Henry A. Kissinger. So we have nine Presidents, almost as many Secretaries of State, several political theorists, a couple of proponents of naval power, and Benjamin Franklin. When I read this book, actually the two paperback volumes, it was the supplemental reading for one of my American Diplomacy classes. The strength of these essays is that they see key moments in American diplomatic history as extensions of individual personalities. This would be very much in the Thomas Carlyle "hero in history" mode. Thus we understand American Destiny in terms of Seward, diplomatic activisim through the eyes of T.R., containment in terms of Truman, and balance of power in terms of Kissinger. As a supplemental text this is an excellent collection of essays that flesh out the history of American diplomacy in human terms.

Blackaby uses a new approach to an old question. How do I get my life in the shape it needs to be for God to use me? Starting small, the book slowly takes you from what ever level that you are at to the place God wants you to be. Stressing the importence of you fellowship with God is the main thrust of the book. No one who truely involves themselves in what is written here will leave it the same as they were before. Thank God for men like Blackaby who use their gifts to help His people.

By its nature, what's most obvious can easily escape our attention, so it may be worth noting that Beethoven's era is beyond the recall of any living person. Theoretically, there might now be some living centenarian whose grandfather could have known him, or at least been in his presence and spoken with him - but this is conceptual, and though conjecture is fruitless it's still fascinating. We can't talk with Beethoven or his intimates, none of whom lived into the 20th century - but here one of them operatively speaks to us, if not literally then surely effectively.

Edited by Maynard Solomon and translated for the first time from the original German by him and Henry Mins, the book FROM THE HOUSE OF THE BLACK SPANIARD - REMEMBRANCES OF BEETHOVEN FROM MY YOUTH was authored by Dr. Gerhard von Breuning and first published in Vienna in 1874.

The title is fitting. As a 12-year-old, the author (whose father was a close friend of the composer) was privy to Beethoven's inner circle and played a small but important role in the composer's daily existence during the last year and a half of his life. He helped him in various ways by assisting with his correspondence, running special errands, helping him keep order in his dwelling, and doing what he could during Beethoven's last illness. The boy eventually developed for the composer a feeling approaching worship. Beethoven reciprocated this devotion by guiding some of the boy's musical education. When the young Gerhard eventually asked the older man's permission to address him with the familiar Du (rather than the formal Sie), the boy was overjoyed when Beethoven consented.

Dr. Solomon says in the book's introduction, "Like many children, Gerhard was a keen observer of small details..." This boy, who became a respected Viennese physician, evidently was the early 19th-century counterpart of today's "kid who doesn't miss a thing" (even pinpointing in his book such details as the exact location and number of windows of Beethoven's street-facing top floor apartment). His precision was fortunate and significant for posterity: it extended even to the minutest specifics about Beethoven's dwelling, personality and character, mood swings, daily conversations about his circumstances, personal preferences and other matters now irretrievably beyond our reach and forever lost. Often even the smallest details, about any subject, can be keys to opening large doors behind which are answers to some important questions. Beethoven's life was dramatic enough without the need for embellishment a-la-Hollywood, and von Breuning illuminates his subject from the real-world viewpoint.

His book takes its name from the building, the Schwarzspanierhaus (House of the Black Spaniard) - Beethoven's last residence, and where he died on Monday, March 26, 1827. In Vienna today, the site of the house (demolished ca.1904) is Schwarzspanierstrasse 15, marked with a memorial plaque and the characteristic red and white Austrian banner. In his day the address was 200 Alsergrund am Glacis. Because of its Beethoven connection the street was later renamed Schwarzspanierstrasse: the composer's swarthy complexion in his youth prompted some to call him The Black Spaniard - which in turn might have been what induced a few revisionist claims in our day that the composer was negro.

When Gerhard von Breuning died in 1892 he was the last survivor of those who had personally known Beethoven. Though his accounts were written late in life, he was there to witness the events of the composer's last years. This gives us not only a more immediate picture, but perhaps more importantly, bottom-line details which shed a bright light on what transpired more than a century and a half ago. This proximity gives special value to accounts like these.

Among the book's photographs are Beethoven's desk, the entrance hall and main door to the very apartment he occupied in the Schwarzspanierhaus, the building's exterior, an intriguiging floor plan of the actual dwelling, and Gerhard von Breuning himself in old age.

Perhaps the most compelling illustration is a superb photograph of Beethoven's life-mask, made by Franz Klein in 1812. It's compelling because it offers a literal glimpse into the past: Beethoven lived before the advent of photography, but this life mask represents him effectively as he looked at 42 and gives us the most accurate rendering we have of his physical features. Artists might disagree - but this illustration, by its very immediacy, seems to enlarge and strengthen the links in the chain that binds us to our own musical history.

Von Breuning's reports range from the humorous and fascinating - about Beethoven's fondness for puns and sarcasm - to the exasperating and even heartbreaking: Gerhard was devastated when as a young adult the numerous handwritten notes he had received from Beethoven were inadvertently discarded by a servant who thought they were trash.

This book is for those who want to know about Beethoven from someone who truly knew him. Historians compile and present an amalgam of data; author von Breuning via editor Solomon takes us into a courtroom and displays primary evidence unsullied by the traditional legendary gloss, the ghosts of myth, and the passage of more than 17 decades. Though no-one's memory is infallible, he still places before us, devoid of cosmetic veneer, the raw material from which we can experience our own reactions, form our own opinions, and draw our own conclusions.

The editor of this work has prepared a book that can be read and enjoyed by both reader and scholar. It's content is authentic, not synthetic - a treasury of material taken from a primary source: someone who literally knew Beethoven and who reports from this distinctive perspective. There are few if any substitutes for accounts like these, and a more superlative book of this type would be hard to imagine.

There's no other book quite like it so its singularity makes it quite special. About Beethoven there are countless tomes, perhaps more than about any other composer, but this book provides something rather unique, which adds to its value: a compendium of fascinating details that would be difficult, if not altogether impossible, to find in any other single volume. The book is, in a word, superb and for both the reader and researcher can be enjoyable, even fascinating and, perhaps more importantly, enlightening reading.

JEFFREY DANE

It is a tricky thing to adapt columns written with a particular region in mind into a book with a national audience -- a special trick, perhaps, when a kind of gardening calendar is retained to organize the text. Henry Homeyer's practical "reflections and observations" may seem most germane to gardeners in New England, but if you know enough to place his experience in your own climate, you will find plenty to interest you.

What I like best about this book are the pieces that transcend zones entirely, such as a report of his visit to White House gardens and his interview with Jamaica Kincaid. Discreet illustrations (block prints, a few black and white photos, and a few drawings) add to the text. And there is an excellent index, something which alas can no longer be taken for granted in gardening books.

Despite my misgivings about how serviceable some of these essays are beyond New England, Henry Homeyer's plain and personal prose reminded me of the great American garden writer, Henry Mitchell. I think Mitchell would not be unhappy to find this book on a shelf alongside his own.

Gives history of relations between the Churches of England and Rome, from the beginnings until 1980 (i have the second edition, by Pawley and his wife). Annoying at times, because it assumes knowledge i don't possess (fluency in French, certain historical episodes), and because it sticks strictly to its purpose, refusing to be sidetracked by any of numerous tempting side paths. Nevertheless, a fascinating book, very detailed (at times), and clearly accurate (or a remarkable fraud) where it speaks. Slow reading, because of the detail and the convolutions of history.

If you know and love cryptic crossword puzzles, this book really doesn't need a review. You already know Henry Hook and his puzzles, and know whether you like them or not.

For the cryptic-crossword neophyte, this book offers a brief--possibly too brief--introduction to solving cryptic clues before launching into the puzzles. If you're just starting out with cryptics, you'll probably feel you're in over your head very quickly. (However, many people who like cryptics ENJOY feeling in over their head.) I'd recommend the Random House Cryptic books as a better starting point, because they open with some really simple puzzles (though by the end, they get trickier than the puzzles in this treasury).

The book's seventy puzzles are relatively tame (as cryptics go), with the occasional really-obscure light or the "how-on-earth-does-THAT-parse?" clue, but nothing that'd pose a problem for your semi-seasoned solver. The last dozen or so puzzles venture into variety formats--I'd have preferred more variety puzzles, but tastes vary on this count. In the end, this book is no sumptuous feast of verbal bedevilment, but it is a good bread-and-butter type fix for your cryptic cravings.

I tried to read this late at night in a guest room in Palo Alto (while I was still on Eastern time), at a house where I was also urged to read _Up and down California_, the narrative based on Brewer's own letters, still in print (first edition 1930). I got the latter via interlibrary loan but the memory of Alsup's vistas of rock has brought me to Amazon to buy my own copies of both.

Just when I think I've seen every modern-day compilation of Thoreau quotations, I turn down an aisle at a used bookstore and gasp in pleasant surprise. Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1850 about "a sweet wild world which lives along the strain of the wood thrush," and here William White reveals glimpses of that realm through selected journal entries arranged by season. White rightly asserts that the transcendentalist's formal poems are clumsy concoctions and are less than memorable, but his prose -- especially portions of his journal -- contains a poetic quality worthy of transcribing into free verse form. Hence, this volume. Individual excerpts appear on separate pages and are enhanced with 16 seasonal pen-and-ink illustrations by Georgia Dearborn. A tasteful gift idea for nature lovers, and certainly less expensive than one of the innumerable coffee table books with full-color photos accompanied by random quotes.

The 42 contributors report from all fields of ongoing research within the field of Talent and Giftedness Development. Contributors are (in addition to the 3 editors) as famous names as Howard Gardner, Joyce Van Tassel-Baskin, D.K. Simonton, Barbara Kerr, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (Flow), Miraca Gross - to mention a few in the order of appearance. The proceedings are not only about talented and gifted children, but about adults as well, and all sorts of talent/giftedness are under scrutiny, from multiple gifted persons over single field gifted to savants - to give you some 'land-marks'. There are contributions about e.g. * pros et cons as for early college education, gifted underachievers etc., and contributions with focus on * 'the special population of gifted learners' as females, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the racial and ethnic minorities. * Further the very crucial subject: the influence of emotions on the development of the gifted, mentally and socially - is covered. * The self-perception of the gifted in a world which cannot provide realistic mirroring. * How gifted people are interacting with each other, in the family, and with siblings.

A multitude of entrances to the problems of 'the gifted learner in western societies' is representated in this volume, covering a broad range of perspectives. Further, there is elaborated reference material in connection to each contribution, directing you where to go for further reading. A good, broadbased introduction to the many areas a world, build on more modest intelligences, need to take into account, if wanting the gifted to be an integrated asset and the 'hope for the future' they actually are born to be.

Professor Allen Speer has kindly shared with us the innermost thoughts of his Confederate ancestor, Colonel William Henry Asbury Speer through a diary and a number of letters to his folks back home. While the diary does show the horrors of the war and the problems of being captured, the focus of the work is to show the inner conflicts suffered by those who answered the call to duty to fight for their nation (whether it was the Confederate States of America or the United States) and the pain those men felt because they were fighting against friends and family.

The bitterness of family members over the war and the death of loved ones is made painfully clear by a letter written by Col. Speer's mother several years after he was killed fighting in the 28th North Carolina at Reams Station in August of 1864. This book brings us closer to understanding the complexities of the Civil War, a war that was not only fought between nations, but between friends and families.