I am an angel & spirit communicator, and the angels recommended that I read this book shortly after I began communicating with them. It contains powerful insights about our lives here on earth, and answers questions related to karma, death and immortality, love and relationships, and the course of human history. If you do not believe in angels, you may just change your mind after reading this book. A must-read for anyone on a spiritual path ( and even those who aren't!). Open your heart to the angels!

I believe in God, but I always wondered what He was doing when a child is beaten to death, or whether he took a coffee break when the Holocaust happened. Ariel's explanation of what we perceive as evil gave me peace, and a great sense of safety. I don't mean physical safety, because now I understand that it's not the point, but spiritual safety.

Thank you Ariel for sharing so much love and compassion with the readers of this book. Ariel is a being we call "angel" and she speaks to all of us on topics such as religion, history, reincarnation, karma, the universe and, of course, love. This book was a fascinating, quick read and I plan to keep it and refer to it on a regular basis.

very explicit. Interesting and innovative aproaches for the restorative esthetic dentistry. Defenetly a MUST in every dental practice !

Although OVER THE RAINBOW first appeared in print almost a decade ago, it continues to have no equal in the interdisciplinary study of religion, film, and popular culture. Nathanson's subtitle is THE WIZARD OF OZ AS A SECULAR MYTH OF AMERICA. He takes great care to define terms such as "secular" and "myth," as well as that elusive but crucial word "religion." Thus the reader is engaged in a stimulating conversation with theorists like Gregor Goethals, John Wiley Nelson, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Robert Bellah, Roland Barthes, Elaide, John Dominic Crossan and many others around a familiar -- but via Nathanson, always surprising -- common text, the 1939 film THE WIZARD OF OZ.

While Nathanson himself is a great admirer of the film, the importance of this study goes far beyond that particular production; it sets a standard of scholarship that is unrivaled in the field.

I have used this book in undergraduate religion and popular culture courses at two colleges in the northeast and also at the University of Alabama. It has been exceedingly helpful in introducing students to the religious character that lurks just below the surface of secular American culture -- what some scholars have called the "implicit" religiosity of popular culture. The book has opened students' eyes to religion in places they least expected to find it (indeed, some students even expect to encounter the Devil in productions that emanate from Hollywood). But it has also introduced them to perennial religious themes and enduring problems in the study of religion, thereby demonstrating to them that the academic study of religion is not only fascinating, it is also fun.

Spreading Misandry is clearly one of the most important books of the new millennium. The battle of the sexes, it turns out, was won. Not by the men, though we've heard time and again how women have suffered under patriarchy. Nathanson and Young reveal how radical feminism took root and then took over. Pop culture took its cue from it and has depicted men, typically, over the past few years as one of two things: evil or inadequate. Think Sylvester Stallone. Think Tim Allen. Actually, just start thinking. That's what this book encourages. No, it's not a license for men to fight back, or to respond to hate with hate. It says that stereotypes and hatred of all kinds are unhelpful and injurious. Ladies, it's time to stand by your man again, as he stands by you. A must read, especially for Oprah.

This book is a serious and articulate academic work, a well documented and insightful examination of misandry in our popular cultural expressions. It is surprisingly easy to read for a book of such intellectual and critical caliber. It is the first part of a three-volume set to be called Beyond the Fall of Man. I presume that Man here is meant to mean men, not women, illustrating the authors' observation that in our current social context the convention that we belong to one species is no longer to be presumed.

The larger purpose of the trilogy according to Nathanson and Young is to "help reverse the current polarization of men and women by laying the foundation for a new social contract between the sexes - one that takes seriously the distinctive needs and problems of both sexes. But this is far beyond the scope of this volume." In the words of authors, the "immediate goal in this [first] book has been the rather modest one of describing a phenomenon or, to be more precise, the link between two phenomena: pop cultural misandry and ideological feminism."

The authors have focused first on clearly illustrating the spreading of misandry, deliberate or unwitting, throughout much of contemporary popular culture. They support their observations meticulously within a formally structured approach. The first seven chapters are a detailed examination of instances of misandric commercial entertainment productions. The authors take an abundance of examples from the various genres in the visual arts, organize them in groupings according to their differently nuanced misandric themes, and examine each instance in a thorough critical exercise. They go to great lengths to avoid any examples but those that are clearly and unequivocally misandric.

The latter part of the book is an exploration of the implications of the phenomenon they have documented. To explain this relatively recent trend in the cultural idiom of Western societies in general and North America in particular, the authors investigate the relationship between popular cultural expressions of misandry and the historical development of feminist thought and influence, both academic and popular. In doing so, they situate both these phenomena within the context of the practical legacies of postmodern philosophical thought and its offshoots.

Nathanson and Young have succeeded without any doubt in defining the characteristics of the phenomenon that they isolate, and in demonstrating it's astounding ubiquity. They also go a long way to showing its intimate relationship with the assumptions, uncritical and unconscious or critical and deliberate, of the politically correct views on gender legitimated by the academic world.

One may, and certainly many will, find fault with their views on the pervasiveness of misandry in today's cultural forms, or on its meaning and importance, but the fault will not be due to any lack of intellectual rigour on the part of the authors. If anything they have been more thorough than should be necessary. Were it not for the contentious reception they could anticipate, such an exhaustive analysis in support of their theses might be considered unnecessary.

This book has shown me how ignorant I was at any conscious level of the rampant misandric sub texts peppering the daily fare we are being served by popular culture. As a man I have become used to a kind of generalized rhetorical misandry in the public discourse over the years, which I credited as the temporary by product of a justified and necessary feminist political movement. I compared it to the somewhat similar anti-white discourses that accompanied black and native militancy in the sixities and seventies, which I also refused to take personally or to consider as more than an impermanent expedient for sympathetic political ends. But if the authors are right, and I believe they are in the light of cumulative personal experience, misandry (and its uncritical acceptance) is not such a relatively innocuous and temporary political event. It is an indication of a far more serious malaise.

Being the rhetorical culprit does become tiring. Any white, middle-aged, north- American, middle-class, etc, male can vouch for it. If one has a strong sense of personal identity, a good sense of perspective, and at least a little sense of humour, it is by no means a truly great burden. But once being the universal culprit becomes by definition fully personal, a fundamentally defining identity, almost an inescapable raison d'être, how can it not be hard to bear, and to what end should it be borne?

I think Nathanson and Young, among other things, have hit upon the subtle fact that to remain enfranchised and politically effective in our society today almost requires becoming a vocal victim. This means victimizers are both in demand and in dwindling supply. Men (imagined in whatever particular variant expedient to the circumstances of the moment) are traditionally handily cast in that role, and today, they are rapidly becoming the only candidates for the job. What happens when, as a group, they too must claim the rights of victims, or simply decide to do so in self-defense, or out of political self-interest? If all victims are equal, and both women and men are victims, equally worthy by definition, where do we look for the unworthy victimizer required by ideological definition? Put another way, as unlikely as it may sound, the growing misandry Nathanson and Young have found in popular culture, if pushed to its logical conclusion within the context of the ideological and philosophical roots they have identified is an indication of a deep and pervasive misanthropy to come. As a philosophical foundation for political life, public human interaction, it bodes ill for the prospects of humanity does it not?

I think the book is an extremely responsible and courageous enterprise, particularly given the prevalent climate in the academic environment the authors inhabit and among the peers with whom they share it. I should like to thank them both for opening my eyes and my mind to the dimensions of a problem to which I have given only scant attention.

Isn't it amazing how, in these supposedly enlightened times, when most negative stereotypes have been dismissed as mere products of ignorance, one stereotype continues to be embraced by the culture more than ever-namely, the negative male stereotype? In fact, misandry (the hatred of men) is not only acceptable to most people; it's actually the only form of bigotry deemed "politically correct." It's hard to tell which is more amazing-the fact that misandry is so rampant in popular culture or that it seems to be invisible to so many people despite its prevalence.

It's precisely this phenomenon that authors Nathanson and Young analyze in their fascinating book. Ostensibly about misandry in popular culture, it's really about much more than that. For the authors use their detailed analyses of popular movies and televisions shows as a departure point to discuss everything from the effects of industrialization on gender identity to the decline of journalistic objectivity. In fact, much of the delight in reading this book comes from how the authors are able to draw such provocative and surprising connections between seemingly unrelated topics. (For this reason, the book reminds me a bit of Camille Paglia's "Sexual Persona," although the present work will be much more accessible to the average reader.)

That accounts for the book's first two hundred pages. But it's after that, as the work moves into its final two chapters and the authors begin addressing the roots of misandry, that the going really gets interesting. Here the authors discuss such rarely acknowledged issues as racism in the early feminist movement and, in one flat-out brilliant section, they provide the best discussion of the relationship between deconstruction theory and feminism that I've ever read. These final two chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

Doubtless some readers will not agree with all of the authors' arguments. But the open-minded reader will nonetheless find much here that is fascinating and thought provoking.