Anatomy Of A Life Possessed is the personal memoir and testimony of Maria Ferrara Pema, a woman who was possessed and tortured by a Catholic priest for 27 years. Anatomy Of A Life Possessed is a graphic, disturbing memoir that hides no secrets and spares no sharpness in its accusations. With today's focus on pastoral pedophilia, it is an unhappy and overlooked truth that most sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and exploitation by priests is perpetrated against their female parishioners -- and always has been. Anatomy Of A Life Possessed is raw, severe, and unforgettable reading.

Although I do not work in the medical arena, I have now read both of Ali Waris's books on antitrust, in an attempt to better understand the complexities of our laws on antitrust, monopolies, and mergers. In his most recent book, Antitrust for Physicians, he is able to present this complicated subject in layperson's terms. His material is well researched and referenced, and comes across as a very credible source. Physicians should make this book a primer, and this should probably even be a course taught in medical schools.

Traditional African powers and imposed western ideas are juxtaposed in this complex and interesting story. If you liked Barbara Kingsolver's "Poisonwood Bible", chances are you will like this book too. In Antonia Saw the Oryx First we meet characters through the eyes of an American doctor who has been in Africa long enough to feel more African than American, yet her perspective is a mixture of both cultures. The characters are complex and very different from each other. Each character seems to represent a different face of Africa - the precolonial, the traditional, the colonized desperate to reclaim his roots, the native-born colonist, and the reincarnated new Africa.

Early in the story, a young woman - Esther - is brought to the doctor's clinic near death from a violent, upsetting episode with a sailor. It took me a while to find the courage to return to the book after that, but the return was worth it. We witness Esther's remarkable rebirth and her gradual transformation to a healer of a more traditional sort. We are thrust(along with the doctor) between the world of traditional African medicine and western medicine, often wondering which really has the greatest power and will prevail in the constantly changing African world. Who belongs in Africa, and who can rightfully find their own place there? The answers will have you thinking a long time!

This delightful and creative book of prayers for children deals with issues that children face such as sibling rivalry and scary monsters. These simple prayers instil a delight in creation while teaching God's love to both child and adult.

Garcia Marquez As A Teaching Tool
One has to come to the USA to find the most authoritative treatises on the Colombian Nobel Prize (1982). And then it is in the USA, although populated by Hispanic experts, that one has to come to find the most advanced knowledge on Maestro Garcia Marquez in the most academic of senses. To this collection of expertise is that the book by the Valdeses. They have brought together several essays by several experts on Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I do not think there is a more reviewed book, Hispanic book of this century for sure, than the novel studied in the masterful collection.

Menocal's now classic (and still controversial) book is well worth the trouble of finding a copy (I waited 6 weeks for mine). She uncovers a hidden thread of influence on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch (and thus our Western Heritage) that most scholars would have preferred lay forgotten.

Yes, Virginia, there really wasn't a "Renaissance." Instead, European authors tapped into the great watershed of Islamic culture and borrowed the best of it, recasting it for a Christian audience.

Michael Kucher
University of Washington, Tacoma

Excellent and informative history of the developement of violent groups (right- & left-wing) in the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina. Should be made a text book in Argentine high schools. Includes an account of the violent activities and background of the guerillas and state-terrorism.

I am a student of this beautiful art and have purchased different books on the subject. This one is my favorite as it explains the different basic stitches and pictures the instructions with such simplicity. Brazilian Embroidery looks difficult, but with this book she manages to instruct with such ease, that anyone can understand it. Great book for the beginner and yet one you will never want to do without! She takes you through the different threads used, the tools needed, and even how to launder your finished masterpiece. Very thorough instruction of stitches and how to use them to make floral designs.

LIke its sister volume,Sevilla Forma Urbis, this luxuriously produced coffee-table sized book is a feast for the eyes. Each glossy, highly-detailed photograph, in gorgeous color, is one of hundreds of arial views of Napoli, Italy. Atlante Di Napoli is an outstanding example of photography as art. Each crisp, sharp photograph has an accompanying page with a non-detailed outline or template of the featured area, and these outline pages would provide hundreds of fascinating design elements for many art mediums. What sets this book apart is the apparently artless arrangements of the buildings, objects and natural formations that comprise Napoli. In the end, these photographs become less a factual record of the current metropolitan and coastline real estate and more an artistic exploration of color and pattern--a sort of arial example of Chaos Theory. Coastal lines, strings of bright red taxicabs, buildings snuggled next to each other all constitute a brilliant, chaotic design that somehow seems artifical and natural simultaneously. Artists, photographers, travelers and students of life will treasure this gem of a book!

Whitshaw spends her life in an arid part of Spain trying to put together and understand several pieces of an unknown pre-Roman ancient civilization. Among the pieces of her most interesting puzzle are an ancient but apparently still functioning (in 1928) aquaduct with no discoverable destination, a castle built of multiple layers each from a different era, unusual ancient mining processes in the rich nearby mining fields, a very puzzling rectangular pool cut in the bottom of the Rio Tinto river, several different and very curious water sources one with an unknown "temple" somewhere out under a desert floor, and the fascinating villagers and local natives of a time when this area was very remote and inaccessable. This is one of my all-time favorite books as it gives not only some very real and mysterious puzzles for the mind to gnaw on but a strong flavor for the time and place Elena writes from. She also suggests other aquaducts scattered along the Rio Tinto river and describes how the area guarded by the castle was the entrance to one of the ancient world's richest mineral fields worked by humans and perhaps, well, something else which is too small and peculiar to be human and digs vertical shafts into mineral deposits unlike any later miners. She also searches for the ways that the ancients got the wealth of this vast mineral field out into the wider world. Truly a book full of food for thought.