Ohio University Press
Anglophone poetry in colonial India, 1780-1913; A critical anthology.
Gibson (English and gender studies, U. of North Carolina at Greensboro) collects and introduces the works of 34 poets writing in English in colonial India from 1780 to 1913 (the long 19th century). The majority of poets are, unsurprisingly, of British origin, but the works of a number of native Indian poets are included as well, Nobel winner Rabindranath Tagore perhaps the most notable of them. Gibson includes notes on vocabulary and historical and cultural references and includes biographical introductions for the poets. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The borders of integration; Polish migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870-1924.
This interesting volume on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Polish immigration presents a comparative analysis of the experience of Polish workers living in the Ruhr valley of Germany and in northeastern Pennsylvania. While involved with mineral extraction in both locations, the immigrants' experiences varied greatly as a result of cultural and political differences in the host countries which informed, in sometimes unexpected ways, the general welfare, prosperity and eventual assimilation outcomes of these populations. The volume is well researched and includes several black and white photographs and maps. McCook is a professor of history at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A comprehensive Indonesian-English dictionary; 2d ed. (CD-ROM included)
Stevens (linguistics, Queens College, City U. of New York) is the author of numerous articles on the Indonesian lexicon and on phonology; the late Schmidgall-Tellings was a freelance translator and author of numerous books and articles on the Indonesian language. Their reference work is based on some two decades of research and documentation, drawing on the assistance of translators and interpreters in Indonesia, the U.S., Australia, and Europe, and resulting in the most authoritative resource on the Indonesian language today. The text is a compilation of all the roots, words, phrases, proverbs, idioms, compounds, and derivatives the authors found in written and spoken Indonesian, including Dutch words and phrases appearing in Indonesian legal documents. This second edition contains hundreds of new entries and an accompanying CD-ROM. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Hatred at home; Al-Qaida on trial in the American Midwest.
This discussion of the arrests of three terrorism conspiracy suspects in Ohio in the years following the 9/11 attacks examines the mindset of FBI agents and law enforcement as a whole, tasked with preventing further attacks and finding "terrorists" at a every turn. Welsh-Huggins (legal affairs reporter, Associated Press, Columbus, Ohio) covered the story of Iyman Faris, one of the convicted men, in 2003 and uses court transcripts and interviews with law enforcement officials and and members of the Ohio Muslim community to recreate the events and circumstances around the arrests. The volume is well researched and includes copious references and a bibliography. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Indian angles; English verse in colonial India from Jones to Tagore.
"I argue here that all poets writing in English in India worked necessarily in a web of affiliation and rupture, identifications and disidentifications. They inhabited polyglot locations. They defined themselves within, against, and across canonical understandings...." So states Gibson (English, and women's and gender studies, U. of North Carolina at Greensboro). Her study includes only those poems written by poets born in India (with one exception). She investigates the deep appreciation of English poetry in India, the works created, and the context of their creation. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The intentional spectrum and intersubjectivity; phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians.
Barber (philosophy, St. Louis U.) offers clarification between the systematic philosophies of John McDowell and Robert Brandom, two philosophers associated with the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians as well as analytic philosophy, by taking as a starting point a debate they had in the late 1990s about perception in the pages of journals and books. He reviews this debate in the first couple chapters, focusing on representationalism vs. inferentialism, the intelligibility of empirical content, and rational constraint. These debates, he argues, have broad implications. At stake are the role of intersubjectivity in knowledge, common sense and our access to the world, and the implications for ethics. Barber draws on phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl, Alfred Shutz and Emmanual Levinas to mediate McDowell and Brandom's debate, arguing that phenomenology offers much in the way of its constitutive methodology, the intentional spectrum from the perceptual encounter with the everyday world to self-reflective transcendental phenomenology, and its ethical approach to intersubjectivity. This is a technical book and probably not suited for an average reader without a background. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Midwestern native garden; native alternatives to nonnative flowers and plants; an illustrated guide.
After noting that gardening with wildflowers is a growing environmentally-conscious trend, the coauthors of Prairie Directory of North America list native alternatives to nonnative plants. For example, they recommend planting butterfly milkweed and orange coneflowers instead of orange daylilies that are naturalized/invasive in the Midwest. The guide includes color photographs; information on John Bartram, the "father of American botany"; a glossary; bibliography, and resources. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Negotiating a perilous empowerment; Appalachian women's literacies.
In some environments learning to read and write means a painful separation from part of one's identity — a denial of one's roots and a frightening leap into the unknown. Sometimes the difficulties can be mitigated by the use of the new powers, but the struggle to come to terms can be ongoing. Locklear (literature and language, U. of North Carolina at Asheville) offers an intimate study of Appalachian women's experiences. She explains in her introduction that she relied heavily on the assertions of one scholar in particular, James Paul Gee, and his book, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses — in which he explains the dilemmas of literacy in the context of primary discourses (those connected with family and community) and secondary discourses (those connected with the broader world). (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The tenets of cognitive existentialism.
Drawing on insights from hermeneutics, Ginev (philosophy of science, U. of Sofia, Bulgaria) develops an interpretive approach to scientific practices. After proposing a rereading of Heidegger's existential conception of science, he looks at cognitive existentialism in relation to science's theoretical objects, biological research, the postmodern philosophy of science, the feminist philosophy of science, and the critical philosophy of nature. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Transversal rationality and intercultural texts; essays in phenomenology and comparative philosophy.
Jung (emeritus political science, Moravian College, Pennsylvania) has collected 13 essays originally published between 1965 and 2009 that provide a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy. Among his topics are transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism in the age of globalization, Confucianism and existentialism, Ernest Fenollosa's etymosinology in the age of global communication, the revolutionary dialectics of Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the ethical question of reinhabiting the Earth. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
