Continuum Publishing Group

Is religious education possible?; a philosophical investigation.

Hand (Institute of Education, U. of London) tackles the unresolved debate in the philosophy of education about whether non-confessional religious education — the attempt to impart religious understanding without also instilling or nurturing religious belief — is logically possible. Some philosophers have argued that religious propositions constitute an autonomous epistemological class or "form of knowledge," and that understanding a form of knowledge involves holding certain propositions of that form to be true or false. Hand contends that the second premise of the argument is true but the first is not. He argues that religious statements make sense within the discourse we all share about persons, and thus can be understood and appreciated by everyone, even when the truth claims made within the religious sphere are not accepted — therefore, it does make sense to include religious education in the schools. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Japanese linguistics; an introduction.

Yamaguchi has taught Japanese language and linguistics in Singapore and Malaysia over the past five years. Drawing from experiences teaching an introductory linguistics course at the U. of Singapore in 2003, the book is designed as a course text for undergraduate students who have completed basic Japanese grammar and want to gain more advanced and systematic knowledge of the Japanese language. No previous linguistic knowledge or training in linguistics is assumed. The text focuses on phonetics and phonology, morphology and lexical semantics, syntax, vocabulary, and writing systems. A forthcoming companion text will address pragmatics, discourse, culture and conversation. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Jeanette Winterson; a contemporary critical guide.

Andermahr (English, U. of Northampton) and her 10 co-contributors offer a critical introduction to British novelist Jeanette Winterson. The winner of numerous literary awards, Winterson has had a tumultuous relationship with her critics since her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in the 1980s. The collection of essays offers insights into the writer's style, her novels and their characters, her adaptations for stage and screen, and the writer as a lesbian and outspoken public figure. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Jesus in twentieth-century literature, art, and movies.

Burns (early Christian studies, U. of British Columbia) presents ten essays in six areas about the portrayal of Jesus in 20th-century media, a theme that elicited lively interest when presented in a panel discussion at a regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in May 2004. The sections include modern uses of Biblical exegesis, antithetical treatments of Marxism, Romantic and Freudian applications of sexual love, Jewish treatments of the crucified Christ, a Muslim life of Christ, and treatments of Christ in two recent movies (being The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ). Eight (small) color images illustrate the section of Jewish treatments of the crucified Christ. The book is not indexed. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Judith Butler; live theory.

Kirby (sociology and anthropology, U. of New South Wales, Australia) explores the writings of American post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler (UC- Berkeley), whose work spans philosophy and contemporary theory as well as political commentary and popular culture. The author examines several important themes — gender, sexuality, and performance; language, power, performativity; and identity and politics — in a selection of Butler's works: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, and The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Undoing Gender. Also included is a discussion of Butler commenting on other scholars and critics, and others commenting on Butler, and an interview of Butler conducted by Kirby. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Knights Templar; the essential history, rev.ed. (reprint, 2006)

This is a paperback reprint of the 2006 edition of Howarth's history of the Templars, written in 1982. Comparison of the two editions does not show any changes, particularly in light of the immense amount of research done in the past quarter century. Nevertheless, this is a solid popular history of the Templars that avoids the wild mythologies that have been created about them. Occasional historical errors do not detract from the essential accuracy of Howarth's work. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Language acquisition and development; studies of learners of first and other languages.

Sixteen international academics and independent scholars contribute 16 chapters investigating and connecting some of those aspects of first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition which might be of interest and value to applied linguists and language teaching practitioners. Included are critical reviews of existing literature and reports on recent research. Topics addressed include the role of proto-reading activities in the acquisition and development of reading skills, the transfer of reading from the language of wider communication to the L1, past tense verb processing for L1 learners of English, audiovisual mental aids in language learning and use, internalization, affect in teacher talk, attitudes of language learners towards target varieties, recasts during meaning-focused communication, the influence of children's literature on young L2 learners' writing, comprehension in the early stages of L2 acquisition, and perceptions of culture by British students learning French. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Language engineering.

Independent researcher Georgiev focuses on written language rather than spoken as he examines the discipline and results of natural language processing as it is most closely associated with computer-user interfaces. With extensive examples in English, French and German he describes morphology, syntax and semantics using the C (C++) programming language, with topics including the dictionary of wordforms, procedures to reduce ambiguity, parsing, orthographical rules, German grammatical rules, lexical semantics, representation of knowledge, machine translation, question answering, content recognition (and text attribution to a particular subject field), information retrieval and German and French sequences of speech. This accessible treatment should serve well as a reference suitable for computer scientists, linguists, and practitioners of linguistic programming. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Language in the media; representations, identities, ideologies.

Sixteen academics and researchers from England, Ireland, Wales, the U.S., and Sweden contribute 14 chapters to an analysis of language in the media and the nature of language, communication and meaning- making processes more generally. The text evolved from a September 2005 conference of the same title held at the U. of Leeds, UK. The authors draw on a wide range of media text types, including print media sources (both written and visual), radio and television broadcasts, and new media genres such as blogs, email, and hyperpoetry. Coverage includes the representation of language issues in print media in the UK and the U.S.; national identities, citizenship, and globalization, and language ideological debates in three non-English speaking countries — Germany, Sweden, and Luxembourg; contact and codeswitching in multilingual mediascapes, specifically radio and television; youth, gender, and cyber- identities in the new media; and discursive patterns of authentication and othe ring. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Language, knowledge and pedagogy; functional linguistic and sociological perspectives.

Christie (language and literacy education, University of Melbourne) and Martin (linguistics, University of Sydney) have produced a study of how learning is achieved through language. The emphasis in the essays is cooperation among linguists, sociologists and pedagogues to understand how knowledge is gained and how different socio-economic groups use language to learn. The contributors all base their essays on the work of linguist M.A.K Halliday and sociologist Basil Berstein. Topics include theories of language and education, the way in which language is learned in childhood, the different modes in which language is used in the teaching of the sciences and the humanities. The stated goal is to create the optimum methods for transmitting knowledge in the schoolroom to students from many backgrounds. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The laughter of the oppressed; ethical and theological resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo.

What does it mean for someone to laugh while they are suffering or disempowered, asks Bussie (religion, Capital U.), why are people laughing who have no ostensible cause for laughter, and what ethical and theological significance, if any, is there to such laughter? To find answers, she looks in Elie Wiesel's Gates of the Forest, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Shusaku Endo's Silence. T&T Clark is an imprint of Continuum. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The legacy of John Rawls. (reprint, 2005)

From the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, Rawls has been a considered a leading light in moral and political philosophy. This perception has not abated since his death and has only grown upon the publication of his complete works. These 11 new essays concentrate on the legacy of Rawls's work and its impact on questions of ethics and justice, covering the unity of Rawls's work and thought, self-realization and the priority of fair equity of opportunity, taking the distinction between persons seriously, feminism and liberal neutrality according to Rawls, public reason and the moral foundations of liberalism, dilemmas of public reason in terms of pluralism as well as polarization and instability, public reason and religion, the new Kantian moral theory and its relation to Rawls, and the Law of People in its old and new forms. The collection closes with a survey of Rawls's legacies. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Levinas and Camus; humanism for the twenty-first century.

How do these two giants of twentieth-century thought compare on issues such as intellectual resistance to totalitarianism and political violence, genocide, religious faith? Sessler (political philosophy, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York) explores the ideas of each about the ethics and practice of opposing tyranny, describing intellectual adherence and resistance to totalitarianism as key themes in twentieth-century intellectual history. He gives brief biographies of Levinas and Camus, then describes their perceptions of Hitler and "political Nietzscheanism," citing a wealth of texts in support of his arguments. He continues with a critique of Soviet-style Marxism and Hegelian history, then shifts to consider religious humanism within the context of Levinas and Camus, including issues raised by conditions in Middle Eastern geo-politics. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Lexicology; a short introduction.

Halliday and Yallop introduce the study of lexical items, commonly called words, its place in the large field of linguistics, and its relation to other areas of linguistic study. They include a section on meaning, with discussions of etymology, a social view, cognitive linguistics, translation, and other topics. The study was first published in 2004 as part of the series Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Linguistic minorities and modernity; a sociolinguistic ethnography, 2d ed.

Originally published in 1999 by Longman/Pearson, Heller's (sociology and equity studies, U. of Toronto) text reports findings from an ethnographic study conducted from 1991-1995 exploring what it means to be francophone and to speak French, as seen through the life of one French-language minority high school in Toronto. The research explores how the school constructs and implements its linguistics norms as part of its political, nationalist mission, which in turn can be understood as part of a minority's struggles for power. The text also examines how students are positioned with respect to the school's public discourse on language and identity, and how they take up, collaborate with, or resist this discourse. The second edition includes a new preface discussing ways that issues raised in the study remain current today. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Long and winding roads; the evolving artistry of the Beatles.

Womack analyzes the lengthy musical career of the Beatles, from their origins as the Quarry Men, their partnership with George Martin, their methods of pushing musical boundaries in their later career, films, and the band's eventual demise. Along the way, he follows the progression of specific albums and songs. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Making waves; new cinemas of the 1960s.

Newell-Smith explores the proliferation of the new forms of cinema that proliferated primarily in Europe during the 1960s. He begins with Truffaut's 1959 film Les Quatre Cents Coups and ends his discussion in the mid-1970s. He analyzes what was really new in the cinemas of the period, how they were influenced by the changing expectations of audiences, technological innovations, issues such as sex and censorship, and the variety of cinematic movements. The author also profiles the work of three of the most important and revolutionary filmmakers of the time: Godard, Antonioni, and Pasolini. This treatment may be unusual because it attempts to examine the new cinemas within the context of their own time, rather than re-examine topics from the perspective of an outsider from the present. In addition to a general index, an index of film titles also is included. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Male jealousy; literature and film.

Lo (Honk Kong Shue Yan U.) uses examples in literature and film to illustrate the concept of male jealousy in Western cultures, and how these emotions are linked to paranoia. The author examines various artistic works, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Pedro Almodóvar, to show how male jealousy is perpetuated in patriarchal societies, and how the concept of love is never "safe" or "protected" in any sexual relationship. As part of the Continuum Literary Studies series, this book is aimed at students of literature and film. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Mao of business; guerrilla marketing techniques for the new China.

Florida-based author Levenda has been involved in trade with China since 1984 as a representative in China for General Electric, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ericsson, and Legrand. He argues that many available books on China and Chinese business concepts are based on the ancient Chinese classics, and, while of value, fail to recognize that Chinese people raised in the years after the 1949 Communist revolution were guided not by the Chinese classics but by the spiritual and ethical principles set down in Chairman Mao Ze Dong's Little Red Book. Levenda offers Western business people a number of strategies for successfully doing business in China, based on several key points from Maoist theory and philosophy. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Marx and alienation in contemporary society.

Padgett (philosophy, Bellarmine U.) argues that Karl Marx qualifies as a philosopher by virtue of his theory of alienation, which he contends (contrary to many other scholars) remains as central in Marx's later writings as it does in the earlier works. Padgett offers an exegesis of the theory of alienation and seeks to demonstrate that it remains relevant in the current era, especially as it illuminates excessive consumerism, the negative effects of globalization, economic inequalities between people, and the intensity of our interaction with the material world. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)