This was a great book. I recommend it to anybody who has gone through a divorce.

The 2nd edition to this books introduces readers to the complex narratives on gender in modern society. The numerous articles included in this volume represent some of the leading scholarship on gender in society, and introduces readers to the theoretical and methodological works of numerous researchers.This anthology is important and essential to scholars, feminists, and teachers. This is an excellent book for graduate student and undergraduate students alike.

It may appear odd that there has been no synthetc history of Hispanics in Colorado, a state with a large Spanish-surnamed population and a Spanish name. Part of the reason for this is that there are actually two Hispanic Colorados. One is in the southern part of the state, a place ecologically and culturally more a part of northern New Mexico than the mountain West. When the Colorado Territory was formed in 1859, surveyors simply drew a rectangle around Denver forming the future state from Kansas, Utah and New Mexico territories. As a consequence those New Mexicans, whose roots date back to eighteenth-century Spanish days and who had been settling the San Luis Valley since the early 1850s, found themselves part of Colorado. Then, as irrigation facilitated the rise of the sugar beet industry around Fort Collins and the South Platte Valley, more and more Mexicans migrated from the interior of Mexico to find jobs there. Beginning as a trickle around the turn of the century, thousands came to Colorado during World War I and the 1920s. While the New Mexican Coloradans who were displaced from ththeir lands often mingled with these recent arrivals in the agricultural fields, and mines and factories of Trinidad, Walsenburg and Pueblo, they understood themselve to be different from the new arrivals from Mexico. Indeed, the "Spanish Americans," as they increasingly called themselves, experienced little prejudice in Colorado until the larger numbers of Indo-Hispano Mexicans began to threaten the lily-white future of places like Denver and Fort Collins. By the 1920s, often barred from restaurants and hotels, the Spanish Americans, quite like German Jews disliking the more rustic Russian Jews and "lace Irish" recoiling at "shanty Irish," increasingly distanced themselves from their southern brethren whom they often blamed for bringing segregation and discrimination. (...)These issues of ongoing mestizaje, or mixing, of cultural dynamism, and the diversity of experiences, spiritualities and political perspectives should be central to future chronicles of Colorado Hispanics. While it may be that the Boulder/Aspen/Broncos lifestyles are associated with the glamour of our state, it is actually the hidden histories of Hispanics, workers, cow punchers, farm wives, community activists and all the rest of those concealed in history that give Colorado its special, and most meaningful past. -Doug Monroy, Professor of History and Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies

This is a beautiful book, full of color photos of old and new (mostly new) Santa Fe style homes. If you are looking for how-to advice, historical description, or much text at all, this book is not for you. However, it was a perfect choice for me, since I was (still am) designing a new home and wanted a wide variety of examples of southwest homes. There are chapters on entrances, courtyards, and individual rooms, each page filled with wonderful views of both traditional and more contemporary details. The last section of the book (about 75 pages) focuses on Santa Fe arts, and features baskets, pottery, kachina dolls, furniture, sculpture, paintings and more. A friend loaned this book to me nine months ago, and after turning pages dozens of times and marking favorites with sticky notes, I finally decided to break down and give myself the gift of my own personal copy.

The articles in this collection absolutely blew my mind. This book contains a comprehensive collection of both theorists and practitioners who work in the gender field, writing on topics ranging from semantics to masculinities. If you have an interest in gender as a social construct, this book is for you. I would suggest this selection to anyone in the gender, masculinities, or feminist theory fields. Excellent!

I adore this slice of life on the eastern New Mexico plains, the Llano Estacado. Cabeza de Baca is an amazing lady, and her childhood remembrances are well worth reading for history buffs, who've probably already enjoyed it, as well as for people who just like to know how people lived on ranches in this era.

I read this after borrowing it from a library, but now I really wish I had a copy to keep. If you are a good liberal, you already know that women of color are doubly oppressed. You know that many ppl think all the feminists are white and all the antiracists are male, so the topic can get tired. However, this book was really well done. It covers Black, Latina, Asian, and Native women equally. It talks about women of various class backgrounds and immigration statuses. The articles are accessible to non-academic readers without boring highly educated readers. I particularly love one article which discusses the "domesticization" of bright black girls in public schools. This book may be a little dated by now. But for what it was at the time, it is quite excellent. All womanists and mujeristas should get a copy.

Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and the Truth. By Todd Wilkinson. Johnson Press, Boulder, CO. 343 pp.

Reviewed by Pete Geddes, Program Director, Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment

From the Civil War until roughly Earth Day, commodity production dominated federal land management. This was often at the expense of ecological integrity, economic efficiency, and social sustainability. Todd Wilkinson's new book Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and the Truth adds personal ethics to this list. He demonstrates how bureaucratic and political pressures sacrifice both environment quality and careers to political expediency.

Wilkinson, a western correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor has been following western environmental issues for the last ten years. Science Under Siege reaffirms that bureaucracies function ultimately as machines to protect and perpetuate their budgets and co-dependent political interests. Wilkinson tells the stories of eight well intentioned and hardworking "whistleblowers" and the personal and professional price they pay when their convictions confront the leviathan. The stories of political manipulation and agency retaliation are depressing but important reading for those seriously interested in federal land management reform or bureaucratic pathologies more generally.

For readers east of the Mississippi River, it's important to understand west of the 100th Meridian, the federal government controls of half the Western lands. At the turn of the century, the West was the staging ground for experiments in Progressive Era conservation. Through "scientific management" benevolent, centralized bureaucracies (e.g., the Forest Service) were to stop the abuses of the nation's natural resources. This was a well intentioned, but naive idea. Instead an "iron triangle" emerged among Congress, federal agencies, and clientele (chamber of commerce/stock grower/mining alliances). As this alliance hardened, the federal agencies, dependent upon the political process for budgetary survival, bowed to political pressures. This may come as a surprise to those who believe it's the mission of the Forest Service to preserve 191 million acres of national forests for "future generations". But as Wilkison documents, the interest of these agencies comes at the expense of national taxpayers, sustainable ecosystems, and agency employees.

The danger in a book like this is that Wilkinson opens himself to charges of being a pawn for disgruntled employees. For most of the book Wilkison avoids this trap. He insulates himself in two important ways: First, Wilkinson chooses carefully. He selected eight subjects from a field of 110. To each profile Wilkinson brings in a range of supporting characters. This adds both substance and a soothing tone. Second, by profiling scientists who publish in professional journals, Wilkinson avoids "he-said, she-said" mud-slinging.

His profile of David Mattson is illustrative. A former Yellowstone National Park grizzly bear researcher, Mattson is an internationally respected as a leading authority on grizzly bear populations dynamics. He arrived at his office one morning to find it ransacked; data gone, computer confiscated, and personal files locked away. Mattson's offense? His research was leading him to conclude that grizzly bear populations in and around Yellowstone may be declining over the long-term. This was counter to the official line preached by bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen. Servheen maintains that grizzlies in Yellowstone have multiplied since the species was listed as endangered in 1975. Mattson recently opened his data to criticisms of the entire scientific community by publishing his results in the journal Ecology. Servheen has the same opportunity.

The ultimate vindication for Wilinkson's whistleblowers may be found on the land itself. Readers can judge the veracity of former Forest Service fisheries "combat" biologist Al Espinoza by visiting the Clearwater National Forest in central Idaho. They can see the steep slopes, denuded of trees from top to bottom, and the miles of logging roads responsible for spilling sediment into fragile salmon streams. (I spent a summer reviewing appeals of Forest Service decisions on the Clearwater and provided Wilkinson information.)

In the patchwork pattern of clearcuts on the national forest of Oregon and Washington, whistelblower Jeff DeBonis made his mark. DeBonis, an up and coming Forest Service timber sale planer, was responsible for "getting the cut out" in the region's old-growth forests. The Pacific Northwest is the "Big League" of professional forestry. Here both the trees and the stakes for meeting timber quotas are big. Sometimes the results are disastrous. For example, the Forest Service recently "accepted blame" for trashing the entire Fish Creek watershed on Oregon's Mount Hood National Forest. It will cost taxpayers $5.4 million to restore areas where logging caused some of the "worst landslides in the region" and runs of wild salmon have "been nearly wiped out".

After a crisis of conscience DeBonis left the Forest Service and founded the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE). He notes, "For many people who wear the green (Forest Service) uniform, the working environment is like living in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell". This is a predictable consequence when decisions are made in the political arena. Here, political considerations trump ecological, ethical, and economic factors.

Without explicit reference, Science Under Siege reaffirms the thirty year-old message of public choice economists Noble Laureate James Buchanan, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock, and others. They described how concentrated, motivated interest groups forming around economic benefits, have significant advantages in political struggles against more disorganized groups. The powerful analytical tools of economics can help explain the causes of maladies environmentalist condemn: money-losing clearcuts on the national forests; federal dams that don't begin to cover operation costs (let alone the amortized costs of construction); federal agents killing predators such as mountain lions and bears on federal lands grazed by livestock at a huge ecological and economic expense, and a gaggle of other environmentally costly practices. The poignant stories in Science Under Siege, provide further motivation for removing resource management from the political process.

From a review that appeared in Bear News, the journal of the Great Bear Foundation: Calling science "a moral compass for making the right decisions," Science Under Siege argues convincingly thatpublic agencies have lost sight of true north. This book is very hard on bureaucrats--many of them professional scientists who have lost their way--and on political manipulations by elected officials and corporate lobbyists who care not one whit for the bears or habitat! This is an extremely good book; it hits hard but it cleverly lets the bad guys hang themselves with their own words while promoting the good science, the good scientists and government officials. It also makes one sad to realize how the concepts of civil service and specialized agencies have been so destroyed by politicians and Big Money. President Nixon started the trend of replacing professional agency heads with politicial cronies--a problem that is still growing today. Dave Mattson, "the hero of the bears," who studied grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park and others deserve all the credit this book gives them.

His subject is the fate of scientists whose research brings them into conflict with the policies of the agencies they work for, especially the Forest Service, The Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Wilkinson's profiles of responsible scientists dislodged because of political pressure create a portrait of environmental irresponsibility-comtempt, even-within the bureaucracies whose ostensible mission is to serve the public interest on federally owned lands.

Jimmy Santiago Baca talks about his film Blood in Blood Out Bound By Honor. I consider him on the best Chicano Authors of our Time!

Jimmy Baca attempts to talk about his life and his poetry! If you own this book, get the movie, Blood in Blood Out Bound By Honor!

Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Working in the Dark" is a novel of extreme importance. Baca gives life and voice to imprisoned people who because of their ethicity, language, culture, and imprisonment have ben reducaed to cultural and social marginality by the dominant white culture and by those foriegn to Southwestern culture. "Voices From the Dark" is a must read for students of Chicano culture and the Southwest. It is a modern classic which may not be realized as such for decades to come!

Being a Chicano, about the same age as Jimmy Baca and the son of a prison guard who worked for 28 years at Ariz State Prison, I read this story with great interest. I not convinced that all the details about Jimmy's time in the Joint were believeable but Mr Baca has my absolute respect for elevating himself and recognizing that surviving meant more than just "geeting out!". He writes with the anger, color and passion of a proud latino who understands that life only gets better if YOU change it. I recommend this work as well as Jimmy's poetry.

I've read a lot of books, and this is the best book I have ever read in my life time, well ok one of the top 3 books I've read ing my life! Anyone who doesn't get this one is really missing out! Jimmy S. Baca's Biography is a must have for any Chicano reader!

You must read this book. I don't care who you are, it will absolutely blow you away. I don't want to ruin it by telling you any of the story. Just start it and you won't be able to put it down. If you liked the movie Shawshank Redemption, you will love this book. Your heart will pound and you will read faster than you've ever read before just to see what happens next. The most incredible part is that it is the true story of the author's life. The tragedy he suffers through will make you appreciate your own life. READ THIS BOOK!!!