I read this book with white knuckles all the way to the end. An end where I was able to smell the smoke and gunpowder, and feel the fear, confusion and betrayal of the innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a deadly cross fire.

I will never again be able to look at a small quiet town without a modicum of suspicion, nor the friendly smiles of the inhabitants without an inkling of mistrust. This book grabs you by the throat, glares into your eyes, and dares you to look away in a bizzare and twisted game of chicken

Also included are three chapters with character biographies set against animators' model sheets, some mecha designs, and a final chapter tracing "Robotech"s origins both as a shining example of Japan's "anime"... and as a case of US TV business expediency (the "show" is actually THREE Japanese programs, edited and rewritten to appear to be one huge saga). For this latter reason, anime purists will balk at the book, just as they dismiss the series as a bastardization.

Nevertheless, if you like "Robotech", this book offers a nice memento, and a glimpse into its unique background. If you can find it, grab it

How I love connections! This book contains a beautiful poem and a scholarly article both inspired by F.C. Frieseke's painting "The Garden Parasol." F.C. Frieseke was my grandfather; the primary figure in the painting portrays his wife, my grandmother Sadie. In this same collection, I found a wonderful poem by James Applewhite, who was my poetry teacher at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His poem was inspired by Winslow Homer's painting, "Weaning the Calf." I had "chosen" this painting as the one I would most like to take home from the museum (their Frieseke is too big for my condo)!

For several years I lived across the street from another author represented in this book, Fred Chapell, who was then a professor at UNC-G. Although I was not priviledged to take any of his courses, I did enjoy a poetry reading of his in 1973.

I recommend "The Store of Joys" to all lovers of visual arts, poetry, literature, and interdisciplinary studies. The reproductions are excellent, and the authors' reactions add so much to our appreciation.

Please visit my website on F. C. Frieseke at: go.to/frieseke

Reynolds chooses one issue, occupation of the land, as his major theme. There are, he admits, many other issues that might have been considered, but the land question remained fundamental to European-Aborigine relations. Australia was the sole colony of the Empire declared "terra nullius" - unoccupied by human beings, therefore open to unrestricted invasion. The island continent and all its resources were at the disposal of the Crown.

Australia, of course, had occupants when the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay, and it wasn't long before they began resisting invasion. Reynolds shows that the Aborigines had allies among the white invaders, people who urged at the very least, that the "natives" be offered remuneration or protected reserves on which to live. He reviews the careers of these humanitarians with sympathy and applause, but recognizes the futility of their efforts. Not a few failed simply because their personalities were unsuited to the task of inhibiting the rape of the continent.

Resistance to white oppression of the Aborigines began as early as the first penal settlement. William Dawes objected to the first of a multitude of punitive expeditions launched to revenge the spearing of a servant. Reynolds notes these "expeditions," which continued into the 20th Century, followed a consistent pattern - unselective killing in revenge for Aborigine defense of their homeland. From Dawes, Reynolds traces the course of objections to wanton slaughter of Aborigines through the notable figures trying to stem the flood of settlement and its attendant conflict. He cites George Augustus Robinson's work to isolate Aborigines in Victoria and Tasmania from white settlement - a career which ended disastrously. Reformers in Western Australia were driven into exile by irate settlers, and Queensland earned its unsavoury reputation with the creation of the Native Police, an unrestrained paramilitary force. Reynolds intersperses his own text with supportive sources of personal journals, letters, government documents and newspaper articles. The result is a descriptive potpourri of opinions, accounts, policy making and, most important, a struggle for justice.

At times, the book is profoundly moving. It recounts appalling atrocities committed against Australia's indigenous communities by the "civilized" British.

Its main focus, though, is the efforts of a number of people who tried to ensure that the Aborigines were treated fairly and with compassion. It provides an insight into their struggles in aid of the Aborigines, their perseverance in the face of rejection and the hardships they often suffered.

Despite being a history book, the text is quite readable!

In summary, this is a moving and enlightening book about some of Australia's "forgotten" humanitarians.

The way we deal with this fundamental injustice is what reveals our character, our courage, and our humanity.

The struggle is truthfully and touchingly portrayed in a setting that has supernatural, mythical, and more sinister satanical elements as its backdrop, making it all the more a page-turner.

No one in northeast Alabama will ever forget Palm Sunday 1994. When deadly tornadoes ripped through northern Calhoun County, killing nearly two dozen people, a spring Sunday dedicated to beginning the holiest week of the Christian year became instead a stormy day of pain and loss. And yet, as the Rev. Dale Clem's memoir "Winds of Fury, Circles of Grace" demonstrates, the terrifying storms could not blow away the faith and devotion that would testify in no uncertain terms to a love and spirit that transcends disaster and death.

As the Rev. Kelly Clem led Palm Sunday services, including a children's pageant in which their 4-year-old daughter Hannah took part, Dale Clem was hundreds of miles away, leading a youth group on a spring break service trip to Oklahoma. The first report Clem received was sketchy, a message received from a cell phone call. "There's been a tornado," he was told. "It hit your wife's church... Kelly is in the hospital, the girls are okay; you need to call home." In the time it took for him to find his wife - interminable time - fear grew. No one had news about Hannah. Finally he was able to speak to Kelly, who told him: "Hannah is dead."

It was the beginning of a long day, a long week - a long year - of tears and mourning. "Winds of Fury, Circles of Grace" chronicles that year with touching honesty, neither shying away from sorrow nor forgetting joy. Clem captures the grief of a small congregation in a small town, where relationships are strengthened both by proximity and faith. He recounts unpleasant moments, such as hurtful and hateful notes received from zealots equating Kelly's ministry and the priesthood of women to Sodom and Gomorrah. And he shares many happy memories of Hannah - "Have I ever told you that I love you?" he would ask Hannah and her younger sister Sarah, and Hannah would giggle, "Oh, Daddy, you tell me that all the time."

The spirit of Hannah Clem is ever-present, dancing through these pages as she did through her life on earth, helping her father tell his tale of loss and redemption. Clem intersperses the chronological account of that Holy Week in 1994 - a week in which the message of death and resurrection resonated among the Piedmont hills - with good basic advice on confronting and accepting grief and healing. He begins this task with a quote from T.S. Eliot: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait.../So the darkness shall be the light,/and the stillness the dancing." He speaks to everyone who has known the darkness of death - encouraging by example, unafraid to recount his moments of weakness and weeping and glad to witness to a faith in life and in Christ which ultimately led both Clems through the valleys and shadows of the first year to a place of new hope and understanding.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

Criticize all you want of Melville's scientific inaccuracy, wandering themes, or even his improper punctuation. The guy wrote this thing in a year - not enough time to refine it, and it was a book he knew would not sell.

Underneath a mess of useless whaling information and Ishmael's rambling are ideas and questions that most people don't dare think about. Unlike Charles Darwin, Galileo or the fearless Ahab, Melville hid safely behind his metaphors and guided the careful readers to draw their own conclusions without completely leading the way.

Let me explain.

While to Ishmael, Moby Dick is nature's wonder and to Starbuck is just a whale, to Ahab Moby Dick is God, with his infinite power.

There are some disturbing things in the universe begging for an explaination, such as why one person is rewarded with happyness while another punished in suffering. There are feel-good answers, like the idea that the score will be evened in the afterlife and there are humble answers, like the book of Job, which suggests that man has no right to complain or question God. Melville's Ahab takes this to another level when he asks why man needs to be God's puppets. Ahab is insulted by God's creation of man, letting man live in suffering, "with half a heart and half a lung".

The bewildered God-fearing masses will not comprehend the depth Melville trys to take them. This most important theme was written for the pursuit of truth, not happyness. This book is not for everyone, and a lot of chapters are better off skipped, but those with enough empathy for Melville will find an emotional and intellectual adventure.