I stumbled on this book in the only bookstore in that tawdry 'soiled dove,' Tombstone--and spent an evening lost in its exquisite, straight-on poems. Coleman's work here covers lots of ground, from the Apache Wars to the Star of Bannock, from a cowboy's victrola to quiet words at the edge of the mesa at Acoma. Many are grounded in Coleman's own southeastern Arizona. A few gems: "Belle Starr Addresses the Sewing Circle" is a frontier woman's eloquent assertion of her personhood and sexuality. "Letter from San Pedro" is a transplanted easterner's small, certain, flowing evocation of western land. "The Rainmaker" stirs together Bisbee, a bit of tall tale, and the worth of water in arid places. Read these poems. They'll leave you changed, a little more certain.

Opportunities in Fire Protection Services is a valuable book describing that fire supression can be very satisfying with a clear objective, generally achieved quickly, with teamwork, shared danger, and includes physical satisfaction. However, there is another side of fire protection of preventing fires through planning, dedication, public education. This protecting of mankind and environment requires the services of fire protection engineers, architects, foresters, building officials, fire marshals, equipment manufacturers, inspectors and others which necessitates a community team work approach.

Understanding Ornette Coleman, the man, only makes the appreciation of his music much deeper. Here is a man, who, like his music, is emotional, different, and most importantly, courageous. The author captures the high points of Ornette's life, and relates them in a way that ties his experiences to the resultant music. I dig this book a lot

William Coleman eloquently describes the enormous heartache of parents of prodigal children. He does not sugar-coat the painful reality nor try to give empty hope. Seeking to help hurting parents understand their own pain, Coleman includes stories of parents who have struggled with their young adults' poor choices in life. He encourages them to accept their reality and move on with their own lives while trusting their child to God.

This book is an easy reading look at the Pharisees and how the maligned sect actually began with sincere love of God and a devotion to serving Him...and how that turned into intolerance, bigotry and narrowmindedness. The book opened my eyes to see how easily I personally and churches as a whole can go down that same path. The book is great!

For those of you who are interested in philospohy in general, this book is an excellent collection of briefs from philosphers from Plato to Firestone. The most interesting aspect of this text is that it addresses the subject that most philosophy books refuse to touch upon - LOVE. Most often, philosophers are associated with their views on religion, politics, or the basic human existence. This book is such a great treat to read because of the subject matter. Love is a subject in which we can all relate. The book is approximately 3 inches thick, with excerpts from many different philosophers, but the great thing is that you can pick it up at your leisure, read a few different excerpts, ponder the subject of love, and put the book back down. It is not a book that you read cover to cover. Another interesting aspect of the book is that no matter what your views on love or romantic love are, you will find essays that will either reinforce your views of the matter, or challenge your present thinking of the subject of love. It covers topics such as misogyny, feminism, romantic love, marriage as more of a friendship than a romantic love, etc. I have been tickled, angered, saddened, pleased, and intrigued by this book. SO much so , that I have recommended it to friend after friend, and all have enjoyed it. It is not necessary that you be a student of philosophy to understand this book. You just need to misunderstand love to gain from it's teachings. I believe you will enjoy this book for years to come. I know I have.

"Early and Late" is the book that accompanied the Phillips Collection's 2002 exhibit on Bonnard's early and late works. The exhibitition was beautiful. The book, of course, doesn't do justice to the colors in the originals, but the book's prints, particularly the details, are very good.

The book includes a chronology of Bonnnard's life, three excellent essays, and some notes from Bonnard's journals. One essay discusses Bonnard's innovations, especially early on and especially his use of photography as a way to prepare for his paintings. Another essay shows how Bonnard's paintings were influenced by his reformed education. A final essay demonstrates Bonnard's debt to Japanese art.

Bonnard's longevity, I think, has kept him from having more of a reputation as an innovator. A quick overview of Bonnard's work shows that he was still painting postimpressionism toward the middle of the 20th Century. His use of different points of view and contrasting colors, and the subservience of the object to the idea make him more than a late impressionist. Basically, I like this guy's work, and this book helped me answer my question, "What is it about this man's painting that I like?"

The three essays here, along with 29 of Mapplethorpe's photographs, provide an invaluable opportunity to address the work in a reasoned and engaged manner. In some important sense, it is no longer possible to experience the work of Robert Mapplethorpe as directly as one might have in 1988, for now "the images have become celebrities," made notorious, even, by the legal and moral controversies that have so prominently surrounded the work. (5) More importantly, however, Danto attempts to answer the question of how to look at art, particularly difficult or "awkward" art such as Mapplethorpe's, without oversimplifying what is seen. (93)

In the main body of the book, the critical essay of the same title, Danto's seriousness avoids no questions, but thankfully acknowledges the ultimate futility of asking whether such work is art or pornography. This false disjunction results from the failure to hold together both form and content when looking at art. For Danto, art is the transcendence of form and content; it is both and neither, for it moves beyond both while in some sense preserving them in the work. Although Danto needlessly complicates matters with his use of the terminology of Hegel's dialectic to articulate this transcendence, his discussion is clear enough otherwise. This is best seen in his analysis of the respective testimonies of the legislators and the experts at the Cincinnati trial in which the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were ultimately acquitted of pandering obscenity and child pornography. Danto shows that while the legislators saw the content and ignored the form, the art experts for the defence saw the form and ignored the content. Though this resulted in the acquittal, Danto rightly emphasizes that for Mapplethorpe, the work was all about making pornography that was art; he "literally became a pornographer with high artistic aims." (78) In Mapplethorpe's words, a work can "be pornography and still have redeeming social value. It can be both, which is my whole point in doing it-to have all the elements of pornography and yet have a structure of lighting that makes it go beyond what it is." (89-90) This attempt to "go beyond what it is" both illustrates Danto's conception of art as transcendence and defines Mapplethorpe's work in particular as a "playing with the edge." (77)

Danto identifies trust as the constant attribute of Mapplethorpe's work which allows the form and content to remain together. "The moral relationship between subject and artist was a condition for the artistic form the images took. The formalism was connected to the content through the mediation of that moral relationship." (79) This trust is attested to by the formal quality of the images, in that they are titled with the subjects' names, posed and lighted in formal abstraction, and clearly constitute something the subjects have allowed, thus presenting the subjects as themselves, but not candidly, rather as they have agreed to be presented. (39) This is why acts of sex are themselves generally not depicted, for here the formalism cannot be maintained. In Mapplethorpe's work, however, there is always the danger of losing this formal control and going "over the edge." (79) It is not just a question of sex and the vulnerability inherent therein, but of danger and violence. For Danto, "a presumption that one's partner could be trusted . . . is the basic connection between sex and love." (41) He ties this trust to "the spontaneous human appetite for feeling danger and being protected at once . . ." (42) The combination of sex, danger, and violence, when contained by formalism through trust, is evident not only in the overtly sexual or violent works. Indeed, Danto is perhaps at his literary best in his discussion of these elements in relation to Mapplethorpe's flowers, fruits, vegetables, and finally the portraits of statues.

Danto's discussion of Mapplethorpe's work is frank, clear, and engaged. In neither oversimplifying the seriousness of the issues nor avoiding the questions raised by the work, he nonetheless leaves open its moral status. This is a great benefit. When it is a matter of "playing with the edge," different people will ultimately experience such an encounter differently. Indeed, this frames what may be the most problematic aspect of looking at Mapplethorpe's work: "It is supposed to be shocking. When morality changes so that it is no longer shocking, Mapplethorpe's intentions will fall away into incomprehensibility." (112) Although his assessment of the historical importance of this work--and that of the seventies in America generally--will surely not persuade everyone, the main achievement here is that Danto gives the reader solid handles by which to grapple with a difficult body of work.

There is hardly anyone that matches Rumi's ability to talk about love in a spiritual, sensual, ecstatic, yet very pure way. Both translation and narration are true to that spirit. Wherever you are on the path to truth, you will find inspiration here.

The Practice of Principle is an important book by a leading legal philosopher. Coleman makes penetrating observations regarding a range of topics, including tort theory, analytical jurisprudence, and jurisprudential methodology with typical clarity, novelty, and rigor. In Part I Coleman attacks the economic analysis of tort law: he argues, persuasively, that such an approach fails as a conceptual analysis, as a constructive interpretation, and as a causal-functionalist explanation of the development of tort law. Coleman uses economic analysis as his foil in displaying the virtues of the corrective justice account defended at length in Risks and Wrongs. In Part II Coleman articulates his version of inclusive legal positivism (which, he thinks, and I agree, was also H. L. A. Hart's) and defends that version against a number of objections from Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, and Scott Shapiro. In conversation with his brilliant but often uncharitable interlocutors, Coleman's analytical abilities absolutely shine. Part III defends conceptual analysis as a sound and intellectually profitable approach to legal theory; if it less gripping than the previous sections it is only because the quality of Coleman's opponents has fallen (from the likes of Posner and Raz to Brian Leiter). I recommend this book to anyone who cares to see the state of the art in legal theory through the eyes of one of its central figures.