A product of The World Watch Institute, "Vital Signs" is the only book out there that attempts to provide the Big Picture of massive global trends - and succeeds. Unlike any other study, it gives a unique snapshot of the social, economic, and environmental trends that determine the quality of our lives and the future of our children's lives. It answers the question, "Where has development brought us?" And although we might not want to hear the answer, it is necessary if we wish to steer ourselves in the right direction. To quote the introduction, "a candied appraisal reveals disparities between rich and poor, mounting health challenges, battered ecosystems, and persistent social and political conflicts." More specifically, we see that the global temperature is rising; forests are fading; pesticide use is skyrocketing (as are pesticide-resistant pests); soda beverage drinking is up as with its concomitants, obesity and diabetes, and food-borne illness is widespread, among other things to numerous to mention. The "key indicators" Vital Signs focuses on are food and agricultural trends, energy trends, atmospheric trends, economic trends, transportation trends, communication trends, health and social trends, and finally military trends. The second half of this slim, compact, hard-hitting book focuses on "special issues." These include environmental features (like the deterioration of farmland and the increase of "unseen toxic wastes"), economy and finance features (from foreign spending to the cruise industry), resource economic features (the biotech and water issues, for example), health features (such as asthma and food-borne illness), social features (like persisting poverty and voter decline), and military features - in particularly, progress against landmines. As you can the see, the scope of the book is vast, but the presentation is clean and seamless. It won't bog you down and intimidate. A veritable resource treasure house. If you want global awareness or simply need to scrape together some important and up-to-date facts for a research paper, look no further. Baseline information for anyone interested in the future of the planet.

Educators are hearing and seeing evidence of problems with youth and gambling - this book addresses the issue very well.

Clare Gass was a nurse with the rank of lieutenant, serving with the Canadian Army Medical Corps in France during World War I for four long years. She documented her daily experiences from her military training in 1915 to her return from Europe in 1918. She had a gift for recording the sights, sounds, and smells of war, and in addition to her nursing duties, found time to explore the countryside around the hospital and took photographs as well. Ardently recommended for students of twentieth century military history, medical history, women's history, and unique autobiographies, The War Diary Of Clare Gass, 1915-1918 offers a unique, eye-witness, "window through time" to what life and death were like during the "Great War" as seen through the eyes of a battlefield nurse.

This is a book I can recommend to anyone interested in Buddhism. Ways of Enlightenment is based on the Tibetan Nyingmapa scholar Mipham's encyclopedic Gateway to Knowledge. The book gives in a quite accessible way the fundamentals of the Dharma. The reader is given a detailed and almost schematic description of the five skandhas, cause and effect, emotional afflictions, and so on. It is a book that will make it easier for the Western Dharma practitioner to actually grasp the theories behind meditation.

Cinema is considered to be 105 years old; its centenary was celebrated in 1995. What is much less known is that motion pictures existed almost from the beginning of the 19th century. These motion pictures did not project films; they used different systems and techniques to create the impression of movement. They form the "Victorian cinema" in the title of this book. The most popular mass entertainment medium of the 20th century came about because, during the 19th century, a huge number of scientists, entertainers, industrialists, speculators and crazy inventors devoted their lives (and a lot of them came to sticky ends because of that) to the improvement of motion pictures. This book is an encyclopedic collection of short biographies that provide a great glimpse into their lives and the various pre-cinematic motion picture systems. It is not a narrative that one can be immersed into but all the same it is moving, because so many of these people had tragic lives, and impressive, because of its comprehensive and truly international scope. Also, it is extremely useful for students of both early cinema and the Victorian era.

Jacob Katz (1904-1998) may well be the greatest historian of Judaism and the Jewish people of the twentieth century. In a series of pathbreaking studies, including TRADITION AND CRISIS, EXCLUSIVENESS AND TOLERANCE, OUT OF THE GHETTO, and FROM PREJUDICE TO DESTRUCTION, Katz reshaped the study of Jewish history from late medieval times through the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.

It is a great shame that Katz's work, which is as valuable in terms of historical method as it is for its specialized content, is not better known to historians generally. In this, his last book (originally published in Hebrew in 1989 and translated into English in 1995), Katz reflects on his life and his development as an historian.

Most of this book's twelve chapters focus on the odyssey of an intelligent, sensitive, and modest young man who seeks a place for himself, first within the sheltered Jewish community in Hungary where he was born; next in the turbulent and shifting Europe in which Jews tried to chart a course between their traditions of religious devotion and Talmudic study and the world of secular knowledge; then in the terrifying world of the impending Nazi domination of Germany and then of the European continent; and finally in the struggles to build a new nation in the land of Israel.

Throughout, Katz writes with modesty and quiet humor and rare generosity. Gradually, his life as a scholar assumes a more and more central place in his life's story -- but Katz excels at showing the intertwining of his intellectual life with his biography. By the book's close, you know that you have been in the presence of "one of the rare and master spirits of the age."

-- Richard B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School

Philippa Strum's sympathies clearly lie with those who argued for admitting women to the Virginia Military Institute. However, they haven't prevented her from giving us a comprehensive and fairly balanced look at the VMI case from start to ... if not finish, at least to the graduation of the first women to begin the school in the rat line.

One area where Strum's analysis is particularly strong is in tracing the history of anti-discrimination and equal rights law in the United States. She shows the jurisprudential evolution of the idea that, rather than women requiring special protection, all people are entitled to the rights and benefits of equal citizenship, regardless of sex. Indeed, following the trend of relevant Supreme Court cases as the author lays it out for us, it's hard to see how VMI's defenders could have believed the Court would ever do anything *but* order the publicly-funded military academy to admit women on an equal basis.

But believe it they did, and Strum shows how the two sides in the case were arguing fundamentally different points: VMI, that tax-funded single-sex education served a public good, and the Justice Department that, whether single-sex education is good or not, public funding of it (VMI being a government school) is unacceptable under the 14th Amendment. Neither side seemed fully to understand the other, and Strum does a thorough job of showing how the two sides in many ways failed to confront one another's arguments head-on.

Strum frames VMI as a defender of outmoded stereotypes and anachronistic ways of thinking (notably the 'women-as-lady' myth, as she calls it). It's a portrait VMI's defenders no doubt resent, but it's clear that their focus on 'how men learn' versus 'how women learn' was based more on differences between men and women *as groups* than on what kind of system might be best for any given *individual*. After all, as Strum points out, if VMI's adversative system isn't right or attractive for most women, the undeniable fact (based on the number of male high school seniors who apply to VMI relative to their number nationwide, for example) is that it's not right or attractive for most men, either.

This brings us to some areas I wished Strum had developed further. Most interesting was her assertion -- based on circumstantial evidence -- that the Bush Administration (Bush I) must have blocked the Justice Department from arguing that VMI's treasured adversative system was unnecessary for molding the kind of citizen-soldier leaders that VMI exists to produce. Certainly (as Ed Ruggero relates in 'Duty First: West Point and the Making of American Leaders'), the USMA ultimately decided its adversative system was actually counterproductive for that purpose, and so abandoned it. But Justice planted its flag on the (arguably weaker) ground that forcing VMI to admit women would not cause a fundamental change in the VMI system or ethos. The jury is still out about whether that's proven true.

Another question this book raised for me that Strum left entirely unaddressed was the appropriateness of cause-activists pursing their agenda on the bench. Specifically, Strum titles her chapter on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 'The Advocate.' Justice Ginsburg (clearly the hero -- can we still say 'heroine'? -- of this book) spent her pre-Court career promoting a certain understanding of law and pursuing specific social and policy objectives. Once on the bench, judges assume a mantle of impartiality -- in exchange for which they enjoy the 'procedural consensus' Strum defines as the key to translating Court decisions into social change. And yet, Strum makes it clear that Ginsburg's jurisprudence in the VMI case was of a piece with her earlier work. Strum quotes another legal scholar describing the VMI decision as 'the vindication for [Ginsburg's] legal career ... the opinion she hoped the Court would one day arrive at when she first started arguing cases of discrimination in the 1960s' (p. 295). Is it right for judges (of any philosophical persuasion) to continue as advocates once they're on the bench? Public acceptance of that idea would seem to threaten the very 'procedural consensus' the advocates rely upon to achieve their goals.

That question aside, though, I enjoyed reading this comprehensive look at the VMI case. Despite clear indications of where she stands on the question, a few broad ideological brush strokes (conservatives are frequently described as 'angry'), and the occasional off-the-wall comment ('Nothing had been more central to the South than racism' [p. 102].) the author's presentation of both sides of this important case was, on the whole, equitable and balanced. As I said, it's hard to escape the conclusion that VMI's stand was doomed from the start. So long as government runs schools, they will be subject to the political process. And in 1996 as in 1864, VMI couldn't withstand the weight of Uncle Sam, no matter how much its defenders loved it, or how fervently they sacrificed to protect it.

I own all six of the books in this series and find them to be extremely useful and effective. My students ask for these lessons. The books range from Beginner, Book 1 to Advanced, Book 6. I like the fact that at the beginning of each unit there is a word chart that gives all the forms of each base word studied. For instance,if the word, "effect" is being studied, "effective", "effectively", and "effectiveness" are also included. Each word is defined and an example given, and followed with exercises. I often assign these lessons as pair work.

This detailed, well-organized reference provides a guide to all the countries of the world from the perspective of the South. Most of the contributors are from the developing world, and the work is coordinated by the Instituto del Tercer Mundo in Uruguay. Don't be fooled by your gut reaction that a book can't be readable and rigorous unless it's published in New York, however. This is one of the better geopolitical reference sources in print by any standard. The country profiles provide unparalleled historical summaries of developing nations, along with truly relevant statistics. It also provides analyses of current global issues, such as food, health, education, poverty, habitat and human welfare.

This is the Millennium Edition (9th) in a series, which is a biennial (every-other year), comprehensive review of the critical issues and challenges facing the world's environmental leaders. The work is compiled by the researchers and staff of the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute. World Resources provides surveys of current conditions and historical trends in major areas of concern and resource areas. The 2000-2001 edition of World Resources addresses the issues and concerns confronting the Earth's ecosytems. Individual chapters address the study of specific ecosystem types (e.g., agricultural coastal, forest, freshwater, grasslands)and analyzes the problems inherent in each. These analyses are described in the context of the ecosystem approach from identification of concerns to their resolution. Supporting trends data are provided for a variety of critical issues: Biodiversity and Protected Areas; Forests and Grasslands; Coastal, Marine, and Inland Waters; Agriculture and Food; Freshwater; Atmosphere and Climate; Energy and Resource Use; Population and Human Development; Basic Economic Indicators; and Small Nations and Islands. This work is an essential resource for understanding the scientific and technical basis of the major environmental and natural resources issues with which we deal at local, regional, national, and global levels. Sections are clearly written for an understanding by non-scientists and scholars reading this outside of their discipline of expertise. Extensive footnotes, maps, charts, and data tables are provided. Data also available in CD-ROM formats. This is an essential environmental reference work. Because of its thoroughness, ease of use, comprehensive coverage, and cost, this book should be on the shelf of ALL acacdemic, public, school (grade 6 and above), government agency, corporate, and other special libraries. Researchers (engineering, life, physical, policy, and social sciences), decision makers, educators, and students will find this a truly impressive ready-reference source for their own bookshelves as well.