european

As John Fitchen's, "The New World Dutch Barn" has been out of print for so many years and interest in NWDBs has increased over the last few years Gregory Huber's edited 2nd Edition is a much welcomed addition to any barn research library.

Mr. Huber's new material as presented in the chapter Introduction to the Second Edition and in the Appendices C. New Checklist of Dutch Barns and D. Huber's responses to Fitchen's text and the Glossary have made this second edition even more valuable than the first edition to the NWDB enthusiast. The leaving intact of the original edition gives the new barn researcher a chance to own the best of both worlds.

Mr. Huber's description of the five fundamental forms of NWDBs along with all of the exceptions and regional variances may possibly bring to the forefront hitherto undocumented barns. As Mr. Huber points out, there are more altered than unaltered barns and knowing a lot of the possibilities will aid NWDB enthusiasts.

I strongly recommend this second edition as required reading for serious NWDB lovers and barn lovers in general.

Rolland Miner, Director, NWDB Survey 2000

Finally this classic and enduring book on the Dutch Barn is again available, now in an updated version. No one has spent more time going over, first hand, the barns first studied by Fitchen. Now Fitchen's original material is available without having to scour the used book stores. The new material by Huber brings up to date the first field work done by John fitchen in the 1960's. Any one with even the slightest interest in Early American Dutch Architecture must get this book. Not only does this book fully explain the barn , but the reader can easily then understand how the same basic construction procedures apply to the Dutch House.

A beautiful book and a moving book in its clarity. I found the reading of this slim volume a wonderful, celebratory experience of a sensitive life, and the author's voice is strikingly personal throughout each poem. Reading in the course of a very long day, I felt like I was perusing old photographs and sharing memories, and I didn't fully realize the impact of this very accessible and very wise work until I found myself quoting passages to my roommate within hours of reading. You will not be disappointed. My absolutely favorite verse: "You are judged/By your obligations to others"

THIS EXQUSITE LITTLE BOOK SPOKE TO ME FROM THE WISDOM AND COMPASSION OF IT'S AUTHORS HEART. IT IS A BOOK FOR ALL LANDS AND ALL PEOPLES. BRAVO TO LIDIA KOSK

This was the book more fantastic that I had read!!!!! This tell us about how a soul fell itself when your love is not recompensed. It makes a psycological interpretation of your mind in these so sad and difficult situation. It is a sensitive book for sensitive people!

This is not a reprint, but a new translation by acclaimed translator and author Tiina Nunnally of arguably the finest novel ever to come out of Scandinavia. It had a huge influence on European writers, especially in Germany, where teenage boys would carry around a Danish dictionary in the vain hope of reading Jacobsen in the original, according to Stefan Zweig, and where the novel has been translated at least 6 times. Read it and see where Thomas Mann got his ideas for "Tonio Kröger." Jacobsen, who was a botanist as well as the translator of Darwin into Danish, fills the novel with flowers and plants, and he knows whereof he speaks. Dive headlong into this examination of creativity vs. lethargy, atheism vs. faith, and the seemingly infinite ability of the hero to misunderstand women!

I really find this an astonishing biography. The best of Cervantes I've read. I'm only halfway through it now but I know two things for sure: every last scintilla of telling information about Cervantes is up-to-date and included, and, that Prof. McCrory has a superb ability to find those larger patterns in a life and give them emotional and psychological meaning. There are moments when you look up and marvel at the tons of documents that must've been sifted to produce the simplest facts. Just to give one example among many, I understand for the first time what living in Esquivias meant to Cervantes, what it must've been like for him, and especially interesting, what it meant to be married to him. Prof. McCrory gives us an uncanny sense of what Catalina's life was like, her financial and social situation, the impact her mother had on the marriage - and all this in a few quick lines. One never bogs down in this book with all that background information about Philip II or the Armada or the state of banditry along this road or that, as is common in other bios of Cervantes. We always know just enough to place things in context and see the influences acting on poor Miguel. I get, for the first time, a sense of his thought processes, the decisions he had to make, his real options, what the world looked like to him. This is (as much as possible) an intellectual biography as well. Superb work.

I HAVE BEEN A CERVANTES SCHOLAR ALL OF MY LIFE AND HAVE READ ALMOST ALL THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST WRITER.THIS BOOK DOES JUSTICE TO HIS LIFE!THE DETAILS OF EVERY ASPECT OF CERVANTES'LIFE ARE ALL HERE.I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO ALL WHO LOVE DON QUIJOTE AND THE GREAT MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA!!!!!!!

While dealing with the comment that shows Florentin Sma­ randache's works as a puzzle, the whole masterpiece means somehow a kind of blank to fill in what is poetry and what it does not mean. To replying such a questions, we quite obliged to reach the real meaning of this art­ work called poetry. What is it since the early begin­ ning of its use in Italy with the Medieval art master­ pieces production and what does it mean at last by the philosophy of life that Hegel focused on its own realms of the structure as well as to the deep down of words. This is the way to underline semantics uses into sentences' structure. This part of knowledge in humanities considers two parts: the first one is extended to simple words and the second deals with sentences and phrases'­ building body. So poetry is yet considered like an art of a freelance lands­ cape engineer working on shapes and innermost beauty. Sometimes it appears also like the wit's prophecies telling on events. Our friend Florentin Smarandache's work ranges him among the prophets of the next century's poets and what I shall mean for any one of them, while setting puzzle and its blanks use of white colour paper like a student who went to an exam, for not learning his lessons prefers to deal with an "impasse" and gives up some of the subjects. This is not the way to say that our friend Florentin Smaran­ dache is this lazy student shaped down, but in contra­ ry is a master in this way since he can focus his mind on the future while going on with wonderings on what poetry is ­ or is going to become in the event of scien­ ces and technology progress. When we take into consideration, the first publication of Florentin Smarandache ­ LAWS OF INTERNAL COMPOSITION starting with poems with problems solving, there is some aesthetics value to underline in the signs and the symbo­ lism of everything. This is the way to meet with Andre Gretton's movement of thought. The Pope of Surrealism as he was called on the movement leading toward great success of what many other writers and thinkers follow up to now with the birth of paradoxism that can gain also weld sin­ ce the word means much in literary achievements as well as has a sense of philosophical movement dealing with so­ cial bond saving outcomes in the early beginning of the third millenary. Its member can shape life upon a strong mind building to fighting new era full of hope and good expectations­ while running with such targets, we have to deal with the philosophy of arts as well as the philosophy of sciences­ while shaping our works upon our days leading epistemology that underline the reason why of the human being on earth- and the best use of technologies and sciences.

OVERNAK C. ANTOINE AJONH

This is the most experimental book of poetry I ever read.

Paul Jaspe

For those not fortunate enough to attend Richard Pell's classes at the University of Texas, this book is the next best thing. A comprehensive account of the relationship between history and culture. Insightful examination of the effect of not only globalization, but "Americanization" on today's modern world.

Although I found this book a bit wordy, Pells left nothing out. If not sure about the situation between America and Europe after WWII to the present, you will be after reading this book. Background knowledge would be helpful, but not necessary. The length should not turn away readers either, because it turns out to be a quick read. A very informative and comprehensive study and a must read for anyone interested in globalization in the twentieth century.

Reviews of JOHN F. MOFFTTT and SANTIAGO SEBASTIAN: O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Published review, in Latin-American Indian Literatures Journal: "The book merits wide circulation. The impressive scholarship embraces both pictorial and written sources, and the lengthy quotations in English translation from the early explorers and chroniclers are helpful."

Another published review by DANIEL K. RICHTER (Dickinson College), in American Historical Review, December 1998.

This book by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián appears, at first glance, to be a blast from the historiographical past. Readers of such standard works as Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979) and Olive Patricia Dickason's The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984) will find much that is familiar. Early modern Europeans invented perniciously enduring stereotypes about Indians, images rooted almost entirely in their own fantasies and fears rather than in empirical data. Those familiar with such more recent, theoretically sophisticated studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), Anthony Pagden's European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1992), or Gordon M. Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) will be disappointed in a book that openly disavows "the imposition of the kind of theoretical constructs that so bedevil current, postmodernist academic writing" (p. 3). Nonetheless, this product of a long collaboration between Moffitt and the late Sebastián has at least three great strengths. First, as art historians, the authors bring to visual materials an attention to detail seldom available to more text-oriented scholars. Second, as specialists in Renaissance art, they take medieval and classical influences on those materials seriously as systems of belief rather than mere artistic conventions. These first two strengths especially come together in their analysis of the meaning of the term India to fifteenth-century Europeans. When Christopher Columbus reported that he had found "Paradise-on-Earth" on "the Indian Islands, Located Beyond the Ganges River, Which Have Just Been Newly Rediscovered," Moffitt and Sebastián argue, he was not merely compounding a geographic error with rhetorical exaggeration. Instead, "as employed by Columbus, the term precisely meant a specific place described in the Book of Genesis as having been initially inhabited by Adam and Eve," a place Columbus and contemporary artists and map-makers sincerely believed still existed at the extreme tip of the Indian subcontinent (p. 16). This framework of ideas about an Indian Eden provides a compelling context for the many descriptions of "Indians" as pre- or post-lapsarian inhabitants of an early paradise. It also helps to explain why explorers, map-makers, and illustrators peopled the Americas with every lurid humanoid type found in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (13561357) and other Indian subcontinent travel fantasies. The third strength of Moffitt and Sebastián is their effort to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers actually experienced images of alleged Native Americans. They are particularly effective in contextualizing dozens of woodcut and copperplate illustrations that previous historians have considered in isolation from the books in which they first appeared. When placed against the texts-and in light of the fact that European illustrators nearly always worked solely from written descriptions rather than illustrations from life-it becomes clear that the visual images were entirely products of European imaginations rather than American experience. Illustrators appear to have made almost no attempt to render details about Native American appearance and behavior contained in explorers's written accounts with any accuracy. Instead, they reproduced stock images of "savages," "wild men," "Amazons," and "cannibals" familiar from books written well before 1492. Few publications went as far as a 1554 edition of Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias y Nuevo Mundo mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico that recycled a set of illustrations originally drawn for a 1520 edition of Livy's history of Rome. Yet most had little more relevance to the subjects they purported to illustrate. The same disconnection from American reality apparent in negative stereotypes also applied in more positive, and presumably accurate, contexts. The famous illustrations of Theodore de Bry-most of which took as their originals the watercolors that Englishman John White painted at Roanoke in 1585-were, Moffitt and Sebastián argue, part of a concerted effort by Philip lI's Dutch Protestant opponents to promulgate the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty to Native Americans. In this politicized context, de Bry's images, far from attempting to convey accurate information about Native Americans, added to "the Noble and Ignoble Indian tropes" a new, third stereotype: "the figure of the 'doomed Indian'" (p. 303).

Abstract: in Historian; a Journal of History, Winter 1998, Colin G. Calloway reviews "O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian" by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian. Full Text: 0 Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. By John F. Moffitt and Santiago (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 399. $55.0.) The authors of this book, both art historians, take a rather well-worn subject but examine it from a different perspective and with more attention to detail than have other studies of the images of Indians that were generated by the Columbian encounter and subsequent contacts. That Columbus mistakenly called the native inhabitants of the Americas "Indians" will come as no surprise to anyone. That Europeans created stereotypes of Indian people out of their own preconceptions, on the basis of limited contacts, and for their own purposes, will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with the work of Roy Harvey Pearce, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Olive Dickason, and others. John Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian go beyond previous studies and, in a close critical reading of pre-colonial art and literature, they search out the origins of the baggage of imagery, attitudes, and assumptions that Europeans brought to their encounters with Native Americans. Focusing primarily on Spanish contacts with native peoples in the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, South America, Moffitt and Sebastian show how Renaissance-era Europeans not only evaluated Indians "according to certain culturally enshrined patterns that seemed most natural or logical to them," but actually reinvented them (p. 4). The authors explain how the scriptural precedent of the Edenic earthly paradise and the equally ancient concept of the noble savage influenced European perceptions and inventions of the "New World" and its people. Moffitt and Sebastian assess the influence of classical models, medieval literary conventions, and previous encounters with other non-European peoples, and they critically analyze depictions of imagined Indians in Renaissance graphic art. Examining how the Indian Eden, which was created by European imagination, was destroyed by European conquest, the authors dissect the "Black Legend" of Spanish atrocities that was established by Bartolomé de Las Casas and perpetuated by Protestant writers and printers. They show how this legend affected the evolving European image of Native Americans and how it continues to distort understanding of Spain's role in the colonization of America, but they perhaps dismiss it too easily as "largely without foundation" (290). Laden with literary and artistic allusions and block quotations, O Brave New People is written in a formal, scholarly--and, as the authors acknowledge, "often rhetorical"--style that will lose some of the readers for whom it is intended (336). Some others will be turned off as they quickly realize that the book has little to do with historical Indian people. It is a detailed examination of the origins and development of the mind-set of a particular group of Renaissance Europeans. Unfortunately, that mind-set has had an enduring legacy. Colin G. Calloway (Dartmouth)

I'm not going to review Homer -- Homer gets ten stars. If you haven't read Homer, you're not an educated person.

If I had to rate the additional material in this edition on its own merits, I'd have to give it something less than five stars. Four, probably. The glossary is useful, and the "Backgrounds" (a brief excerpt each from Kirk and Nilsson and then snippets from various archaic authors commenting on Homer) are worthwhile and sometimes amusing. But the "map of probable locations for legendary places mentioned in The Odyssey", for instance, is silly. And the essays in the "Criticism" section seem randomly-themed and of hit and miss quality.

But the additional material is all just icing on a very good cake. Cook's translation is readable and delightful. He carefully maintains the repetitions and line units of the original, so a reader of the English translation can get some sense of what the Greek feels like. Well worth reading.

Albert Cook's is the only verse translation of the Odyssey to rival Lattimore's: slightly less literal, but also more readable.

This is a fascinating book about the female archetypes which *may* underly modern women of Nordic heritage more than we've previously realized. Or are they more patriarchal fantasy than reality? This book (and the companion volume "Women in Old Norse Society") seems a culmination of Jochens' career, bringing together vast amounts of knowledge and wisdom, brilliantly and provocatively interpreted. The book looks at images of women in Norse literature, mainly the Icelandic sagas. First she looks at Divine Images. The more ancient ones include fertility goddesses, valkyries, sibyls, norns and land-spirits. The more recent classic Nordic pantheon includes the two main goddesses Frigg and Freyja, and how such topics as sexual behaviour and marriage are treated in this divine pagan realm. Jochens then looks at Human Images of women in Norse literature. This is where she identifies the archetypes: the Warrior Woman, the Prophetess/Sorceress, the Avenger, and the Whetter (or Inciter). One of the very interesting points which Jochens stresses is that there is little historical evidence that these images portrayed the reality of women in real Norse society. Stories and poems of these pagan figures were transmitted by oral tradition for hundred of years, but the written sources were written by Christian monks for a Christian audience. This makes for infintely fascinating layers of conjecture and interpretion. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how women are portrayed in history, especially women of Nordic heritage.

Jochens does a supreme job of explaining "everything you ever needed to know about women in early Scandinavia, but were afraid to ask."

This is one of my favorite books. As a pre-kindergarten teacher, I read this and the children loved it. They would repeat the lines, "And she didn't even say thank you", and when one of them was whining, the question "Do you live in a vinegar bottle?" caused the whining to instantly cease. I have even found myself using the phrase to describe other adults who are never happy! Highly recommended.

My 7 yr. old daughter loves this book. It's a funny book about an old lady who is never satisfied with her house even though the fairy keeps granting her wishes for bigger and better houses. The morale is a good one--happiness comes from within, not from your possessions. My daughter soon memorized the verses that repeat throughout the book and recites them each time we read the book. The pictures are beautiful, detailed, and full of bright colors.