In The Young Philosopher, George Delmont embraces an agrarian life and devotes himself to the pursuit of knowledge. But it is George's love Medora Glenmorris and her mother Laura who provide the emotional core of the novel. Contrasting the pain and suffering of individuals with the idealism of the French Revolution and the hope provided by glimpses of life in America, Smith exposes philosophical enlightenment as an ineffective weapon for fighting the widespread corruption of English society. The early novels of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) were precursors of the gothic tradition that came to dominate the Romantic period. Her later fiction, including The Young Philosopher (1798), were more political in nature and influenced both the form and substance of works by nineteenth-century novelists such as Austen and Dickens.

While countless memoirs have been written about depression and therapy, no one has examined how the "talking cure" of psychotherapy is presented in novels and other works of literature. Beginning with an overview of the principles of psychotherapy and its growing use as a treatment for mental and emotional disorders, Lilian Furst addresses the patient's view of the value of talk.Patients' portrayals of psychotherapy in literary works range from serious to satirical and from comic to ironic, with some descriptions verging on the grotesque. Furst identifies the overtalkers, undertalkers, and duet voices that shape the individual experiences of psychotherapy. While the voices of the overtalkers overwhelm those of their therapists, undertalkers are reluctant to express or acknowledge their feelings. Particularly revealing are the instances where patient and therapist provide separate but parallel renderings of the same therapy.Just Talk looks at a wide range of questions about psychotherapy. Furst considers the patient's first impressions of the therapist and how the patient is prompted to engage in talk. She looks for signs of self-deception or self-betrayal on the patient's part and asks how the therapist's behavior affects the patient's responses and the ultimate outcome of the therapy.Furst examines such well-known works as Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Plath's The Bell Jar, and Lodge's Therapy, as well as lesser-known novels, to discuss how patients react to psychotherapy as a cure for mental and emotional disorders. Her analysis of these narratives adds significantly to our understanding of the dynamic relationship between patient and therapist and reveals much about the healing process that is not addressed in technical casebooks.

In the twelve months centered around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a diverse group of American and British flyers fought one of the most remarkable air campaigns of WWII. Pilots including Claire Chennault, "Pappy" Boyington, and Art Donahue bought time for an Allied regrouping against Japan's relentless assault in the China-Burma-India theater. In the face of the 1941 bombings, Chiang Kai-shek turned to air power to survive, which he did thanks to Chennault's rebuilding of the Chinese Air Force and the leadership of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG. Formed by Chennault, the AVG, also known as the Flying Tigers, were contract employees working for the Chinese government. As a result, they received virtually no official American recognition for their efforts. The group was known for their romantic, reckless spirit. They performed remarkably with outdated planes and equipment in ill-repair, were almost always heavily outnumbered in battle, and were seen by outsiders as hard-drinking rebels.Whatever their image, the Flying Tigers were highly effective. In the words of Air Force Major General Charlie Bond, "During that first week of action the AVG destroyed fifty-five enemy bombers and fighters while losing only five Tomahawks. Unfortunately, two of our colleagues were killed, but at the same time two hundred enemy airmen were either killed or captured. We were shattering the myth that the Japanese Air Force was invincible."Jerome Klinkowitz, whose earlier books focused on flyers' attitudes toward the air war in Britain and Europe, continues his work with an exceptionally interesting group of Pacific warriors. He brings together not only the commanders' stories but the often more colorful--and sometimes more accurate--accounts of life and battle by the men who flew these planes and the women who participated on the ground.

Focusing on the work of A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder, author Leonard Scigaj shows that just as a sustainable society does not depreciate its resource base, so a sustainable poetry does not restrict interest to language. Over the past thirty years many poets have shown an increasing sensitivity to ecological thinking. But critics trained in poststructuralist language theory often fail to explore the substance of ecopoetry. Scigaj is the first to define ecopoetry as separate and distinct from nature or environmental poetry, marked by its concern with balancing the interests of human beings with the needs of nature. Just as science learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, ecopoetry insists on the recognition that humans are not at the center of the natural world.

"She was one of the world's four best comediennes," said Milton Berle, "but she lived a life of personal disaster." Martha Raye sang, danced, and joked her way into the spotlight of the entertainment world with a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed everything from vaudeville to television commercials to entertaining U.S. troops.Take It from the Big Mouth, the first full-fledged biography of the multi-talented performer, explores Raye's life and career with candor and insight. Raye got her big break when she caught the attention of a film director as she kidded with audience members Joe E. Lewis and Jimmy Durante during an engagement at the Trocadero in Hollywood. In the late 1930s, Raye appeared in a number of films, and the press heralded her as a "stridently funny comedienne with a Mammoth Cave mouth." From there her career soared. She landed a role in Charlie Chaplain's film Monsieur Verdoux, and the New York Post commented that Raye was the only one who could hold her own with the comic master. By the 1950s she hosted her own highly rated television show, reaching millions with her clowning.Behind the huge smile and raucous laugh, though, there was a darker side to Martha Raye. She found solace from her insecurities and a frenzied schedule in the use of drugs and alcohol. Her seven rocky marriages, the last to a man 33 years her junior whom she had known less than two weeks, fueled headlines and gossip columns. Particularly painful was her turbulent relationship with her only daughter, Melodye.She was passionately committed to entertaining troops abroad during World War II, and she worked tirelessly as both entertainer and nurse in the remote jungles of Vietnam. Bob Hope commented that "she was Florence Nightingale, Dear Abby, and the only singer who could be heard over the artillery fire." The Green Berets designated her an honorary lieutenant colonel, and she later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After her death in 1994, "Colonel Maggie" became the only civilian laid to rest among the Green Berets at the Fort Bragg military cemetery.

Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was one of the first women in England to earn a living writing fiction. Her early tales of amorous intrigue, sometimes based on real people, were exceedingly popular though controversial. Haywood, along with her contemporary Daniel Defoe, did more than any other writer to create a market for fiction in the period just prior to the emergence of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, the dominant novelists of the mid-eighteenth century.The scheming, sexually predatory anti-heroine of The Injur'd Husband is a memorable villain who defies all expectations of a woman's conduct in marriage. The heroine of Lasselia is initially a model of virtue who bravely resists the advances of a king, only to be driven by her passion and desire into an illicit affair with a married man and ultimately into ruin. These two provocative narratives strikingly represent Haywood's extraordinary contribution to the development of the novel.

Entertainers were the first group of successful women to capture the public eye, taking to the stage in vaudeville and film and redefining their place in society. June Sochen introduces the white, African American, and Latina women who danced on Broadway, fell on bananas in silent films, and wisecracked in smoky clubs, as well as the modern icons of today's movies and popular music. Sochen considers such women as Mae West, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Lucille Ball, and Mary Tyler Moore to discover what show business did for them and what they did for the world of entertainment. She uses the life of 30s and 40s Latina star Lupe Velez as a case study of the roles available to Latinas in popular culture. She then contrasts her story with that of the African American action star Pam Grier to demonstrate the old and new ways minority women are portrayed in popular culture.From Mae to Madonna places each woman within the context of her time and talks about her relationship with dominant female stereotypes. Sochen discusses women's roles as Mary, Eve, and Lilith and asks thought-provoking questions. Why did the Depression give women movie stars so many important roles while the so-called feminist 1970s did not? Why has television been a congenial venue for women comics while film has not? In examining how entertainers worked within or transformed particular genres and how their personal and public lives affected their careers, From Mae to Madonna casts the spotlight on a series of remarkable women and their dramatic effect on America's popular culture.

With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history.At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement.Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan--the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later.During these years, the game was led by A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him."

Godey's Lady's Book, perhaps the most popular magazine for women in nineteenth-century America, had a national circulation of 150,000 during the 1860s. The recipes (spelled ""receipts"") it published were often submitted by women from both the North and the South, and they reveal the wide variety of regional cooking that characterized American culture. There is a remarkable diversity in the recipes, thanks to the largely rural readership of Godey's Lady's Book and to the immigrant influence on the country in the 1860s. Fish and game were readily available in rural America, and the number of seafood recipes testifies to the abundance of the coastal waters and rivers. The country cook was a frugal cook, particularly during wartime, so there are a great many recipes for leftovers and seasonal produce. In addition to a wide sampling of recipes that can be used today, Civil War Recipes includes information on Union and Confederate army rations, cooking on both homefronts, and substitutions used during the war by southern cooks.

In 1941, the fortress city of Terezin, outside Prague, was ostensibly converted into model ghetto, where Jews could temporarily reside before being sent to a more permanent settlement. In reality it was a way station to Auschwitz. When young Gonda Redlich was deported to Terezin in December of 1941, the elders selected him to be in charge of the youth welfare department. He kept a diary during his imprisonment, chronicling the fear and desperation of life in the ghetto, the attempts people made to create a cultural and social life, and the disease, death, rumors, and hopes that were part of daily existence. Before his own deportation to Auschwitz, with his wife and son, in 1944, he concealed his diary in an attic, where it remained until discovered by Czech workers in 1967.

Women have traditionally been expected to tend the sick as part of their domestic duties; yet throughout history they have faced an uphill struggle to be accepted as healers outside the household.In this provocative anthology, twelve essays by historians and literary scholars explore the work of women as healers and physicians. The essays range across centuries, nations, and cultures to focus on the ideological and practical obstacles women have faced in the world of medicine. Each examines the situation of women healers in a particular time and place through cases that are emblematic of larger issues and controversies in that period.The stories presented here are typical of different but parallel facets of women's history in medicine. The first six concern the controversial relationship between magic and medicine and the perception that women healers can harm or enchant as well as cure. Women frequently were banished to the edges of medical practice because their spiritualism or unorthodoxy was considered a threat to conventional medicine. These chapters focus mainly on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but also provide continuity to women healers in African American culture of our own time. The second six essays trace women healers' efforts to seek professional standing, first in fifth-century Greece and Rome and later, on a global scale, in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to actual case studies from Germany, Russia, England, and Australia, these essays consider treatments of women doctors in American fiction and in the writings of Virginia Woolf.Women Healers and Physicians complements existing histories of women in medicine by drawing on varied historical and literary sources, filling gaps in our understanding of women healers and nulling social attitudes about them. Although the contributions differ dramatically, all retain a common focus and create a unique comparative picture of women's struggles to climb the long hill to acceptance in the medical profession.

" Kentucky Home Place tells of eight generations of the fictitious Boyd Family, whose story begins in 1799 with a Western Kentucky land claim and continues through the present. The Boyds work hard to keep the family farm, facing their daily tasks with hope and determination. As a member of the family tells her grandson, ""The farm is special because it is our family home and the home of those who came before us. It is important for every person to know who they are and where they came from.""

Not until the eighteenth century was the image of the tender, full-time mother invented. This image retains its power today. Inventing Maternity demonstrates that, despite its association with an increasingly standardized set of values, motherhood remained contested terrain. Drawing on feminist, cultural, and postcolonial theory, Inventing Maternity surveys a wide range of sources--medical texts, political tracts, religious doctrine, poems, novels, slave narratives, conduct books, and cookbooks. The first half of the volume, covering the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, considers central debates about fetal development, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childbearing. The second half, covering the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, charts a historical shift to the regulation of reproduction as maternity is increasingly associated with infanticide, population control, poverty, and colonial, national, and racial instability. In her introduction, Greenfield provides a historical overview of early modern interpretations of maternity. She concludes with a consideration of their impact on current debates about reproductive rights and technologies, child custody, and the cycles of poverty.

Latin American women were among those who led the suffrage movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their opposition to military dictatorships has galvanized more recent political movements throughout the region. But because of the continuous attempts to silence them, activists have struggled to make their voices heard. At the heart of Voices of Resistance are the testimonies of thirteen women who fought for human rights and social justice in their communities. Some played significant roles in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, while others organized grassroots resistance to the seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Though the women share many objectives, they are a diverse group, ranging in age from thirty to eighty and coming from varied ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The Cuban and Chilean women Judy Maloof interviewed use the narrative form to reinvent themselves. Maloof includes narratives from a poet, a tobacco worker, a political prisoner, an artist, and a social worker to demonstrate the different faces of their struggle. In the process, these women were able to begin to put together their fragmented lives. Speaking out is both a means for personal liberation and a political act of protest against authoritarian regimes. The bond that these women have is not simply that they have suffered; they share a commitment to resisting violence and confronting inequities at great personal risk.

The O.J. Simpson trial. The Lindbergh kidnapping. The death of Marilyn Monroe. The assassination of the Romanovs. The Atlanta child murders. All controversial cases. All investigated with the latest techniques in forensic science. Nationally respected investigators Joe Nickell and John Fischer explain the science behind the criminal investigations that have captured the nation's attention. Crime Science is the only comprehensive guide to forensics. Without being overly technical or treating scientific techniques superficially, the authors introduce readers to the work of firearms experts, document examiners, fingerprint technicians, medical examiners, and forensic anthropologists. Each topic is treated in a separate chapter, in a clear and understandable style. Nickell and Fisher describe fingerprint classification and autopsies, explain how fibers link victims to their killers, and examine the science underlying DNA profiling and toxicological analysis. From weapons analysis to handwriting samples to shoe and tire impressions, Crime Science outlines the indispensable tools and techniques that investigators use to make sense of a crime scene. Each chapter closes with a study of a well-known case, revealing how the principles of forensic science work in practice.

Few historical images are more powerful than those of wartime London. Having survived a constant barrage of German bombs, the city is remembered as an island of courage and defiance. These wartime images are still in use today to support a wide variety of political viewpoints. But how well do such descriptions match the memories of those who survived the blitz?Jean Freedman interviewed more than fifty people who remember London during the war, focusing on under-represented groups, including women, Jews, and working-class citizens. In addition she examined original propaganda, secret government documents, wartime diaries, and postwar memoirs. Of particular significance to Freedman were the contemporary music, theater, film, speeches, and radio drama used by the British government to shape public opinion and impart political messages. Such bits of everyday life are mentioned in virtually every civilian's experience of wartime London but their interpretations of them often clashed with their government's intentions.By exploring the differences between wartime documentation and postwar memory, oral and written artifacts, and the voices of the powerful and the obscure, Freedman illuminates the complex interactions between myth and history. She concludes that there are as many interpretations of what really happened during Britain's finest hour as there are people who remember it.