North American Indian Music

Reviewed with Geraldine Woods' The Navajo.

Gr. 5-7. Two titles in the Watts Library--Indians of the Americas series offer glimpses of Native American culture and history. Woods' title about the Navajo includes the Navajo creation tale, describes the land where the tribe has lived for centuries, and looks at housing and clothing, ceremonies and spiritual life, and the clan system. Also mentioned are the Navajo code talkers, who devised the only unbreakable code in World War II, and the continuing dispute over land with the Hopi, as well as a brief look at contemporary concerns and successes. North American Indian Music describes the many uses of music since ancient times and explains the unique beat, rhythm, and melody that characterize much Indian music. Subsequent chapters focus on music from specific tribes.

The colorful photos in both titles enhance the texts nicely, but some of the drawings of historical events are inappropriate and of poor quality. The authors cite their information sources, but both titles show an outsider's perspective. Each book concludes with a glossary, a bibliography, and time line. Whenever possible, teachers should provide native sources to complement this series. Karen Hutt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture

Considered a pioneering achievement when first published nearly two decades ago, From Indians to Chicanos--now in a completely revised second edition--continues to offer readers an informed and penetrating approach to the history of Chicano development. Anthropologist-historian Diego Vigil shows a perceptive and knowledgeable background in brief, clear outlines of each stage of Mexican-American history, charting the culture change sequences in the Pre-Columbian, Spanish Colonial, Mexican Independence and Nationalism, and Anglo-American periods.

He analyzes not only the events and the underlying conditions that affect them but also the dynamics that shaped contemporary Chicano life. The author has absorbed an enormous amount of information and has condensed it in a very readable and understandable fashion. Vigil's ethnohistorical introduction to the Mexican- American experience in the United States is simple yet comprehensive so that readers clearly understand historical developments and the specific socioeconomic, sociocultural and sociopsychological forces involved.

A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples

Dispelling myths, answering questions, and stimulating thoughtful avenues for further inquiry, this highly absorbing reference provides a wealth of specific information about over 200 North American Indian groups in Canada and the United States. Readers will easily access important historical and contemporary facts about everything from notable leaders and relations with non-natives to customs, dress, dwellings, weapons, government, and religion. This book is at once exhaustive and captivating, covering myriad aspects of a people spread across a continent.

Divided into ten geographic areas for easy reference, this work illustrates each Native American group in careful detail. Listed alphabetically, starting with the tribal name, translation, origin, and definition, each entry includes significant facts about the group's location and population, as well as impressive accounts of the group's history and culture. Bringing entries up-to-date, Barry Pritzker also presents current information on each group's government, economy, legal status, and land holdings. Whether interpreting the term "tribe" (many traditional Native American groups were not tribes at all but more like extended families) or describing how a Shoshone woman served as a guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Pritzker always presents the material in a clear and lively manner.
In light of past and ongoing injustices and the momentum of Indian and Inuit self-determination movements, an understanding of Native American cultures as well as their contributions to contemporary society becomes increasingly important. A magnificent resource, this book liberally provides the essential information necessary to better grasp the history and cultures of North American Indians.

American Sign Language Green Books, A Teacher's Resource Text on Grammar and Culture (American Sign Language Series)

This book is designed for a teacher as part of the "Green Books" American Sign Language series; however, it is a very useful guide to ASL Grammar and Culture for anyone studying American Sign Language seriously (I, myself, am not a teacher, but have a copy of the book).


I was introduced to the book when I first began learning sign language, and it was very confusing to me. I would have benefited, at the time, much better from an ASL dictionary or simpler sign book. My recommendation to those of you who have just begun learning (or would like to learn) ASL would be NOT to buy this book just YET! Start with something less daunting and sophisticated (after all, it is designed for those already familiar with ASL and preparing a class curriculum).

What the book will give you is an excellent explanation of the sociolinguistic nature of American Sign Language--something you typically will not receive from a ASL Dictionary. For example: how sentences are structured, topicilization, rhetorical questions, relative clauses, expression of time, pronominalization, subject and object usage, the use of classifiers, locatives ... to name a few.

All in all, this is a terrifically detailed, well researched, informative and valuable book; yet, not for a beginning student.

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Race and American Culture)

Description
The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism.

Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language.

At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself.

Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.

Review

"All readers...will be hard-pressed to deny North's revisionary insight for twentieth-century literary studies: black dialect as performance is an unrecognized bridge between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. With North's generative paradigm, we can examine the movements together in new ways."--American Literature
"[A] long overdue study....This may be the most significant rereading of traditional American modernists in years."--South Atlantic Review
"Michael North's new book makes an indispensable contribution to the study of transatlantic modernism....Of the many recent attempts to historicize modernism, North's stands out as what will surely become an enduring model of literary and sociological analysis."--Novel

American Cinema/American Culture

Description
Ideal for Introduction to American Cinema courses, American Film History courses, and Introductory Film Appreciation courses focused on American Film, this text offers a cultural examination of the American movie-making industry, with particular attention paid to the economic and aesthetic institution of Hollywood.

Review : By C. Burkhalter
Years ago I took an intro-level film class at a community college. This was the text for the class. It was accompanied (at least in my class) by a PBS video series that combined film clips with interviews and historical information. Going into the class I had little more than a passing interest in film and film history. But after taking that class, my passion for film has grown exponentially with each year. But back to the book, I really liked this book and highlighted my way from the front cover to the back cover. There are of course limitations to this book. Firstly, it deals only with American films. Secondly, this book barely breaks the 300-page mark - hardly a comprehensive volume. You aren't going to get any information on John Cassavetes here or anything. Now if you have a chance to use this book in conjunction with the PBS films, I think you'll do much better (in fact I think the vids even give a nod to Cassavetes), but even then please note that this material is for an INTRO-level film class, and won't be much good for someone who already knows a fair amount about American film. But with that in mind, the book still has a lot to offer someone looking to introduce themselves to film history.

The first third of the book starts with the birth of film, moves quickly on to the Hollywood studio system, and walks us through the basics of film style (camerawork, lighting, editing, etc.). The second third covers the basics of film genre; there is a chapter about film noir, one on comedies, one on war films, and one on westerns. This second section was particularly useful to me. I could read each chapter, jot down a list of promising titles, hit my local video store, and I was good to go. The third section covers American film after World War II. In this section things seem a little compressed. 110 pages for 50 years of film? A lot is lost on the cutting room floor. But there's lots to dig into all the same. There's a chapter on Hollywood during the McCarthy years (yikes!), one on film's evolution during the emergence of television, a chapter on 1960s counterculture films, one on the film school directors of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a pretty weak chapter on film in the 1990s. Oh yeah, and at the end of the book there's a handy glossary (in case you're ever stuck on what point-of-view editing is) and a pretty thorough index.

Again, not a book for someone who already has a good feel for film history. But definitely a great resource for someone new to film studies, or for someone who has trouble finding a movie at Blockbuster on Fridays. It did a great job getting me excited about movies, and I imagine its done the same for others.... A good companion to this text (or possibly an all-out replacement of it) is Scorsese's VHS/DVD, "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."

Fundamentalism and American Culture (New Edition) (Paperback)

Product Description
Many American's today are taking note of the surprisingly strong political force that is the religious right. Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.
For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power.
For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.


Review: By Jacob Aitken

The thesis of this book parallels that of George Marsden's similar book on American culture, Religion and American Culture, that Fundamentalism shaped and was shaped by the surrounding culture. Marsden builds upon the work of earlier historians of Fundamentalism, namely that of Ernest Sandeen's book The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism. Sandeen's thesis is that Fundamentalism is the outgrowth of the "millenarian" movement that developed in late nineteenth-century American, especially through Bible institutes and conferences concerning the interpretation of biblical prophecies. Sandeen's thesis, according to Marsden, has much to commend it in connecting millenarianism and Princeton theology to the movement; however, it does not deal adequately with the militant anti-modernistic slant of the movement. Fundamentalism can briefly be defined as militant anti-modernist Protestantism that took on its own identity as a patchwork coalition of representatives of other movements.
Overview of the Book
Marsden divides his book into three sections (these sections are different in intent than the above themes. Marsden uses these sections to expand on his themes), Evangelicalism before Fundamentalism, the Shaping of Fundamentalism as a Movement, and the Crucial Years in which it gained popularity and its subsequent exodus of public life. In understanding the rise of Fundamentalism at the end of the nineteenth-century one must understand the backdrop from which it arose-nineteenth-century evangelicalism.
Conclusion
Marsden concludes the book by re-emphasizing his definition of Fundamentalism as a militant anti-modernist conservative force. For Marsden this should be the starting point for defining the movement. Militant anti-modernism applies to all types of Fundamentalism and any definition that goes beyond this must have qualifiers so that false stereotypes are not applied to the wrong group. As an Evangelical I enjoyed this book as I saw where the mind-set of conservatives and liberals developed. I also learned to what extent my own beliefs were influenced by this movement. I suggest that this book be read alongside another book on the shaping of American Christianity for a full understanding. I would also like to see an analysis of Fundamentalism from a more mainline perspective, although I believe Marsden is objective in this work. My main qualm with this book is in Part Three. In discussing the peak and soon-to-come fall of Fundamentalism, Marsden tried to put too many ideas into too few words. To keep up with him I had to re-analyze several chapters. However, due to the length of the book already, I can understand his attempt to save space. I would recommend this book to people of all political and religious persuasions so that they may have a fair understanding of this branch of early twentieth-century American religion.

American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture (3rd Edition)

Book Info
Popular cultural reader focuses on the traditional mainstream values that have attracted people to the United States for well over 200 years and traces the effect of these values on American life. Paper. DLC: English language - Textbooks for foreign speakers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture, Third Edition, by Maryanne Kearny Datesman, JoAnn Crandall, and Edward N. Kearny, focuses on the traditional values that have attracted people to the United States for well over 200 years and traces the effects of these values on American life.

Chapter themes include diversity, the family, education, government and politics, religion, business, and recreation. Cross-cultural activities --- from discussion topics to writing projects --- encourage high-intermediate to advanced students to compare their own values with those discussed in the readings.

New to the Third Edition:

* Expanded pre-reading exercises preview the chapter content and Academic Word List vocabulary.
* Improve Your Reading Skills helps students become independent readers.
* Build Your Vocabulary features collocations and exercises that expand on the Academic Word List.
* New Internet activities offer opportunities for further research and study.

The Twilight of American Culture

From Publishers Weekly
American culture is in crisis, argues Berman, pointing out that "millions of high school graduates can barely read or write"; "common words are misspelled on public signs"; "most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens"; and "40% of American adults [do] not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II"--never mind that most students don't even want to learn Greek or Latin. Berman's lament that "like ancient Rome [American culture] is drifting into an increasingly dysfunctional situation" at first makes his book seem like a neoconservative treatise along the lines of the late Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. But Berman, who teaches in the liberal arts masters program at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't locate the cause of this malaise in multiculturalism or postmodernism, as Bloom did (although he is no fan of either one), but rather in the increasing dominance of corporate culture and the global economy, which he claims creates a homogenous business and consumer culture that disdains art, beauty, literature, critical thinking and the principles of the Enlightenment. Berman's provocative remedy is to urge individuals who are appalled by this "McWorld" to become "sacred/secular humanist" monks who renounce commercial slogans and the "fashionable patois of postmodernism" and pursue Enlightenment values. While Berman's eclectic approach often makes for engaging reading, his quirky and almost completely theoretical solutions are unlikely to galvanize many readers. Agent, Candice Fuhrman. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com
"If you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age 'spirituality,' then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you."

A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its author's disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Berman's outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the "multinational entertainment oligopoly"--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of "spin and hype." Ironically, despite his disdain for "the fashionable patois of postmodernism," he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-François Lyotard's maxim "elitism for everybody" in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.

Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.