<div> <b><i>The Culture of Christina Rossetti</i></b> explores a ?new? Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society's attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics. <br /> <br />The volume examines Rossetti?s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives in order to reevaluate her place in the Victorian world of art, literature, and ideas. The essays offer a radical rethinking of her best-known poems, retrieve neglected works, establish the diversity of her writing, and reposition Rossetti within a canon continually under formation. <br /> <br />Contributing to the ongoing retrieval of the nineteenth-century woman poet, <b><i>The Culture of Christina Rossetti</i></b> highlights Rossetti?s responses to both male and female literary traditions and explores her incorporation and revision of literary influences from medieval Italian sources to contemporary writers. </div>
<div> <b>A 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title </b> <br /> <br /> Traditionally, the Eastern Cape frontier of South Africa has been regarded as the preeminent contact zone between colonists and the Khoi (Hottentots) and San (Bushmen). But there was an earlier frontier in which the conflict between Dutch colonists and these indigenous herders and hunters was in many ways more decisive in its outcome, more brutal and violent in its manner, and just as significant in its effects on later South African history. <br /> <br /> This was the frontier north of Cape Town, where Dutch settlers began advancing into the interior. By the end of the eighteenth century, the frontier had reached the Orange (Gariep) River. The indigenous Khoisan people, after initial resistance, had been defeated and absorbed as an underclass into the colonial world or else expelled beyond it, to regions where new creole communities emerged. <br /> <br /> Nigel Penn is a master storyteller who brings a novelists sensitivity to plot and character and a command of the archival record to bear in recovering this epic and forgotten story. Filled with extraordinary personalities and memorable episodes, and set in the often harsh landscape of the Western and Northern Cape, The Forgotten Frontier will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of history. </div>
<div> <p><i>African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights</i> examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.<br /><br />Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate.<br /><br />Contributors: Iris Berger, Carol Bohmer, John Campbell, Katherine Luongo, E. Ann McDougall, Karen Musalo, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Amy Shuman, Joanna T. Tague, Meredith Terretta, and Charlotte Walker-Said.</p> </div>
<div> <p><i>Mirages</i> opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be ?the One,? the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as ?hell,? during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, ?Close your eyes to the ugly things,? and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world?s darkness with her own search for light.<br /><br /><i>Mirages</i> collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin?s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of <i>The Diary of Anaïs Nin,</i> which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries <i>Henry and June, Incest, Fire,</i> and <i>Nearer the Moon.</i> Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin?s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin?s ?children,? the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? <i>Mirages</i> is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.</p> </div>
<div> <p>?When Lincoln took office, in March 1861, the national government had no power to touch slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln understood this, and said as much in his first inaugural address, noting: ?I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.?? How, then, asks Paul Finkelman in the introduction to <i>Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation,</i> did Lincoln?who personally hated slavery?lead the nation through the Civil War to January 1865, when Congress passed the constitutional amendment that ended slavery outright?<br /><br />The essays in this book examine the route Lincoln took to achieve emancipation and how it is remembered both in the United States and abroad. The ten contributors?all on the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship on Lincoln and the Civil War?push our understanding of this watershed moment in US history in new directions. They present wide-ranging contributions to Lincoln studies, including a parsing of the sixteenth president?s career in Congress in the 1840s and a brilliant critique of the historical choices made by Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner in the movie <i>Lincoln,</i> about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.<br /><br />As a whole, these classroom-ready readings provide fresh and essential perspectives on Lincoln?s deft navigation of constitutional and political circumstances to move emancipation forward.<br /><br /><b>Contributors:</b> L. Diane Barnes, Jenny Bourne, Michael Burlingame, Orville Vernon Burton, Seymour Drescher, Paul Finkelman, Amy S. Greenberg, James Oakes, Beverly Wilson Palmer, Matthew Pinsker</p> </div>
<div> <p>Between 1500 and 1850, European traders shipped hundreds of thousands of African, Indian, Malagasy, and Southeast Asian slaves to ports throughout the Indian Ocean world. The activities of the British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders who operated in the Indian Ocean demonstrate that European slave trading was not confined largely to the Atlantic but must now be viewed as a truly global phenomenon. European slave trading and abolitionism in the Indian Ocean also led to the development of an increasingly integrated movement of slave, convict, and indentured labor during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the consequences of which resonated well into the twentieth century.<br /><br />Richard B. Allen?s magisterial work dramatically expands our understanding of the movement of free and forced labor around the world. Drawing upon extensive archival research and a thorough command of published scholarship, Allen challenges the modern tendency to view the Indian and Atlantic oceans as self-contained units of historical analysis and the attendant failure to understand the ways in which the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds have interacted with one another. In so doing, he offers tantalizing new insights into the origins and dynamics of global labor migration in the modern world.</p> </div>
<div> <p>Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.<br /><br />As this book shows, Africa?s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals?both African and non-African?have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. <i>African Intellectuals and Decolonization</i> outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity.<br /><br /><b>Contributors</b><br /><b>Lesley Cowling,</b> University of the Witwatersrand<br /><b>Nicholas M. Creary,</b> University at Albany<br /><b>Marlene De La Cruz,</b> Ohio University<br /><b>Carolyn Hamilton,</b> University of Cape Town<br /><b>George Hartley,</b> Ohio University<br /><b>Janet Hess,</b> Sonoma State University<br /><b>T. Spreelin McDonald,</b> Ohio University<br /><b>Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi,</b> University of Ibadan<br /><b>Steve Odero Ouma,</b> University of Nairobi<br /><b>Oyeronke Oyewumi,</b> State University of New York<br /> at Stony Brook<br /><b>Tsenay Serequeberhan,</b> Morgan State University<br /><br /></p> </div>
<div> <p>Despite his military achievements and his association with many of the great names of American history, Godfrey Weitzel (1835?1884) is perhaps the least known of all the Union generals. After graduating from West Point, Weitzel, a German immigrant from Cincinnati, was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans. The secession of Louisiana in 1861, with its key port city of New Orleans, was the first of a long and unlikely series of events that propelled the young Weitzel to the center of many of the Civil War?s key battles and brought him into the orbit of such well-known personages as Lee, Beauregard, Butler, Farragut, Porter, Grant, and Lincoln. Weitzel quickly rose through the ranks and was promoted to brigadier general and, eventually to commander of Twenty-Fifth Corps, the Union Army?s only all-black unit. After fighting in numerous campaigns in Louisiana and Virginia, on April 3, 1865, Weitzel marched his troops into Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, capturing the city for the Union and precipitating the eventual collapse of the Southern states? rebellion.<br /><br />G. William Quatman?s minute-by-minute narrative of the fall of Richmond lends new insight into the war?s end, and his keen research into archival sources adds depth and nuance to the events and the personalities that shaped the course of the Civil War. </p> </div>
<div> <p>In this ambitious new history of the antiapartheid struggle, Jon Soske places India and the Indian diaspora at the center of the African National Congress?s development of an inclusive philosophy of nationalism. In so doing, Soske combines intellectual, political, religious, urban, and gender history to tell a story that is global in reach while remaining grounded in the everyday materiality of life under apartheid.<br /><br />Even as Indian independence provided black South African intellectuals with new models of conceptualizing sovereignty, debates over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa (the ?also-colonized other?) forced a reconsideration of the nation?s internal and external boundaries. In response to the traumas of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, a group of thinkers in the ANC, centered in the Indian Ocean city of Durban and led by ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli, developed a new philosophy of nationhood that affirmed South Africa?s simultaneously heterogeneous and fundamentally African character.<br /><br /><i>Internal Frontiers</i> is a major contribution to postcolonial and Indian Ocean studies and charts new ways of writing about African nationalism.</p> </div>
<div> <p>Play is the central, universally significant activity of childhood. Self-directed play in which adults have a supporting rather than directing role is critical to the development and well-being of children. Yet as children have their days and nights increasingly scripted and planned for them, opportunities for play have disappeared over the last half century, especially in schools.<br /><br />ArtBreak?s innovation lies in its creative framework. Former school counselor, current professor of counseling, and practicing artist Katherine Ziff developed and tested the program over five years, integrating theory and practice from art therapy, counseling, and child-centered education. The result is a choice-based, guided play experience based on the developmental and restorative possibilities of art making.<br /><br />A detailed how-to guide, this book is the flexible and accessible toolbox that teachers, parents, and counselors need to facilitate relaxing, art-based play that allows children to freely explore, plan, and pursue their own interests with adult support. Easy to implement, ArtBreak can be added to the regular routines of classroom, home, therapy office, or other community setting at whatever scale suits space, time, and budget. No art training is required, only a willingness to embark on a play journey with children.</p> </div>
<div> <p>Scholars of southern Appalachia have largely focused their research on men, particularly white men. While there have been a few important studies of Appalachian women, no one book has offered a broad overview across time and place. With this collection, editors Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco redress this imbalance, telling the stories of these women and calling attention to the varied backgrounds of those who call the mountains home.<br />The essays of <i>Women of the Mountain South</i> debunk the entrenched stereotype of Appalachian women as poor and white, and shine a long-overdue spotlight on women too often neglected in the history of the region. Each author focuses on a particular individual or group, but together they illustrate the diversity of women who live in the region and the depth of their life experiences. The Mountain South has been home to Native American, African American, Latina, and white women, both rich and poor. Civil rights and gay rights advocates, environmental and labor activists, prostitutes, and coal miners?all have lived in the place called the Mountain South and enriched its history and culture.</p> </div>
<div> <p>The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. <i>Music Hall and Modernity</i> demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of ?the people.?<br /><br />In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. <br /><br /><i>Music Hall and Modernity</i> offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middle-brow, mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies. </p> </div>
<div> At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups?those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland?faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland. <br /> <br />The new arrivals did not consider themselves simply as immigrants, but rather as members of the special category of political refugees. They defined their identity within the framework of the exile mission, an unwritten set of beliefs, goals, and responsibilities, placing patriotic work for Poland at the center of Polish immigrant duties. <br /> <br />In <i>The Exile Mission</i>, an intriguing look at the interplay between the established Polish community and the refugee community, Anna Jaroszynska?Kirchmann presents a tale of Polish Americans and Polish refugees who, like postwar Polish exile communities all over the world, worked out their own ways to implement the mission's main goals. Between the outbreak of World War II and 1956, as Professor Jaroszynska?Kirchmann demonstrates, the exile mission in its most intense form remained at the core of relationships between these two groups. <br /> <br /> <i>The Exile Mission</i> is a compelling analysis of the vigorous debate about ethnic identity and immigrant responsibility toward the homeland. It is the first full?length examination of the construction and impact of the exile mission on the interactions between political refugees and established ethnic communities. <br /> <br /> </div>
<div> Despite deepening poverty and environmental degradation throughout rural Latin America, Mayan peasant farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, are finding environmental and economic success by growing organic coffee. <i>Organic Coffee: Sustainable Development by Mayan Farmers</i> provides a unique and vivid insight into how this coffee is grown, harvested, processed, and marketed to consumers in Mexico and in the north. <br /> <br />Maria Elena Martinez-Torres explains how Mayan farmers have built upon their ethnic networks to make a crucial change in their approach to agriculture. Taking us inside Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state and scene of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, she examines the anatomy of the ongoing organic coffee boom and the fair-trade movement. The organic coffee boom arose as very poor farmers formed cooperatives, revalued their ethnic identity, and improved their land through organic farming. The result has been significant economic benefits for their families and ecological benefits for the future sustainability of agriculture in the region. <br /> <br /> <i>Organic Coffee</i> refutes the myth that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based agriculture and gives us reasons to be hopeful for indigenous peoples and peasant farmers </div>
<div> Ever look at a modern skyscraper or a vacant lot and wonder what was there before? Or maybe you have passed an old house and been curious about who lived there long ago. This richly illustrated new book celebrates Columbus, Ohio?s, two-hundred-year history and supplies intriguing stories about the city?s buildings and celebrated citizens, stopping at individual addresses, street corners, parks, and riverbanks where history was made. As Columbus celebrates its bicentennial in 2012, a guide to local history is very relevant. <br /> <br />Like Columbus itself, the city?s history is underrated. Some events are of national importance; no one would deny that Abraham Lincoln?s funeral procession down High Street was a historical highlight. But the authors have also included a wealth of social and entertainment history from Columbus?s colorful history as state capital and destination for musicians, artists, and sports teams. <br /> <br />The book is divided into seventeen chapters, each representing a section of the city, including Statehouse Square, German Village, and Franklinton, the city?s original settlement in 1797. Each chapter opens with an entertaining story that precedes the site listings. Sites are clearly numbered on maps in each section to make it easy for readers to visit the places that pique their interest. Many rare and historic photos are reproduced along with stunning contemporary images that offer insight into the ways Columbus has changed over the years. <br /> <br /> <i>A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus</i> invites Columbus?s families to rediscover their city with a treasure trove of stories from its past and suggests to visitors and new residents many interesting places that they might not otherwise find. This new book is certain to amuse and inform for years to come. </div>
<div> For two and a half years (1937-1939), Captain John Seymour Letcher commanded a company of the U.S. Embassy Marine Guard in Peking. During that time, he wrote a series of letters to his parents in Virginia describing the life of a Westerner in the former imperial city. During that same time, China was invaded by Japan. <br /> <br />Captain Letcher describes the flavor of life in pre-Communist China ? the food, servants, cold Peking winters and torrid summers, hunting, and excursions to the major tourist sites. <br /> <br />But his letters also tell of the Japanese slaughter of Chinese troops in the opening days of the Sino-Japanese War. He wrote about life in a city under Japanese occupation and the stirring story of the Chinese guerrillas rebounding from devastating defeat. <br /> <br />These letters and accompanying introduction, preface, and notes, draw attention to the Western experience in a place and time largely overlooked by military historians and modern China specialists. </div>
<div> If Horatio Alger had imagined a female heroine in the same mold as one of the young male heroes in his rags-to-riches stories, she would have looked like Belinda Mulrooney. Smart, ambitious, competitive, and courageous, Belinda Mulrooney was destined through her legendary pioneering in the wilds of the Yukon basin to found towns and many businesses. She built two fortunes, supported her family, was an ally to other working women, and triumphed in what was considered a man's world. <br /> <br />In <b><i>Staking Her Claim</i></b>, Melanie Mayer and Robert N. DeArmond provide a faithful and comprehensive portrait of this unique character in North American frontier history. Their exhaustive research has resulted in a sweeping saga of determination and will, tempered by disaster and opportunity. <br /> <br />Like any good Horatio Alger hero, Belinda overcame the challenges that confronted her, including poverty, prejudice, a lack of schooling, and the early loss of parents. Her travels took her from her native Ireland as a young girl to a coal town in Pennsylvania to Chicago, San Francisco, and finally, in 1897, to the Yukon. <br /> <br /> <b><i>Staking Her Claim</i></b> is a testament to the human spirit and to the idea of the frontier. It is a biography of a woman who made her own way in the world and in doing so left an indelible mark. </div>
<div> In <i>Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions,</i> a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions. The book examines the jihad movement in the context of the age of revolutions?commonly associated with the American and French revolutions and the erosion of European imperialist powers?and shows how West Africa, too, experienced a period of profound political change in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Paul Lovejoy argues that West Africa was a vital actor in the Atlantic world, and has wrongly been excluded from analyses of the period. <br /> <br /> Among its chief contributions, the book reconceptualizes slavery. Lovejoy shows that during the decades in question, slavery not only expanded extensively in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil, but also in the jihad states of West Africa. In particular, this expansion occurred in the Muslim states of the Sokoto Caliphate, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro. At the same time, he offers new information on the role antislavery activity in West Africa played in the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora. <br /> <br /> Finally, <i>Jihad and Slavery in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions</i> provides unprecedented context for the political and cultural role of Islam in Africa?and of the concept of jihad in particular?from the eighteenth century into the present. Understanding that there is a long tradition of jihad in West Africa, Lovejoy argues, helps to correct the current distortion in understanding the contemporary jihad movement in the Middle East, Afganistan, Pakistan, and Africa. </div>
<div> Koyashi Issa (1763-1827), long considered amoung Japan?s four greatest haiku poets (along with Basho, Buson, and Shiki) is probably the best loved. This collection of more than 360 haiku, arranged seasonally and many rendered into English for the first time, attempts to reveal the full range of the poet?s extraordinary life as if it were concentrated within a year. Issa?s haiku are traditionally structured, of seventeen syllables in the original, tonally unified and highly suggestive, yet they differ from those of fellow haikuists in a few important respects. Given his character, they had to. The poet never tries to hide his feelings, and again and again we find him grieving over the lot of the unfortunate - of any and all species. <br /> <br />No poet, of any time or culture, feels greater compassion for his life of creatures. No Buddhist-Issa was to become a monk -- acts out the credos of his faith more genuinely. The poet, a devoted follower of Basho, traveled throughout the country, often doing the most menial work, seeking spiritual companionship and inspiration for the thousands of haiku he was to write. Yet his emotional and creative life was centered in his native place, Kashiwabara in the province of Shinano (now Nagano Prefecture), and his severest pain was the result of being denied a place in his dead father?s house by his stepmother and half brother. <br /> <br />By the time he was able to share the house of his beloved father, Issa had experienced more than most the grief of living, and much more was to follow with the death of his wife and their four children. In the face of all he continued to write, celebrating passionately the lives of all that shared the world with him, all creatures, all humans. Small wonder that Issa is so greatly loved by his fellow poets throughout the world, and by poetry lovers of all ages. </div>
<div> Polish émigrés have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin's fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration. <br /> <br /> Mostwin and her husband survived the ravages of World War II, traveled to Britain, and then emigrated to the United States. Mostwin devoted her scholarly career to the study of immigrants trapped between cultural worlds. Winner of international awards for her fiction, Danuta Mostwin here offers two novellas, translated by the late Marta Erdman, which are the first of her works published in English in the United States. <br /> <br /> Deeply melancholic and moving in its unsentimental depiction of ordinary people trying to make sense of their uprooted lives, <i>Testaments</i> presents two powerful vignettes of life in immigrant America, <i>The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski and Jocasta</i>. This timely publication provides an introduction to Mostwin's work that will ensure that she is recognized as the creator of one of the most nuanced and deeply moving pictures of emigration and exile in Polish-American literature. </div>
<div> Studies of the 1974 Ethiopian revolution have hitherto almost completely ignored religion, in spite of the commitment of a great majority of Ethiopian people to one or another religious tradition. Moreover, existing studies focus almost exclusively on the center, on national politics, and on the evolution of national institutions. <br /> <br />This book makes an important contribution to the literature on the Ethiopian revolution and on African church growth and development. <br /> <br />Based on the wealth of materials available from informants, in documentary collections, and in missionary records, in addition to his personal observations, Eide traces the journey from support for the revolution by the church leaders and local members to their suspected alliance with opposition forces. The result is informative, and, at times, moving. </div>
<div> The concept of Colouredness?being neither white nor black?has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation. <br /> <br /> <i>Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community</i> is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity?s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment. <br /> <br />Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people?s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa. </div>
<p>2015 Garden Writers Association, Silver Award of Achievement</p> <p>Trees not only add beauty and value to property but also enhance the physical environment by providing shade, reflecting heat, and blocking wind. Choosing the right trees for the right location and conditions, however, is not always easy: each species has its own requirements for sunlight, water, drainage, and protection.<br /><br /><i>Landscaping with Trees in the Midwest: A Guide for Residential and Commercial Properties</i> describes sixty-five desirable tree species, their characteristics, and their uses. More than 325 color photographs illustrate the appearance of each species through the seasons--including height, shape, bark, flowers, and fall colors--as well as other factors that influence selection and siting in order to help the landscape professional or homeowner make informed choices.<br /><br />This guidebook also considers trees as a factor in overall environmental health and gives special consideration to the effects of the emerald ash borer, which continues to wreak havoc in wooded areas of the Midwest, offering replacement alternatives for vulnerable areas. In addition to the text and photos, the book includes a table of growth rates and sizes, a map of hardiness zones, and other valuable reference tools.</p>
Publishers Weekly,Reporter Welsh-Huggins's workmanlike debut, the first in a series, introduces Andy Hayes, a Columbus, Ohio, PI, and-for reasons explained late in the story-perhaps the most reviled former football player in Ohio State history. On the behalf of client Ted Hamilton, Hayes manages to retrieve a laptop from high school student Pete Freeley with an embarrassing video, of which Hamilton is the unwilling star, but Hayes is beaten and robbed of it before he can wipe it clean. The missing laptop has information that affects not only Hamilton but also police detective Henry Fielding, O.S.U. booster Bobby Fletcher, English teacher Anne Cooper, FBI agent Cindy Morris, and Pete's father, businessman Doug Freeley. Hayes proves an appealing, if not terribly effective, investigator. The author's use of iconic Columbus landmarks and lots of Buckeye lore will appeal to O.S.U. fans. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.