Books

So few countries are like Japan. It is a place where everyone is good at their jobs and where crime is low. It is a place where ancient traditions blend with modern technology and modern lifestyles. Japan continually adapts to the changing of the times but her heart still retains her unique identity. There is a cultural universe inside every Japanese individual that is both logical and mysterious. Imagine a place where communication revolves around silence and ambiguity and you begin to understand something of the Japanese heart.

This book explores those areas as well as what common everyday life is like. It presents insights into history, culture, and current trends, as well as personal experiences by the author. A concise analysis of lifestyles is portrayed of the children, adults and senior citizens. Touching the Heart of Japan presents all these things and more.

“…I have called this collection Certainties and on the first page I quote Werner Heisenberg’s attempt to articulate the fundamental paradox of quantum ‘uncertainty’: that knowledge of location (position) and momentum (direction) are mutually exclusive at least at the quantum level.

I have appropriated this concept to my own experience: If I know where I am, I can never be certain where I am going. And the corollary: If I know where I am going, I cannot be certain where I am. My poems are exceptions. They are certainties because they are ‘fixed’ moments of experience or reflection, identified in words that provide both locale and direction, at least in hindsight.”

—From the Preface of Certainties

Dear Folks: A Father’s Journey, contains the most heartfelt, intimate, and bravest e-mails to be shared as one father walked this journey with his son, Kevin, who was diagonosed with a rare form of Ewing’s Sarcoma.

Along with these emails that Howard Spinner wrote to family and friends to update them on Kevin’s progress, the book contains photographs of Kevin throughout his life, art that he drew and literature that he wrote.

This book was created as a memorial to Kevin Spinner’s life, as a means of educating the public about Ewing’s Sarcoma and also a way of garnering donations for research into this devastating disease.

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to UCSF research into the treatment and cure for Ewing’s Sarcoma.

Evolution and growth are different for each of us; destiny having a way of forging its own path. The future lies in the ashes of the past and is brought about by actions taken in the present. One can never be sure where past, present and future connect, but they do connect; making Life the greatest of all adventures.

With the answering of the telephone, the years and worlds separating Julian Holliday and Sierra Wolfe are merged into a reality masked in deceit, lies and the fog of illusion. If Julian and Sierra are to be together, obstacles must be overcome; agendas must be realized, confronted and dealt with and the power of love must be believed and embraced.

The author was born in Laramie, Wyoming, one of seven children. Her parents had emigrated from Norway in 1905. This book is the story of her childhood in a small farming community, a story filled with vivid portraits of colorful characters—both human and animal. Spring Canyon is a warm tale of a time of rich harvests and cruel reapings, of plenty and of want, and of many dear lives remembered and immortalized in this book.

Note: Spring Canyon, in both original manuscript and printed book form, is in the Jennie Williams Tennant Collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie WY.

Two Brothers Paths West and East by Mary Shuler Heimburger is currently featured at the Oakland Museum Bookstore, during the California Gold Rush Exhibition, and at the.Alameda Historical Museum.

“Let’s take a look at a box of Gold Rush letters in Grandma’s attic…your grandfather was a Forty Niner.” With these words, Mary Heimburger’s father Frank Shuler introduced her to a legacy of family history, which was to lead to the bookTwo Brothers–Paths West and East. The Author’s historical research and the letters, notebooks, and documents which she collected, create a fascinating story of an odyssey from the Pennsylvania Dutch village of Powder Valley to the Gold Rush mines of old California. Her book gives an unforgettable glimpse into the daily lives, struggles for survival, and dreams of American pioneers.

This book is written with a dual purpose in mind. Yes, it is a “how-to” book, but it is hoped that it will also serve as a facilitator for honest communication between couples.

A practical introduction to a major movement in the liberal church, Most Like an Arch is a groundbreaking study of the context, theory, and realities of global congregation-to-congregation relationships. Drawing on his six years of engagement in building sister church programs, the author presents partnerships as social justice initiatives, guides the reader through minefields of power, money, and paternalism, and focuses on the efforts of Unitarian Universalist congregations to establish and sustain connections with historic Unitarian churches in Transylvania.

Impeaching the President for lying about sex seemed so bizarre, so shockingly wrong-headed to this author (a retired professor of political sociology) that when the trial began he reset his wakeup alarm: got up before dawn each day in time to record events in the trial in the Senate and note how they seemed to be impacting public opinion, the jury-behind-the-jury of people not unlike himself. Would the poll numbers decline? Would the home folks finally “get it” that what Clinton did with Monica called for the political equivalent of capital punishment? Or would they “get it” that the campaign against him was in bad faith: an effort by religious extremists and others on the far right, on grounds that were both frivolous and contrived, to finally and at long last, “Get Clinton?” Was what Michael Lind has called “the southernization of American politics” a factor? Issues of race and sex, gays, women outside the home (“family values”), resentment of the protest movements of the ’60s and ’70s and the counterculture that grew out of it?

The renowned historical linguist Hans Henrich Hock once commented that, for reasons that are not well understood, there sometimes appear “curious gaps” in the bilabial slot of languages’ series of obstruents. Hock based his comment on the observation that if a language lacks a voiceless stop at one of the cardinal points of articulation, the missing segment is almost always /p/. Labial Instability in Sound Change explains the driving force behind this phenomenon. In this elegantly crafted solution to the longstanding problem of “labial instability,” linguist Richard Edward McDorman, Jr. clarifies the complex relationships among speech perception, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, language typology, and sound change.