No comments about Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Women in Culture and Society Series).

No comments about Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography.

No comments about The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill.

1 comments about All My Sins Are Relatives (North American Indian Prose Award).

1. This is an amazing book. It is hard to write about one's own family and make it interesting. To go further and make it not only interesting, but relevant to others, takes a writer of rare talent. Penn is clearly such a writer, and I was very pleasantly surprised at the creative and original approach taken in this work. The author draws thought-provoking parallels and connections between his own mixblood Indian family's dreams, visions, failures and successes, and those of other families, in particular other native and mixed-blood families, including exploration of the writing of many historical native American figures. This is a creative and very original book, highly recommended.

No comments about After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration.

3 comments about Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women.

1. This novel is even more trite, than the authors boring monologues on mail order brides. Rather than familiarize the reader with the subject matter at hand, the author pumps her own ego repeatedly. What I did find amusing were the multiple references to the author's own homoerotic, incestuous, and pediphilific tendencies. In a word this novel blows. literally.



2. I've read stacks of books on China--both before, during, and after living there--and I will certainly add this one to my recommendation list. There are plenty of writers comfortable with giving pure "reportage" on a foreign country they have lived in, supposedly factual accounts of dramatic encounters or distanced anecdotes about the sights and sounds, but few willing to speak honestly about how they are personally affected by that place and the people they grow close to--or the complicated reasons that motivate them to go in the first place. Why travel to another country if you aren't willing to be changed by it or admit the concerns and questions you bring with you? Why read a memoir if you want just the facts or a large scale "objective" account and not something of the writer too? Read an encyclopedia or history book if that's what you're after, although these won't give you a sense of what it is for you as an individual to be in that place. Checkoway's beautiful account of her year in Hebei Province and the lives of the Chinese women who were brave enough to tell her their stories enriched my own understanding of the women in China who had befriended me, leaving me longing to return and at the same time profoundly aware of the way travelers are constantly compelled, each for their own reasons, to try to connect across cultures and political divisions. There is a haunting, respectful quality to Checkoway's prose. She admires these women for their courage, determination, and insights, and by the end of the book, I admire them--and Checkoway--too.



3. This tells you more about the author than it does about China; the writer claims to know Chinese but commits some obvious howlers ("horse-horse camel-camel" for "ma-ma hu-hu") that shows she speaks very little. Much better books about China include Kristoff & WuDunn's China Wakes, the Tysons' Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from the Unofficial China, or Jan Wong's Red China Blues : My Long March from Mao to Now.

3 comments about Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series, V. 16).

1. I recommend this book enthusiastically, for several reasons: First, amid the helter skelter of my own life, I treasure books I can enjoy in segments. Second, I enjoy books which I consider well written, and third, I relish non fiction books that read like imaginative prose but are actually non fiction works. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST meets each of these criteria. Savoring, dipping into this book, is a joy. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST enabled me, a compulsive stay-at-home, to see distant places. For example, as I write it's deep winter in Ohio, 2006, and I'm writing about Laurel and Ernest's ninth soujourn at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in March 2002. Laurel, an accomplished poet, writes first, revealing her sharp yet lyrical talent for descriptive prose. It's her first trip since 9/11 and she breathes deeply "imagining millions of zaps of the happiness potions that live in the sea, some call them 'negative ions.'" She describes the GulfGate Condos as "color coordinated, swirls of turquoise, shrimp, and shells on the Wall Tex, chair covers, upholstery, pictures, dishes, towels, sheets. I sink into the comfort of the cliche." We're allowed to relish a visit to Evander Preston's jewelry store where Ernest buys Laurel "a pair of gold earrings, flat and smooth with wrinkled edges like the sea." In Ernest's account they revisit the Don Cesar Hotel which used to be a haunt of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Coincicentally, they want to see President George W. Bush and his motorcade drive up to the Don Cesar for a $25,000 a plate fundraiser. As two retired profesors they exchange hilarious wisecracks about the price! They also intend to have lunch in an ice cream parlor which was once named Zelda's, but they have to settle for the new Uncle Andy's. Ernest, who is an aficianado of--indeed, an expert on--F.Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, describes the scene with accuracy and literary elan. As Laurel puts it, "Ernest can riff." He describes the Don Cesar as "our goal the flamingo pink mirage shimmering up ahead in the Florida heat, gigantic yet fragile looking, a Hansel and Gretel castle that might at any moment dissolve like sherbet into the Gulf of Mexico." Laurel asks Ernest whether he remembers George W. Bush at Yale. This sets Ernest off on a riotous yet highly informative ramble on those Yale days, 1963-71, when Ernest was assistant professor of English there. He recalls "classrooms full of good looking kids who'd rather discuss yachts than Yeats, most of them looking like, oh, clones of the Kingston Trio." Ernest writes skillfully, fearlessly about the then-new New Criticism and explains how and why N.C. eventually contaminated--yes, nearly murdered--the craft of literature, yea, education. Here is a marvelous expose, a must, for a throng of serious writers who have been suffering in silence and wondering for some time what really went wrong. In TRAVELS WITH ERNEST the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences. It's the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives. I treasure this book. It's kind of like reality TV, but the ideas are more exciting, and the language is platinum. REVIEWER: Elizabeth Ann James



2. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST could be called Travels with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, for its unique travel narratives are informed by a wide range of literary works. At one point Ernest Lockridge muses on his tendency to follow the footsteps of famous authors: "Myth and literature help order and direct your life, so you're not just traveling fecklessly about. They're like a map. We're able to map ourselves onto literature and onto myth." Lockridge and his wife, Laurel Richardson, travel with and without maps in TRAVELS WITH ERNEST, a hybrid volume combining travel narratives from two distinct perspectives. Lockridge and Richardson are both authors and emeritus professors at Ohio State University, Lockridge in English and creative writing and Richardson in sociology and cultural studies. For this book, they traveled to places as different as Death Valley, Beirut, and Ireland, each writing about the trip from his or her individual perspective; the book also includes transcripts of their conversations about the trips and the writing process. Ernest's essays, Laurel's essays, and the couple's conversations work together to triangulate in on exotic places and the process by which people come to know the world. Richardson describes their method: "Experiencing, writing, conversing, rewriting, conversing, writing. Although we agree on what we see, we have a different edge, a different take on experience." Most interesting are those forays that take the writers off the map entirely. Over and over again the map has been lost or left behind, but our intrepid explorers stumble on stubbornly, ending up lost or imperiled. Even while exploring familiar terrain, they discover hidden hazards. Lockridge, for instance, is haunted by memories of his father, novelist Ross Lockridge, who wrote RAINTREE COUNTY, a classic of mid-century Midwestern literature, and then committed suicide at the peak of his success. The terrain they travel is both exotic and familiar: a high-rise apartment building in Russia where they encounter cherished family members; a tiny apartment in Copenhagen that evokes memories of their student days; an ancient castle in Ireland that bears a family name. Wherever they travel--Beirut, Copenhagen, Shenandoah--they find their people, their history, themselves. And they also find Ohio. Lockridge describes Ireland's Midlands as "a dead ringer for Ohio on our best day of the year." Even while looking over Yeats's acclaimed Lake Isle of Innisfree, Lockridge finds an island paradise that looks familiar: "Thick with trees and shrubs it's the size of my back yard in Worthington, Ohio." Whatever maps its authors may follow, TRAVELS WITH ERNEST leads right back home.



3. I loved this book! Lockridge's humor pulled me in and Richardson's lyrical writing kept me reading. This is a book that cuts a broad swath through an academic couple's life. It took me to places I had never seen, made me think about my marriage in new ways and examine my career history with fresh eyes. Travels with Ernest is unique, compelling, and provocative. I highly recommend it.

No comments about The Mind of Oliver C. Cox (African American Intellectual Heritage Series).

No comments about Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884: Journals and Letters.

No comments about Confronting the Drug Control Establishment: Alfred Lindesmith As a Public Intellectual (S U N Y Series in Deviance and Social Control).