War Horse -- The Making of the Motion Picture by Steven Spielberg et al, A Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook '12 in oversized format on glossy stock, $34.99, 144 pages, ASIN #0062192612.
From Steven Spielberg's Foreword:
"Through the eyes of Joey and Albert, I embraced the opportunity to explore the vast scope of World War I. Despite the exposition to the horrors of war and the shattering of their innocence our heroes encounter on their journey to be reunited, this film is not about who is right in war. It is about the remarkable humanity that an animal is able to bring to these characters -- be they English, German, or French."
Designed as a visual companion to Steven Spielberg's acclaimed film currently in theaters across America, it brims with 140 dramatic images "about a young man and his horse and their separate journeys through the battlefields of the First World War." Spielberg writes that he made the film "because of what the book and the screenplay say about courage. It is about the courage of the horse Joey and what he endures to survive, and the courage of Albert in his attempt to find his best friend in a time of war."
Director Steven Spielberg has won acclaim for such films as Saving Private Ryan, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurrasic Park, Schindler's List, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jaws.
Food and Faith in Christian Culture, Edited by Ken Albala & Trudy Eden, Columbia UP '11, 265 pages, ASIN #0521146240. Index, bibliography, notes follow each essay.
The intersection of food and religion provides, at the least, food for thought and plenty of that. The editors have gathered varied points of view on a welter of topics, such as The Ideology of Fasting in the Reformation Era; 'The Food Police': Sumptuary Prohibitions on Food in the Reformation; The Sanctity of Bread: Missionaries and the Promotion of Wheat Growing Among the New Zealand Maori; Metaphysics and Meatless Meals: Why Food Mattered When the Mind was Everything; and Divine Dieting: A Cultural Analysis of Christian Weight Loss Programs. Two introductory essays detail the key themes tying these essays together and survey food's role in developing and disseminating the teachings of Christianity, not to mention providing a tangible experience of faith. Editor Ken Albala teaches history at the University of the Pacific. Trudy Eden teaches at the University of Northern Iowa.
Haiti -- A Shattered Nation by Elizabeth Abbott, Overlook '11, $35, 492 pages, ASIN #1590201418. Index, bibliography, notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.
The desperate Caribbean nation of Haiti, as revealed to us by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, is at the top of most "think you've got troubles?" lists. In her latest work, Elizabeth Abbott, whose last work also centered on the Caribbean (Sugar: A Bittersweet History), recounts Haiti's grim history, starting with its 1803 independence from France, through the multi-generational Duvalier regime, which may have set all records for corruption. (Abbott also wrote their biography). "The Duvalier regime slaughtered at least 50,000 people, drove a million Haitians into exile, and tortured hundreds of thousands more," writes the author. The primitive nation's sheer inability to cope came to the fore during the 2010 earthquake that left one million homeless. While Abbott doesn't offer any magic formula to change things, she does observe the Haitian people are "extraordinarily resilient."
Historian Elizabeth Abbott is a senior research associate and former Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Her four other histories have been translated into sixteen languages.
So Much Aid, So Little Development -- Stories from Pakistan, Woodrow Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins Press '11 paperback. $25, 204 pages, ASIN #142140138X. Index, no bibliography, footnotes, unillustrated.
From the back cover:
"Pakistan has received more than $20 billion in external development assistance but has made little evident improvement in its social indicators. So Much Aid, So Little Development offers a fresh explanation for this outcome. The author, Samia Altaf, a physician and public health specialist, follows one major initiative, the Social Action Program developed by the Pakistani government in 1992 and funded by the World Bank to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. In an engrossing account that reads almost like a novel, at times hilarious, at others heartbreaking, she tells the story of the program's shortcomings through a series of eyewitness vignettes. She begins with planning meetings in Islamabad, moves through layer after layer of the Pakistani bureaucracy down to the village health trainee, and then returns to Washington for the evaluation. At every stage, she finds skewed incentives, misplaced priorities, and inappropriate designs diverting the project from its original intentions and ambitions. In the process. Altaf introduces into the development conversation the human dimension that most frameworks have neglected to their detriment.
Samia Waheed Altaf, a 2007 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, was formerly the senior advisor to the Office of Health in the USAID Mission in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Politics, Culture, and Sociability in the Basque Nationalist Party by Roland Vazquez, UNevada Press '10, Index, bibliography, notes, glossary, three appendices, grouping of b&w images.
A brief excerpt:
"The book does not simply concern political ideas and ideology, but political organization as well. I believe that this has been a significant void in the research on Basque politics, and it is one that is even more pronounced in the study of politics from an institutional perspective, in the Basque case as well as more pervasively....Although organizations such as parties represent wha might be called important meso-level realities, political scientists and sociologists have tended to focus on party systems and voting data at the expense of studying the organizations themselves....On the other hand, anthropologists have often been far too quick to jump directly from the local to the global....Parties and other political organizations do continue to matter -- a fact that makes their empirical study of ongoing importance and the relative lack of such studies perplexing...."
Roland Vazquez is associate professor of social sciences and anthropology at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, Iowa.