Presenting a vivid picture of the current world-wide effort to promote literacy, the author discusses the problems faced, the procedures followed, the ends sought.

Stressing the increasing interest in reading today throughout the world, the author points out the recognized importance of world-wide literacy and the increasing demands made on readers in all countries. The conditions which make world literacy imperative, and the role of reading in the lives of adults everywhere are reviewed.

An analysis of records of eye-movements in reading reveals that the basic attitudes and skills involved in reading are similar the world over, independent of differences in language and culture. Review of the teaching of reading reveals that both meaning and word recognition should be emphasized from the beginning. The author next lays out programs for teaching both children and adults to read. Finally, he discusses the lessons to be learned about the teaching of reading from this world wide study.

From the dense forests of the Big Thicket to the limitless vistas of the Davis Mountains, Texas is a land of astonishing diversity and natural beauty. Yet it is also a land where commuters endure endless traffic jams in the major cities and where pollution and environmental degradation threaten the most essential elements of our common living space—the land, air, and water.

In this thoughtful, practical book, Pete Gunter and Max Oelschlaeger offer a new vision for living on the land, a 'land ethic' that respects the stability, integrity, and beauty of the "land community." Avoiding harsh rhetoric that seeks only to place blame and foretell doom, they discuss how economic and environmental goals may be reconciled so that Texans can continue to enjoy a reasonable prosperity while living in a land free of pollutants and scars, where some wild lands still exist and animals range freely.

In presenting their land ethic, the authors draw on the ideas of Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac persuasively urges human beings to respect the land—with all of its animal and plant inhabitants—that supports us. This is an ethic to take Texas into the twenty-first century, in which the wise choices we make now will create a stable and sustainable future.

The bar code is now at the core of commerce, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and retailing, and its influence has spread to virtually every industry in the industrialized world. When this voluntary product code was first introduced in 1974, it led to the worldwide revolution in supply chain efficiency.

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this now universally embraced technology, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a symposium. Gathered together in this volume are the thoughts of eight speakers with hands-on experience concerning the development, diffusion, adoption, and applications of a truly groundbreaking technology. The volume concludes with papers from a panel discussion among those involved in creating the Universal Product Code, the foundation of the bar code.

Over the course of his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises. In more recent years he has written extensively on the legal realists and the Warren Court.

Following an earlier festschrift volume by his former students, this volume includes essays by Horwitz’s colleagues at Harvard and those from across the academy, as well as his students. These essays assess specific themes in Horwitz’s work, from the antebellum era to the Warren Court, from jurisprudence to the influence of economics on judicial doctrine. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke’s own work such as The Left-handed Woman. Handke prefaces the monologue in Till Day You Do PartOr a Question of Light with a description of two stone figures. While the male figure remains “as dead and gone as anyone can,” the female bursts into life, and her monologue gradually focuses on Krapp’s use of pauses and language to dominate the other characters in the Beckett play. Ultimately, however, her complaints and critique of Krapp become a declaration of her love for Krapp or at least an affirmation of their attachment, as the two of them are ultimately bound together, perhaps even inseparable. 

Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light  is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.

This is a twentieth-century reissue of a distinguished book--a collection of the impressions and experiences of European travelers to America over three centuries, revealing much about the changing viewpoints of Europeans toward the United States.

Oscar Handlin has added a new preface, written from the perspective of 1969. He points out that in 1919 when This Was America was first published, strains among the wartime allies had already appeared, but they had not weakened the memory of joint efforts to defeat Fascism. Anti-Americanism was not yet widespread.

Europeans generally have tended to see in the United States developments which they either disliked intensely or cherished devotedly, and quite naturally their accounts of travels through this country have reflected their feelings. But, however biased, their reports help bring into perspective the troubles of the present as they provide valuable insights into the problems of the past.

The authors of these papers came from many walks of life. They were businessmen, land speculators, merchants, government officials, exiles, artists, students, and priests. What they wrote has a directness of perception and expression that allows both the Old World temper and the New World atmosphere to come vividly alive. Their subjects are as varied as the interests that led them to America.

Here are observations on the country's physical beauty and spaciousness as well as on its social and governmental institutions. More significant, however, are the observations on Americans as individuals, their domestic manners, their ways of life, their adaptations to the new continent and the new society. Oscar Handlin gives us the very cream of their comments, preceded by an introductory paragraph and so organized as to tell an orderly and connected story of American social history. The result is a well founded, entertaining commentary on the United States.

Marion Duff Hanks (1921–2011) was one of the most beloved and influential leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century, serving as a General Authority (senior leader) for forty years. He was also a leader of national import. As a recognized expert on youth, five US presidents appointed him to their President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Hanks also served as an executive leader of Rotary International and the Boy Scouts of America.

Author Richard Hanks draws on previously unavailable primary sources—journals, correspondence, notebooks, and recordings—to share this first and only authorized biography of his father. Hanks traces his father’s influence as he advocated for numerous changes in the institutional church, including humanitarian efforts, refugee relief services, missionary community service, a focus on mercy for the sinner, and a churchwide emphasis on “coming unto Christ.” A Renaissance man, Duff Hanks felt comfortable mingling with presidents and world leaders and speaking from pulpits and podiums to huge audiences and on television. But he found his greatest joy in assisting the individual, encouraging each in their personal search for happiness. Once, when asked about his goals, he replied, “My strongest desire is to qualify to be a friend of Christ.”

Thomas P. Harrison here combines a lifelong interest in birds with a professional study of literature. This book, a study of birds as they are presented by four great English poets, inquires into the extent and sources of their knowledge of birds and analyzes the methods by which they adapted that knowledge for poetic purposes. The interrelationships of their poetry are also discussed, providing a new basis for comparison of four poets whose work is closely linked on other grounds remote from natural history.

The first chapter reviews representative figures and works of the centuries preceding the Renaissance and illustrates the medieval poetic conventions about birds that influenced the four poets. The remaining chapters treat each poet and his works in detail, comparing their use of this area of the natural world. The book concludes with an index of bird allusions in the works of the four poets, with occasional quotations illustrating the manner in which the traditional or observed habits of particular birds were put to poetic use. The book is illustrated with medieval and Renaissance illustrations of birds.

In this careful treatment of an important element of the poets’ works, Harrison has indicated the larger picture of their attitudes toward and use of the natural world about them. Accordingly, it might be said to constitute a chapter on the relationship of poetry and science at a crucial period in the history of thought.

For much of his material, Harrison journeyed to England, where, among other research activities, he visited museums of natural history and bird sanctuaries throughout the country.

Primarily intended for students of literature, They Tell of Birds will also be of interest to ornithologists in its presentation of the beliefs of antiquity and the Middle Ages about particular birds. For, as the distinguished ornithologist E. M. Nicholson has said: “We owe to poets a wealth of records of living wild birds long before scientific ornithology had started.”

Winner, Journalistic Achievement Award, Texas Historical Foundation, 2004

From the simplest slab of weathered stone to the most imposing mausoleum, every marker in a Texas cemetery bears witness to a life that—in ways small or large—helped shape the history and culture of the state. Telling the stories of some of these significant lives is the purpose of this book. Within its pages, you'll meet not only the heroes of the Texas Revolution, for example, but also one of the great African American cowboys of the traildriving era (Bose Ikard) and the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office (Annie Webb Blanton). Visiting cemeteries from every era and all regions of the state, Bill Harvey recounts the histories of famous, infamous, and just plain interesting Texans who lie at rest in Texas cemeteries.

The book is organized alphabetically by city for easy reference. For each city, Harvey lists one or more cemeteries, giving their location and history, if significant. At the heart of the book are his profiles of the noteworthy people buried in each cemetery. They include not only famous but also lesser-known and even unknown Texans who made important contributions to the state in the arts, sports, business, military service, politics—truly every area of communal life. For those who want to visit these resting places, Harvey also includes tips on finding cemeteries, locating gravesites, and taking good photographs. Spend time with him in the graveyards of Texas, and you'll soon appreciate what fascinating stories the silent stones can tell.

Here are the traditions of harpsichord making as they might have been taught to young apprentices in five countries where the craft once flourished: Italy, Flanders, France, England, and Germany. The period covered ranges from approximately 1500, when concrete data became available, to 1800, after which the nature of the instrument is no longer of musicological significance.

The author’s aim is to “give enough information to make it possible for builders of harpsichords to base their work on certain knowledge of the designs and methods of earlier makers; to guide players of the harpsichord in their search for appropriate instruments, dispositions, and registrations in recreating the music of the past; and to serve as a useful body of information for historians and editors of early keyboard music.”

A chapter each is devoted to the five most important schools of harpsichord making. Over forty plates illustrate the most typical harpsichords of each country. Each set of drawings includes a plan drawn to scale, the interior of the instrument, and interesting details of action and construction. These are supplemented by reproductions of illustrations taken from early sources. The appendixes contain texts of relevant documents, including inventories of the shops of some prominent French makers and contemporary descriptions of instruments.

Frank Hubbard has drawn material from contemporary descriptions of instruments and the mechanical arts such as those found in encyclopedias, technical treatises, books on music theory, and manuals for craftsmen. In addition he has examined hundreds of instruments in European and American collections. His exceptional position as an internationally known harpsichord maker as well as a student of harpsichord history allows him to discuss technical as well as historical matters that would be outside the competence of a musicologist.

Published in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, this book tells the story of that fateful night from an unusual angle: through the many wireless communications sent to and from the land stations and the ships involved as the tragic events unfolded.

These are the chronicles of the trail drivers of Texas—those rugged men and, sometimes, women who drove cattle and horses up the trails from Texas to northern markets in the late 1800s. Gleaned from members of the Old Time Trail Drivers' Association, these hundreds of real-life stories—some humorous, some chilling, some rambling, all interesting—form an invaluable cornerstone to the literature, history, and folklore of Texas and the West. First published in the 1920s and reissued by the University of Texas Press in 1985, this classic work is now available in a handsome paperback edition that contains the full text, historical illustrations, and name index of the hardcover edition.

This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Trans-Political Economy,” edited by Dan Irving and Vek Lewis, addresses how capitalism differentially and unequally affects trans and sex/gender-diverse people across the globe. “We all, from our different social and political locations, become implicated in those architectures through our everyday interactions with a variety of coordinated and contradictory institutions and rationalities that order our lives across different local and global geopolitical spaces and scales,” write Lewis and Irving. The editors of and contributors to this issue reveal how the narrowly constructed objects of trans studies and political economy (such as gender, labor, class, and economy) have been complicit in the necropolitical devaluation of trans lives and existing strategies crafted for trans survival. Topics include trans visibility and commodity culture; trans credit reporting; the growing population of T-girls, trans women truckers; trans street-based sex workers; the system of sex/gender identification for trans asylum seekers in South Africa; and waria affective labor in Indonesia. There is also a roundtable deconstructing trans* political economy.

The Arts & Culture section of this issue features a review of season 7 of RuPaul's Drag Race in relation to certain political-economic elements of the drag industry as well as an in-depth look at the representation of transgender lives on film, specifically in Dallas Buyers Club.