During the early part of the twentieth century all the Mediterranean powers were transforming or at least expanding their navies from mere coastal defense forces to modern war machines, thus adding to a highly unstable political situation. The naval challenge of the Triple Alliance to Britain and especially to France was a serious one. Indeed, this study demonstrates that the Mediterranean situation had great influence on the plans and estimates of the British Admiralty.

Paul G. Halpern has uncovered new material in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna that helps to explain the plans and dispositions of Entente and Triple Alliance forces at the outbreak of the war.

Over a mere three decades, the video game became the entertainment medium of choice for millions of people, who now spend more time in the interactive virtual world of games than they do in watching movies or even television. The release of new games or game-playing equipment, such as the PlayStation 2, generates great excitement and even buying frenzies. Yet, until now, this giant on the popular culture landscape has received little in-depth study or analysis.

In this book, Mark J. P. Wolf and four other scholars conduct the first thorough investigation of the video game as an artistic medium. The book begins with an attempt to define what is meant by the term "video game" and the variety of modes of production within the medium. It moves on to a brief history of the video game, then applies the tools of film studies to look at the medium in terms of the formal aspects of space, time, narrative, and genre. The book also considers the video game as a cultural entity, object of museum curation, and repository of psychological archetypes. It closes with a list of video game research resources for further study.

Jeannie Cheatham is a living legend in jazz and blues. A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, she has played and sung with many of the greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway, Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary Three Generations of the Blues. Her music, which has garnered national and international acclaim, has been described as unrestrained, exuberant, soulful, rollicking, wicked, virtuous, wild, and truthful. Cheatham's signature song, "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On" is a staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and Japan.

In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained in a flash of light. Cheatham's autobiography is also the story of her fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.

On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.

In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another.

This groundbreaking work offers major new insights into girls' development and women's psychology. But perhaps more importantly, it provides women with the means of meeting girls at the critical crossroads of adolescence, of harkening to the voices of girlhood and sustaining their sell-affirming notes.

Though a US-China conflict is far from inevitable, major tensions are building in the Asia-Pacific region. These strains are the result of historical enmity, cultural divergence, and deep ideological estrangement, not to mention apprehensions fueled by geopolitical competition and the closely related “security dilemma.”

Despite worrying signs of intensifying rivalry, few observers have provided concrete paradigms to lead this troubled relationship away from disaster. This book is dramatically different in that Lyle J. Goldstein’s focus is on laying bare both US and Chinese perceptions of where their interests clash and proposing new paths to ease bilateral tensions through compromise. Each chapter contains a “cooperation spiral” —the opposite of an escalation spiral—to illustrate these policy proposals. Goldstein makes one hundred policy proposals over the course of this book to inaugurate a genuine debate regarding cooperative policy solutions to the most vexing problems in US-China relations.

Goldstein not only parses findings from American scholarship but also breaks new ground by analyzing hundreds of Chinese-language sources, including military publications, never before evaluated by Western experts. Meeting China Halfway, new in paperback, remains a refreshing and unique contribution to the study of the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

While the profession has generated many books on information literacy, none to date have validated exactly why it is so difficult to teach. In her new book, Reale posits that examining and reflecting on the reality of those factors is what will enable practitioners to meet the challenge of their important mandate. Using the same warm and conversational tone as in her previous works, she

• uses personal anecdotes to lay out the key reasons that teaching information literacy is so challenging, from the limited amount of time given to instructors and lack of collaboration with faculty to one’s own anxieties about the work;
• examines how these factors are related and where librarians fit in;
• validates readers’ struggles and frustrations through an honest discussion of the emotional labor of librarianship, including “imposter syndrome,” stress, and burnout;
• offers a variety of approaches, strategies, and topics of focus that will assist readers in their daily practice;
• looks at how a vibrant community of practice can foster positive change both personally and institutionally; and
• presents “Points to Ponder” at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to self-reflect and then transform personal insights into action.

A whirlwind journey through fungus frontiers that underscores how appreciating fungi is key to understanding our planet’s power and fragility.

What can we learn from the lives of fungi? Splitting time between the northern and southern hemispheres, ecologist Alison Pouliot ensures that she experiences two autumns per year in the pursuit of fungi—from Australia’s deserts to Iceland’s glaciers to America’s Cascade Mountains. In Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms, we journey alongside Pouliot, magnifiers in hand, as she travels the world.

With Pouliot as our guide, we smell fire-loving truffles that transform their scent after burning to lure mammals who eat them and, ultimately, spread their spores. We spot the eerie glow of the ghost fungus, a deceptive entity that looks like an edible oyster mushroom but will soon heave back out—along with everything else in your stomach—if you take a bite. And we crawl alongside vegetable caterpillars, which are neither vegetable nor caterpillar but a fungus that devours insects from the inside out.

Featuring stunning color photographs of these mycological miracles, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms shows that understanding fungi is fundamental for harmonizing with the natural world.

This book is about the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration and the supporters who promoted their legacy. Although the violence of the Meiji Restoration is typically downplayed, the trauma was real, and those who felt marginalized from the mainstream throughout modern Japan looked to these losers as models of action.

Using a wide range of sources, from essays by former Tokugawa supporters like Fukuzawa Yukichi to postwar film and “lost decade” manga, Michael Wert traces the shifting portrayals of Restoration losers. By highlighting the overlooked sites of memory such as legends about buried gold, the awarding of posthumous court rank, or fighting over a disembodied head, Wert illustrates how the process of commemoration and rehabilitation allows individuals a voice in the formation of national history. He argues that the commingling of local memory activists and nationally-known politicians, academics, writers, and treasure hunters formed interconnecting memory landscapes that promoted local figures as potential heroes in modern Japan.

This book is about the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration and the supporters who promoted their legacy. Although the violence of the Meiji Restoration is typically downplayed, the trauma was real, and those who felt marginalized from the mainstream throughout modern Japan looked to these losers as models of action.

Using a wide range of sources, from essays by former Tokugawa supporters like Fukuzawa Yukichi to postwar film and “lost decade” manga, Michael Wert traces the shifting portrayals of Restoration losers. By highlighting the overlooked sites of memory such as legends about buried gold, the awarding of posthumous court rank, or fighting over a disembodied head, Wert illustrates how the process of commemoration and rehabilitation allows individuals a voice in the formation of national history. He argues that the commingling of local memory activists and nationally-known politicians, academics, writers, and treasure hunters formed interconnecting memory landscapes that promoted local figures as potential heroes in modern Japan.

Credit for the swift unification of Japan following the 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate is usually given to the national leaders who instigated the coup and formed the new Meiji government. But is brilliant leadership at the top sufficient to explain how regional separatist tendencies and loyalties to the old lords were overcome in the formation of a nationally unified state? On the contrary, argues James C. Baxter. Though plans were drawn up by policy makers in Tokyo, the efforts of citizens all over the country were required to implement these plans and create a sense of national identity among local populations.

Drawing on extensive archival resources, Baxter describes the transformation of the Tokugawa domain of Kaga into the Meiji prefecture of Ishikawa. The result is a richly detailed study that helps explain how Japan achieved national unity without the bloody struggles that have often accompanied modernization and nation-building.

The Meiroku Zasshi is recognized as the single most important source for thought during the Japanese enlightenment that followed the Mei Restoration of 1868. The men who wrote for the Meiroku Zasshi (Meiroku refers to the sixth year of Meiji, that is, 1873, and zasshi means magazine) were the encyclopedists of the Meiji enlightenment. Trained as Western experts during the reopening of the country after 1853, they introduced mid-nineteenth-century European and American culture to Japan. The forty-three issues of the magazine represent a broad sampling of the way in which this culture was presented. The influence of the Meiroku Zasshi on the nation builders of Meiji Japan was second to that of the writings of the great enlightener, Fukuzawa Yukichi. This crucial work in Japanese cultural history is now accessible to readers in a precise, beautifully rendered translation by William R. Braisted.

In the magazine’s pages, the Meirokusha writers expressed their views on such concerns of the period as a popularly elected assembly, the separation of church and state, the status of women, economic policy, chemistry, language reform, and the nature of knowledge. Their prose style reflected their modernity—terse, dignified, less artificial than the traditional literary modes. They also translated articles from languages other than Dutch (until that time the only Western language known to Japanese scholars).

Nowhere else can one find gathered together such representative writings by the leading intellectuals of the day, many of them former samurai, who fused their country’s tradition of practical studies with the humane and useful knowledge of the West. Complete with Braisted’s highly informative introduction, this full translation of the Meiroku Zasshi suggests why Japan’s modern experience has been unique.

Rare is the person who has never known the feelings of apathy, sorrow, and uselessness that characterize the affliction known as melancholy. In this book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals shows that melancholy is not only a psychological condition that affects individuals but also a social and cultural phenomenon that can be of considerable help in understanding the modern middle class. His larger topic is, in fact, modernity in general.

Lepenies focuses not on what melancholy is but on what it means when people claim to be melancholy. His aim is to examine the origin and spread of the phenomenon with relation to particular social milieux, and thus he looks at a variety of historical manifestations: the fictional utopian societies of the Renaissance, the ennui of the French aristocracy in the seventeenth century, the cult of inwardness and escapism among the middle class in eighteenth-century Germany. In each case he shows that the human condition is shaped by historical and societal forces--that apathy, boredom, utopian idealism, melancholy, inaction, and excessive reflection are the correlates of class-wide powerlessness and the failure of purposeful efforts.

Lepenies makes inventive use of an extraordinary range of sociological, philosophical, and literary sources, from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to the ideas of contemporary theorists such as Robert K. Merton and Arnold Gehlen. His study gains added richness from its examination of writers whose works express the melancholy of entire social classes--writers such as La Rochefoucauld, Goethe, and Proust. In his masterly analysis of these diverse ideas and texts, he illuminates the plight of people who have been cast aside by historical change and shows us the ways in which they have coped with their distress. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, students of modern literature, indeed anyone interested in the problems of modernity will want to read this daring and original book.

The German Romantic theologian and philosopher Schleiermacher wrote, "The virtuosity (or special calling) of a person is at the same time the melody of that person's life, and it remains a simple, meager series of notes unless religion, with its endlessly rich variety, accompanies it with all notes and raises the simple song to a full-voiced, glorious harmony." It is around this melody that Jaroslav Pelikan, a great theologian of our own day, weaves the polyphonic threads of philosophy, theology, morals, history, and personality to create a singular portrait of his life and work.

The Melody of Theology is really two books in one: a dictionary in which a reader can browse through piquant explorations of some of the most interesting topics in Christian theology, and an intellectual autobiography in which Jaroslav Pelikan has used those topics to give an account of the traditions to which he owes the formation of his own mind and spirit. As he says, "An intellectual autobiography in the format of a 'philosophical dictionary' permits the self-indulgence of employing the seeming objectivity of some eighty-two entries, arranged in the impersonal sequence of alphabetical order, to express a completely personal set of prejudices."

Among the large topics addressed in this volume are the Bible, Faith, Grace, Reformation and Renaissance, and Sin. Among the towering figures of religion and theology are Dante, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Erasmus, Gibbon, Martin Luther, Paul the Apostle, and Schleiermacher. Among the technical topics analyzed are Apocatastasis, Christian Creeds, the term "Ecumenical," Eschatology, Patristics, and the Trinity. The Melody of Theology belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to study a history and tradition that precede us and will continue after us, and also of the reader who would like to make the acquaintance of a subtle analytic mind and a generous open heart.