Ron Read is 58 and is in serious trouble. Scans and tests reveal he has had a heart attack and his heart is in very bad shape. His Doctor, Doctor Deschanel sends him to a major Brisbane hospital for tests. This results in him having a quadruple bypass operation. The novel traces his story from diagnosis, through open heart surgery to his recovery and his meeting with someone who didn't win a prize at the local agricultural show because his chokos had their little tongues hanging out.
Well known for his imaginative treatment of environmental issues, Kevin Dann presents a natural history of the Lewis Creek watershed in Vermont's Champlain Valley, told largely through the lives and thought of three individuals,whose investigations brought them into close contact with the area. Congregationalist minister John Perry (1825 - 1872) conducted paleontological research on the region's Paleozoic rock and attempted to negotiate his era's confrontation between science and religion. Rowland Robinson (1833 - 1900) was a Quaker farmer and author/artist whose historical fiction often dealt with issues of human impact on this watershed. The first plant-hunting expeditions of another Quaker farmer and noted plant collector, Cyrus Pringle (1838 - 1911), took place in this watershed as well. Dann's account of these three men, whose lives span nearly a century, graphically illustrates contemporary human-nature relationships at the same time that it suggests the limits of science in circumscribing our experience of the physical landscape. The experience of pain and loss is documented along with the stories of success and celebration, since, as Dann writes, "Genuine places, like human hearts, have dark recesses within them, and by examining these recesses within the Lewis Creek watershed, we take a small step toward demythologizing Vermont."
Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. At a time of such uncertainty and confusion, with human rights currently being violated all over the world, a new and sustained examination of cultural responses to such issues is warranted. In this respect music, which is always produced in a social context, is an extremely useful medium; in its immediacy music has a potency of expression whose reach is long and wide. Contributors to this significant volume cover artists and topics such as Billy Bragg, punk, Fun-da-Mental, Willie King and the Liberators, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Anti-Death Penalty movement, benefit concerts, benefit albums, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Wounded Knee and Native American political resistance, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, as well as human rights in relation to feminism. A second volume covers World Music.
