* This page is constantly updated and the changes are too numerous to mark them
with the words NEW or UPDATED or any other device.
In the future, I shall probably add headings: "ADDED x/x/99" and
list the new entries in two places: one at the end of the section of books I have read,
and the other at the end of the file for books I've learned about but have not yet read.
As for the books I've read: I have not kept a lifetime list.
I'll just add them when I think of them and as I have time.

NEW The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception (Empirical Linguistics , Vol 2)  Click to purchase

NEW Language Crimes : The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom
"Language Crimes tells the story of some of the remarkable cases in which linguist Roger Shuy has served as an expert witness. These cases covered criminal acts such as solicitation to murder, bribery, threatening extortion, and perjury, all of which use language as a medium. These intriguing stories show the power of the study of language to assist the courts to achieve justice.  Click to purchase

NEW A Few Months to Live : Different Paths to Life's End by Jana Staton, Roger W. Shuy, Ira Byock.  Interviews of senior elders.  Write the first review of this book. Earn a chance to win a $50 gift certificate.  Click to purchase

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women  by Christina Hoff Sommers

The War Against Boys : How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers 

Ceasefire! : Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality by Cathy Young 

Heterophobia : Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (American Intellectual Culture) by Daphne Patai

Christina Sommers wrote: "A devastating expose of the way academic feminists are driving their wedge between men and women.Professor Daphne Patai shows us the workings of the vast Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) that now flourishes on the college campus. With humor, style, and persuasive analytic power, she demolishes its male-bashing arguments. And she does it all from a classical feminist point of view." 

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia

Any book by Norman Mailer
Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer

Harlot's Ghost is about the CIA.  Very thick (1310 pages), sometime tedious to read.  Yet when I finished, I had this feeling that I knew, just KNEW, just absolutely knew that he had researched his story very well.  His use of language is phenomenal.  At times, I thought, "Ah, hell, he's just being pompous . . . or condescending."  Sometimes it was just the challenge or the testing of my self-discipline to get through it.  It was the CIA story which kept me going.  His depiction of the Kennedys makes Clinton appear an innocent.

"Macabre humor," " Dickensian sentiment," and "outrage at cruelty, dogmatism and injustice" -- words used by Time to describe this family saga.

Foremost author of our century. A great novel to give teenage girls, Cider House Rules sees both sides of the abortion issue.  The young girl to whom I gave this book has chosen celibacy(!) -- at least for the last few years.

Set in and around Bombay, India: a little mystery, a little murder, a little sex, a little faith, a little humor, a little Hindi movie-making, a little Indian circuses, and a little dwarf.  :) Wrong, not oxymoronic, read it again.

How far will the medical community alter their standards of acceptable risk?  Robin Cook jumpstarts his novel by suggesting that a spicy rye bread, known as "crazy bread," was at the root of  the Salem witchhunt in 1692.  The mold on the rye-seed bread was an ergot fungus.  Ergot is the chemical basis of  lysergic acid, recognized today for its mind-altering characteristics.  Uncharacteristic Cook ending.

My personal favorite of Cook's recent books is Fatal Cure.  It was, I believe, the prescience of the current controversy over HMOs'  managed care policies and practices.  Of course, the most obvious opportunity for fraud -- at least in Massachusetts -- is not covered in the book or, for that matter, in any other book known to me.  It is so obvious and simple that it is just not sexy enough to gain the attention of publishable authors, the media, the former Bay State Governor's (Weld's) office, or the fraud unit of the former Attorney General's office (Harshbarger's).

A Web-friend.  Writes a very entertaining nonstop mystery in record time.  Pick up his new ones also.

Harstad's new mystery, about to be published, is on back order.

A perfect novel for the young adult . . . as well as the older one.  Readers generally don't stop after one Kingsolver book.  She is a cult.

Issue: Illegal adoption of Native American children.

A great Graduation or Birthday gift for leisurely summer reading.  All four of these are great.  Cheaper if you buy by the set.

Navajo history is mixed with mystery in each of Hillerman's many and fascinating books set in the Dine Nation.   Become friends with Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police by getting hooked on Hillerman.

By the way, I donated all Federal reporters (hard copies and advance sheets) to the Navajos when I switched to CD-ROMs for my legal research.  I hereby request that all attorneys in similar circumstances to do the same:  send books and advance sheets either to the Dine Nation or to some other Indian or Native American reservation or nation.  Federal courts have jurisdiction over Indian matters.  Some groups may want state law as well.

The address below is where I sent my books -- a school where there is a community college and relatively new law school:
 

 Carolyn Stanfill (505-368-5144)
 Ship Rock Alternative Schools
 Pinon St., Dorm 9, Bldg 1232
 Post Office Box 1799
 Ship Rock, New Mexico
 Dine Nation 87420


Ordinary United States mail only goes as far as the U.S. postoffice in Ship Rock.  Because boxes of books are weighty, and the school would have to send a car or truck for them, I sent those via UPS, which delivers to the school.

NOTE: I made several requests to the old West Publishing Co., as well as the new West Group, parented by a U.K. parent company with its U.S. headquarters in Connecticut, to send their "extras" to prisons as well as to the reservations.   Corporate irresponsibility won out. . . .  Maybe I should amend that to say, if they did follow my suggestion, that news didn't reach my ears.

If any lawyers read this, write to West and push the idea.  Let common sense and a little public opinion work for a change. (Think of how many prisoner-right suits would be mooted!) Or even Copy this page and Paste it into an email and Send it to
 

fed.govt@westgroup.com or
customer.service@westgroup.com or, better yet, return.center@westgroup.com


West destroys the returns.  They dare not ship them to other customers in case someone tore out pages from the books which were returned.  That type of damage is probably minimal to never.  Frequent reshipping to state and federal prisons would solve that problem.  If certain pages are out of one book, it would be unlikely they'd be out of another copy of the same volume

West could take a tax loss for the de minimus cost of shipping and handling.

 

Peter Decker and Nina Lazarus mystery solvers.

Purportedly the stories of Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell are the subject of this, a lesser, novel of the usually acclaimed Archer.  Great opportunity for character exploration was sacked.  Lubji's transformation first into Player and then Armstrong all made sense.  But then Armstrong's character was divorced from early development.  From a young man clever and observant and linguistically talented, Armstrong became an ill-mannered boor with Henry VIII's eating habits . . . all without explanation.

The Southern Hemisphere's Keith, driven with an occasional hormonic urge, was never a mystery.

There was also no need to jump back and forth between the early decades of their lives.  I kept on looking for the purpose of the jumping around but there was none to be found.  Crisp but empty.  The only good lesson was about bargaining around page 48.  I finished it only because I'm compulsive.  After all that disappointment, the cutesy ending was insulting.  Those who survived the reading deserved more.  Lazy, lazy work.  Pages 100-680 could have been abridged into 100 pages.

Kirkus says the book is about "the parallel adjustment problems of a 21st-century cyborg and a 17th-century golem."  A reader wrote it's "#1 on my SF list."  Another wrote that the story is set in the not-too-distant future when "megacorporations rule the world and small, entrepreneurial communities have to fight to protect their unique cultures, products and people."

I found the romance with the cyborg more interesting than all the SF and political cliches and religious mysticism.  Would it, the cyborg, have the requisite emotions to love and be loved?  Piercy was telling the story on many levels.  Buy it once but read it several times, each time on a different one of those many levels.

I gave this 4 out of 5 stars in a review at amazon.com in March 1998. I wrote (except for a few differences in punctuation):
 
A literary oxymoron
Mesmerizing yet dull. A page turner but slow. Trudi the Zwerg is rejected by all but accepted by all. Her peers don't include her in their school activities but confide in her. A three-year-old with a memory that is developmentally impossible. Oxymorons that make sense! An oxymoron. But throughout the book, I felt it was nisnamed. It was an Apologeia for religionists. Religion demands blind faith and makes vulnerable to manipulation those whom it entices. It was difficult to believe that the Catholic majority were so tolerant of the surprisingly sizable community of educated Jews in their midst up until the Hitler era.

Hegi avoided the irony of the tryst between Catholic, dwarfed, love-shunned Trudi and Jewish, half-blind Max. Their love affair was not credible. Max was talented and ostensibly brilliant, but it was not enough that he loved Trudi because she was unique. It simply was not enough.

George was three-dimensional from the time he was a long-curly-locked boy raised in girl's clothing. Her rose-chested friend (whose name I forget) was three-dimensional. Her friend's eventually-suicidal husband was. Even the dentist was. Ingrid was. But Max wasn't. He had been a teacher who was found out.

Granted Max was not brought up on the village with the others, but it was not credible that Trudi would NOT have explored and learned his secrets as she did those of others . . . and should have shared them with us, the readers. It was as if . . . if even Trudi, this deformed woman, secretly immoral -- at least immoral as measured in that era -- could secretly love a Jew, Max, so could the rest of her fellow Germans. It's just that they couldn't, says Hegi, show their love or respect or concern for the Jews' safety because they were in fear themselves. Hogwash or does it wash?

Ironically, the book's majesty is that it raises all these questions. It makes us think. Brilliant? No.  Fascinating? Yes. Just not for the obvious reasons! It left me suspicious. Nevertheless, at least Hegi allowed her villagers to admit that they knew that genocide was taking place. That is more than the people from Dachau did, even though the camp Dachau was just down a straight road lined by slender trees (name I forget, begins with an "L" (think), bordered by a flat plane of farm acreage between the town and the camp, and edged by rows and rows of chimneys soaring out of the ovens and leaving an unbearable stench which lasted years after the camp was long empty. At least Hegi didn't say, We didn't know. But then she wasn't born during WWII, depriving her of the opportunity to learn about shame (none in her novel). It's possible, though, that she felt the rejection -- a young postwar German emigre -- that Trudi felt. Whence Trudi was born.

By drawing upon the latest of archival, linguistic, and archaeological discoveries, this volume traces the development of the Khazars from their early beginnings as a tribe to the decline and fall of their kingdom.  It also examines the many migrations of the Khazar people into Hungary, Ukraine, and other areas of Europe and their subsequent assimilation, providing the most comprehensive treatment of this complex issue to date. As a major world power, Khazaria enjoyed diplomatic and trade relations with many peoples and nations (including the Byzantines, Alans, Magyars, and Slavs) and changed the course of medieval history in many ways.  Readers have given it 5 stars!  (I'm in the middle of it.)

This book is a must for every budding writer and poet.  I've used it for the last 40+ years and could not have lived without it!

I received this from a favorite aunt when I married.   A must . . . even in today's society . . . particularly if your upwardly mobile.

The following books were either recommended to me or I heard the authors speak about their books on BookTV on CSPAN-2 on weekends.  If you're a book lover, that's the place to visit regularly.

Absolute Power by David Baldacci
        Movie is starring Clint Eastwood.  Can the President get away with murder?
Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
Everywhere That Mary Went by Lisa Scottoline

Lawyer turned author.  Scottoline's first legal thriller, for which she almost won the Edgar Award.

Cernan's personal observations of his experiences in the Apollo program. We are "exploiting space" rather than "exploring space," Cernan fretted as he stood in the Pentagon bookstore for the first time. The latter is, of course, what we as a nation should be doing.  (BTW, Tom Hanks did not overdramatize. . . .)

Mistress of the short-story genre is this Canadian woman, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, whose editor at Knopf is Ann Close.  Harriet Klausner, an independent Web reviewer, gave it a ***** review and wrote "Fabulous" but not Munro's best.  (Klausner's review at amazon.com.)

Due out in May.  The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of John Nash, a Nobel Prize (for Economics) winner and genius mathematician who tumbled into madness, paranoid schizophrenia, in his thirties.   Nasar read an excerpt from the book on BookTV on CSPAN-2.  Sounded extraordinary.

Viagra in the Year 1000 was the herb agrimony, which, when taken with milk, "inflames the passion of the male."  Agrimony with Welsh ale had the opposite effect.   Not an ordinary read in history.  If the book contains the energy with which Lacey speaks about the subject, the journey at the close of the previous millenium promises to be filled with excitement.

Millenial trivia:

Parchment, made from the skin of sheep or goat, shrinks as it ages and tries to resume the shape of the animal from which it was taken.

Easter Eggs!  In nature, hens stopped laying eggs around October, when daylight dwindled.  After the Equinox, when days of increased light coincided with Easter, hens began laying eggs again and celebration was appropriate.   The relationship between eggs and Easter is less evident today because the lights are kept on in the egg factories all year long, tricking the poor little hens into laying eggs all year round.

In history, there is no evidence that St. Valentine had anything to do with love or sex.  February was simply the month of pagan fertility festivals featuring copulation,  and the season of the year when birds first mated.

Reader review said that the book is so well-written, and humorously, that it is a good read for anyone of any age, including high school and college folk, and for anyone interested in history.

Cyber-legal-detective thriller, neurobiology, hate crimes, love-starved chimpanzees, computer-game copyright violation are all words needed to describe Dooling's work.  He's a personal favorite of a briliant friend of mine.

"Sleazy, fast and HOT," one reader says of Goldsmith's second novel.  She is the author of the First Wives Club, of recent movie fame.

A mistress is featured.

The publishing world is the focus of this murder mystery.

Canadian magical realism

The title says it all!

Mosher's first book: six stories and a novella about the "Up North" country:  A favorite amongst Vermonters.

Mosher's tells of a small town torn apart by fear and prejudice, told from the point of view of a sensitive young boy.

Read about the Star Chamber.  Thomas More, the lawyer who became a saint.  He was martyred for his refusal to support Henry VIII's divorce and break with  Rome.

Romance, melodrama, detective story.  Sound modern?  Several generations of a family wait in vain to inherit money from a disputed fortune while a lawsuit drags on for decades of convoluted legal maneuvering.  Sound modern?  It's a blend of social commentary and Dickens' best writing: a satirical look at the Byzantine legal system.

A fascinating history of blood.  Not what you expect!

Vietnam revisited

Classic Hitler biography?

Modern types of racial discrimination are defined by two psychologists who believe in participatory education.  An example of such discrimination:   The modern black man may sit on the board of directors of a city transit authority, but he doesn't decide where the buses or trains will run, the white males do . . . between the meetings . . .   Lucid, exciting speaker/author.  Must be a must read.

Jon Katz, a 50-year-old baby boomer, advocates taking a break from life as you've come to know it.  He went, he said, to where he saw only big men in big trucks with big wheels, and the only thing he heard from them for the first year  he was there was, "Nice dogs."  His book has found instant success, thanks to the success of marketing it on the Net.

Alicia gives writing courses on the Net.  Take a visit.  If you want to write, this is a place to start:
http://www.sff.net/people/alicia/artb.htm
http://www.sff.net/people/alicia/quest.htm
And at Painted Rock, you'll find "The Plot-phobic's 12-step Program to the Perfect Plot:
http://www.paintedrock.com/conference/plotalicia.htm
An interview with Alicia Rasley
No femiNazis in the next group:

Written via e-mail on the GEnie Network, Gwen's Christmas Ghost is the second collaborative effort of Kerstan and Rasley.

Aside from being an Oprah choice, the readers reviews in amazon.com promise that this book will be enthralling.  A good book to buy with full knowledge that you'll either give it a way to a special friend or that a good friend will ask for it on loan and you'll never see it again. I suppose you can always buy two of them and save on the cost of shipping and handling!

A history of the literary elite -- e.g., Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer -- some decades ago. Podhoretz was young but one of them. He marvels at the success of their group, and mourns the harm to society which that success caused. Provocative perspective!

A Web-friend wrote: "A good excerpt from a book: `Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely! I have taken to wandering about after school looking for one simple object in it that might be romantic, or appalling even, but there is nothing. It is simply the most ordinary place in the world.'  Malouf doesn’t like this place very much, but can’t stop talking about it. Go figure!!

I have to disagree with him. Brisbane is lovely and green, sunny all the time... just gorgeous place to live. Not in the least bit claustrophobic. Very open. He just can’t see the inherent beauty of ordinary things. `The quiet miracle of ordinary life.'

That is what we have and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The simple pleasures of ordinary activities, friendly people, movies, eating out, or eating in, chatting to neighbours over the fence, pet dogs, sun-baking, getting on a bus, going to the shopping centre, walking through the streets, under a green tree, past a building painted yellow and cobalt blue, road rage... the occasional international superstar descending on our town for a few days: Yehudi Menuin is coming in a month, I want to go but tickets are too expensive. His last trip here ever. (How can I miss it :(((((((

Book chosen by Poetry Contest winner, Female, aged 16.