Kind-hearted Christy enters seventh grade worrying about what to do for a science project, yearning for the attention of a gorgeous male classmate, surprisingly winning the lead in "Peter Pan," and helping out a boy with really serious problems.

(Limelight). This book relates the life and experiences of composer Giuseppe Verdi, from his birth in 1813 to his death in 1901. Besides documenting Verdi's life and the music he created, it also goes further in discussing the times and culture in which he was living in 19th century Italy, both socially and politically. "A complete life-to-death biography, wonderfully comprehensive on both life and art, wonderfullly sensible, and splendidly gotten up." The Boston Herald

On Reading the Will studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or the will to power, as well as lack of will. It surveys many texts - from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence - in order to analyse the history of its different meanings: whether these imply rational or irrational drives, or the sexual appetite, or the testamentary will. This last is a particularly interesting form of the will, in that it asserts the desire to control, and to have an identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music as the embodied will in Wagner and Verdi. Considering the law and its prohibitions as a form of the will, it sees how these produce a perverse will. Drawing on Freud and Lacan it studies interrelationships between the law which prohibits and the desire which wills, how desire creates the law, and the law desire. What stands out is that the authors studied are fascinated by the will as unknowable and irresistible, as rational and countermanding rationality, as divided and imperious. Chapters include how wills motivate plots in Shakespeare and the Victorian novel. Discussion of opera and Nietzsche focuses on the will as an unconscious force.--

In 1968 University of California Press published an unusual manuscript by an anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda.ÊThe Teachings of Don Juan enthralled a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda's now classic book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. Whether read as ethnographic fact or creative fiction, it is the story of a remarkable journey that has left an indelible impression on the life of more than a million readers around the world.