Butterfly Gardening   (Friedman/Fairfax Publishers)  
 by Thomas C. Emmel  (Zoology) 

(Review taken from book jacket)  
Bring butterflies to your own backyard by creating a butterfly garden with the help of renowned lepidopterist Dr. Thomas C. Emmel.  Butterfly Gardening takes you step by step through choosing plants to attract the butterflies in your area, arranging them to fit your garden and their needs, and maintaining your garden once you have established it.  Beyond the garden's creation, Butterfly Gardening will teach you how to identify your new visitors with handy tips and a beautiful photograph gallery of butterflies.  With the help of Butterfly Gardening, you can establish a fun hobby and a gorgeous refuge for you and your winged friends to enjoy. 
 
(Excerpt) So, while butterfly conservation may not have been the starting point for your venture into butterfly gardening, you can see by this brief series of examples how individuals can make a difference, and how by planting the food plants of butterflies, both for their larvae and adult stages, you can bring back a species even on the verge of extinction.   
 

Florida's Fabulous Butterflies  (World Publications)  
by Thomas C. Emmel (Zoology) 
Photographs by Brian Kenney. 

(Excerpt) The word "butterfly" was probably inspired by the buttery yellow color of the Brimstone, a very common European butterfly.  The Brimstone is a relative of the sulphurs found in Florida and is one of the first European butterflies to appear in the spring. 
 

Procreative Man  (New York University Press)    
by William Marsiglio (Sociology)  

(Review taken from book jacket) 
In what ways do men think about and express themselves as procreative beings?  Under what circumstances do they develop paternal identities?  What is their involvement with partners during the pregnancy and delivery process, and how do they feel about it? 
     In Procreative Man, William Marsiglio addresses these and other timely questions with an eye toward the past, present, and future.  Drawing upon writings ranging from sociology to biomedicine, Marsiglio develops a novel framework for exploring men's multifaceted and gendered experiences as procreative beings.  Addressing such issues as how men feel about their limited role in the abortion decision and process, how important genetic ties are for men who want to be fathers, and men’s reactions to infertility,  Marsiglio shows how men's roles in creating and fathering human life are embedded within a rapidly changing cultural and sociopolitical environment. 

(Excerpt) Young men need to develop a better sense of how their masculine and partner role identities are related to their sexual and procreative feelings.  If responsibility is defined broadly, without moral overtones concerning premarital sex, young men may learn that careless sexual behavior and disrespectful treatment of their female partners are unattractive behaviors.  This process is likely to be enhanced if young men can be persuaded to redefine masculinity in terms of adulthood status rather than the rejection of femininity and homosexuality, as is currently the case.  Campaigns to revise young men's perceptions of masculinity to include notions of adulthood responsibility may, in the process, fundamentally alter the way young men think about and express themselves as procreative beings. 
 

Spinning Fantasies:  Rabbis, Gender, and History  
(University of California Press ) 
by Miriam B. Peskowitz  (Religion) 

(Review taken from book jacket)  
In the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism began to emerge.  Of these rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, developing as the classical form of the religion.  By researching ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz reexamines this critical moment in Jewish history, presenting a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage.  She shows how notions of female and male were developed by the rabbis of Roman Palestine, and why these distinctions were so important in the development of this religious tradition.  Rabbinic attention to women, men, sexuality, and gender took place within the "ordinary tedium of everyday life, in acts that were both familiar and mundane."  However, Peskowitz argues that gender was most powerful in those things so prevalent and repetitive that they eventually became invisible.  While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues.  It is through this study of the imagery and remains of spinning that Peskowitz shows how gender and rabbinic Judaism were indeed inextricable. 

(Excerpt)  To call a man a weaver casts aspersion and suspicion on his masculinity.  Spinning too was a trope of transgression. When Juvenal, through his character Laronia, critiques men for spinning more deftly than Penelope, he chastises men who do not uphold the properties of masculinity.  The masculinity of these men does not establish sufficiently clear differences between them and women's femininity.  Another effect of this discourse is to portray men of nonelite classes as feminine.  Weavers were lower-status workers, whether slave, freed, or freeborn.  Written into life with a distinctively sexualized timbre, these men are different from elite men, and as such, help to establish the masculinity that makes elite men superior.  
 
 

Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France 
(Cambridge University Press) 
Henry W. Paul  (History) 

(Review taken from book jacket)  
     Science, Vine, and Wine in Modern France examines the role of science in the civilization of wine in modern France.  Viticulture, the science of the vine itself, and oenology, the science of winemaking, are its subjects.  Together, they can boast of at least two major triumphs:  the creation of the post-phylloxera vines that repopulated late nineteenth-century vineyards devastated by the disease and an understanding of the complex structure of wine that eventually resulted in the development of the widespread wine models of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne.  
     Paul provides an extended discussion of the importance of Louis Pasteur and Jean-Antoine Chaptal to the development of oenology; detailing the role of research in the production of wine in the Champagne, Burgundy, the Languedoc, and Bordeaux regions.  Along the way, he questions the popular idea that the more complex the oenology, the duller the wine.  Quite the opposite, he suggests:  research has put the  science of wine on a solid foundation and made it possible for people to enjoy a greater variety of better wines. 

(Excerpt)  Pasteur's basic point was that wine is a food.  He meant for the working class.  Pasteur thought that wine has two distinct virtues:  it is a stimulant, and it is a food.  The bourgeoisie may drink wine as a stimulant for its jaded palate; the working class needs wine as both stimulant and food.  Gladstone, who as chancellor of the exchequer was responsible for getting duties lowered on French wines imported in to the United Kingdom, was in basic agreement with this point of view:  the "great gift of Providence to man" might tempt the people of England, if they could afford it.