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Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence
By Evelyn Savidge Stern Ph.D. '94. Cornell University Press, 2003. 304 pages. $34.95.

Too often, writes Stern, "religion remains on the margins of modern American history." Stern, an assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, seeks to change that. In Ballots and Bibles, her first book, she argues that the Catholic Church, not the labor unions and machine politics--the two institutions usually credited with enabling ethnic activism--empowered its constituency to participate in the political process. The church--far and away the largest and most inclusive of nineteenth-century organizations in the U.S.--gave Irish, Italians, and French Canadians, men and women, rich and poor, a voice available to them nowhere else. Religion was paramount in mobilizing the disenfranchised in the country's first city (Providence, Rhode Island) to gain a Catholic majority. It was in the parishes of Providence, Stern writes, that "Catholics learned to be speakers and leaders ... eventually claiming full membership in the nation."

The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America
Edited by Frank S. Gilliam M.F. '78, Ph.D. '83 and Mark R. Roberts Ph.D. '83.
Oxford University Press, 2003.
408 pages. $85.

As graduate students at Duke's forestry school (now the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences) in the early Eighties, Gilliam and Roberts took a summer dendrology course taught by a professor who, as he walked through Duke Forest, referred dismissively to plants of the herbaceous layer as "step-overs." This slight, say the editors, was indicative of a troubling trend, a general under-appreciation among foresters of the true ecological significance of ground flora. "Our image of forests often comes from the broad brush of a landscape perspective," they write. "We see only the grandeur of the predominant vegetation--the trees." They have chosen to buck the norm, focusing instead on a spatially and temporally dynamic world of vascular species--a forest few could see, until now, for the trees.

The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great
By Steven Pressfield '65. Doubleday, 2004.
368 pages. $24.95.

The best-selling author of Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Last of the Amazons, Pressfield explores history, this time, through the eyes of Alexander the Great. Avenger of his father's death, fearless warrior, and, in Pressfield's version, intrepid narrator, Alexander tells the tale as only the conqueror of the known world could. Ascending to the throne of Macedonia at the age of nineteen, he had conquered the Persian Empire by twenty-five. He died at thirty-three, a driven leader, famed for his brilliance in battle, undefeated to the end. But it's the complex character within that makes for a richly textured read. "License has been taken," Pressfield writes in the introduction. The result is a provocatively imagined Alexander of opposites and excesses and probing introspection.