The Mycota: A Comprehensive Treatise on Fungi as Experimental Systems for Basic and Applied Research, Volume IX: Fungal Associations (The Mycota)

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This volume highlights fungal associations, as they are found in mycorrhizas, lichens and other fungal symbioses. The emphasis is laid upon the molecular biochemical and ultrastructural analysis of these interactions. Major progress has been achieved over the last few years by the systematic application of modern methods, developed mainly in molecular biology. The data are presented in high-quality illustrations, leading the reader from the subcellular to higher levels of organization where specific symbiotic traits become apparent. Early stages of symbiotic interactions are of special interest. They are compared to parasitic interrelations and also considered from an evolutionary standpoint.

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This book describes the basis, application, and interpretation of statistics, and presents a wide range of univariate and multivariate statistical methodology. In its first edition it has proved popular across all science and technology based disciplines, including the social sciences, and in areas of commerce. It is used both as a reference on statistical methodology for researchers and technicians, and as a textbook with particular appeal for graduate classes containing students of mixed mathematical and statistical background. The book is developed without the use of calculus, although several self-contained sections containing calculus are included to provide additional insight for readers who have a calculus background. Based on the author's "Statistics in Scientific Investigation," the book has been extended substantially in the area of multivariate applications and through the expansion of logistic regression and log linear methodology. It presumes readers have access to a statistical computing package and includes guidance on the application of statistical computing packages. The new edition retains the unique feature of being written from the users' perspective; it connects statistical models and methods to investigative questions and background information, and connects statistical results with interpretations in plain English. In keeping with this approach, methods are grouped by usage rather than by commonality of statistical methodology. Guidance is provided on the choice of appropriate methods. The use of real life examples has been retained and expanded. Using the power of the Internet, expanded reports on the examples are available at a Springer Web site as Word documents. Additionaly, all data sets are available at the Web site as Excel files, and program files and data sets are provided for SAS users and SPSS users. The programs are annotated so users can adapt for their own data sets. Glen McPherson has had a long career as an acedmic and a consultant in applied statistics. After holding a tenured position for thirty years at The University of Tasmania in Australia, where he developed and directed under-graduate and gradate programs in applied statistics, he resigned to devote more time to book writing and to his consultancy role to government , business, and industry. The practical experience built into the book is drawn from the two thousand consulantcies he has undetaken across virtually all areas in which statistics has an application.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent for Quantitative Computer Science Research!.......2001-10-17

Finally a good and thorough book on statistical methods. Most of the books I've investigated are either of the traditional mathematical style (which are strong on probability theory, weak on methods), or guides to quantitative research in social sciences (which are usually quite "lightweight" and a bit off-track for computer scientists). This book gives very good explanations on when to choose which distribution and experimental setup based on the nature of your problem.

This book is suitable for:
1. those who are using quantitative methods in their research
2. those who felt they had a good grasp on calculating probability and statistics, but never got a grasp on when to use which statistical methods and setting up statistical experiments.

Book Description

Described by Henry James as "much less a book than a state of vision," "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is probably the most influential work of fiction in American history. Stowe's moving Christian epic turned millions of Americans against slavery, bringing the "peculiar institution" immeasurably closer to its fiery destruction. In "The Minister's Wooing" and "Oldtown Folks," Stowe examines the interplay of religion, domesticity, and women's roles and choices in the shaping of American culture.

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Outmoded fiction, but interesting nonetheless.......2005-01-29

This is a compilation of three novels written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. These books are together considered by the editor to be her most important works, so they are grouped together in this volume. While Uncle Tom's Cabin is probably the most influential novel in American history, I doubt many readers have ever heard of The Minister's Wooing or Oldtown Folks. The rating then can't involve just Uncle Tom's Cabin, but must discuss all three books.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, as noted above, is the most influential novel in American history. There's a famous anecdote, repeated in slightly different forms in different places, that President Lincoln, upon being introduced to her, referred to her as "the little lady who started the big war" or something to that affect. Uncle Tom's Cabin opened the world of slavery (in a somewhat homogenized form) to Northern readers who objected to slavery but were convinced it wasn't their problem. The book itself is rather sly: it puts a very good man who's a slave in a series of situations, and it's not until the last portion of the book that his slavery becomes intolerable. The trick is that within the world of "acceptable" slavery, the situation is intolerable, with families being split and various other calamities. The result is to make the reader oppose slavery, even in situations when the master of the slaves were good-natured, compassionate people.

The Minister's Wooing is a different sort of story. It's set sometime just after the American Revolution in New England, and the main characters are a woman of middle years and her teenaged daughter, who have a boarder, the Minister of the title. The mother sets her heart on getting the Minister to marry her daughter, and off we go for a 300 page romance novel. The romantic aspect of the novel is very very tame by our modern standards, but the worst part of the book is the treacly religious fervor that pervades every page of the book. I think most modern fundamentalists would think it overdone. One odd circumstance is the appearance of Aaron Burr (prior to his shooting Alexander Hamilton) as a secondary character in the book: the author doesn't approve of Mr. Burr.

Oldtown Folks is set similarly to The Minister's Wooing, in New England at about the turn of the 18th Century. The book is told in the first person, with the narrator being the son of a widow. They befriend a pair of orphans from a neighboring village, and the bulk of the book surrounds one of the orphans, a young girl named Tina who bewitches everyone who knows her with her bright personality and wonderful demeanor. Some of the characters in this novel are especially well-drawn: one old woman is so hateful that you just despise her, more than the characters in the book do. The problem, again, is that the book just goes on and on, for almost 600 pages, and it takes forever to run to its conclusion.

All three novels deal with the inequities of society in the period in which they are set, and all three have the aforementioned religious overtones that are completely overdone by modern standards. If you can overcome the latter, the former are interesting, but I can't recommend either The Minister's Wooing or Oldtown Folks. Uncle Tom's Cabin is of course required reading for anyone interested in American history, and frankly is the best book of the three anyway.

Uncle Tom is the most important book in US History.......2005-01-13

A central text in American Literature and History, January 7, 2005
Reviewer: Tony Thomas (North Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews
Uncle Tom is probably the most important single book written in the United States of America. No one is really familiar with American culture, literature, relgion, and history if she or he has not read Uncle Tom.

To understand this book, I would urge people to consult Eric J. Sundquist's book New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (The American Novel) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs. The 19th Century world and reader that Stowe aimed at read and understood things so differently, that you will miss much without knowing how to look at this book the way Stowe wrote to them and the way they read.

This book has a broad purpose: literary to decide what is wrong with the entire world and present an answer. If you follow the sweep of the book you will find Stowe takes on everything from whether the issues of the 1848 revolutions can be resolved on the side of Democracy, to the question of marital relations amogn the free and the white. The issue of slavery is not the book's only focus. It is, in fact, the solution.

Stowe's real thesis here is that American Chattel slavery is the number one evil in the world, that this evil corrupts every institution in society North and South and corrupts far beyond the borders of the United States, and that no compromise with it or avoidance of it is possible.

To Stowe, slavery is an abomination not just because of the cruelty, savagery, exploitation, and degradation involved, but above all, it is an abomination against God, the most unChrist-like behavior possible.

Thus the relgious solution she offers is to become more Christlike in your opposition to slavery and to finally undergrow the Christic experience of dying for your sins and being reborn in Jesus Christ. That's right, in Stowe's time evangelical Christianity, rather than being a fob for right-wing politics, was practiced by some of the militant and serious opponents of slavery.

Stowe creates figures that are Christlike who like Christ die rather than yield to sin and influence the others in their faith. The supreme figure is of course Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, as a a pejorative, comes not from this novel, but from the Tom shows that blossomed in the late 19th century which were a presentation of a mock version of this story with racist minstrel like charicatures of the African American characters.

In this book, Uncle Tom is a physically majestic, heroic, dignified person, whose faith and dignity are never corrupted, whose death is shown as a parallel to that of Christ in the resurrection of the souls of all around him required to eliminate Slavery. If he is passive, never disobeys his masters, and seems to have not much of a material interest of his own in life, it is because to Stowe this a reflection of his Christic nature.

No doubt at best Stowe sees him as a "noble savage" at Best. There is no doubt if one reads this book and even more clearly STowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin which provided documentation for this book's depiction of slavery, that it is clear that Stowe did not believe African Americans were equal to whites. Her then-current immigrationist views are expressed in the way the one intelligent independently acting Black couple presented here leave the US for Canada once they escape slavery.

Yet, this book accomplished the purpose it had. It galvanized millions of Americans and more millions around the world to dramatically oppose slavery. Uncle Tom was one of the first true international best sellers. In a smaller country, where literacy was lower, and when many people bought books through private libraries where families shared books and the book was often read to family gatherings rather than by one person, Uncle Tom sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year and sold a million copies between its publication and the civil war.

Stowe was honest in her afterward and in other writings to say that her description of slavery in Uncle Tom is much prettier and more nicer than slavery was. She believed an accurate depiction of slavery--Stowe had lived in Cincinatti on the board with slaving Kentucky and traveled through the South--would be so revolting that her target audience of Northern whites would not read this book.

Her book launched a torrent of responses from white southerners as could be expected. However, the popularity of her book encouraged white authors, but especially Black authors to write antislavery books that responded to Stowe. Some of the foundations of Black American literature by authors like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany are essentially response to Uncle Tom.

Perhaps the most dramatic is Delany's Blake or the Huts of America whose character is a double to Uncle Tom. However, Delany's hero does not submit to being sold "down the river." He instead runs away and travels throughout the US following the same course as the travels in Uncle Tom showing how slave conditions are so much worse than Stowe showed. Finished with that business, Blake leaves the United States for Cuba where he becomes part of a group of Afro-Cubans unwilling to suffer like Christ and Uncle Tom. Like the current leaders of Cuba, they start to organize an international revolution of Slaves and the oppressed!

A great interpretation of a Christian man in shackles........1999-03-13

Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by a woman who appalled slavery, has touched the hearts of many readers. Wanting to change and affect public opinion on the concept of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a novel, a dramatic, engaging narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of many fellow Americans. It was propaganda and an attempt to make whites in the North and South see slaves as mortal human beings with Christian souls.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is the story of the slave Tom. Strong and loyal as he is, his "good" master, Mr. Shelby, sells Tom to Mr. Haley, a slave trader, to pay off a debt. Mr. St. Clare then purchases him as an act of gratitude for saving his daughter's life. After St. Clare's death, his wife goes against his wishes and sends him to a slave warehouse where he is bought by the "bullet headed" Mr. Simon Legree. Here, Tom endures brutal treatment at the hands of his master. By exposing the extreme cruelties of slavery, Stowe explores society's failures and asks, what is it to be a moral human being?"
The novel was revolutionary for its passionate indictment of slavery and its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity." Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, Uncle Tom's Cabin still remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful piece of literature--exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth century society toward the institution of slavery, and documenting the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families.
I would definately recommend this novel to all well-informed readers looking for literature with much diction and imagery. It would also suit the needs of those looking for a great plot. However, I caution those sensitive to great detail of torture because this novel is very strong and graphic on the broad issue of slavery.

The Minister's Wooing (Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England Novels)

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Not a Bad Summer Reading Choice
The Agony of Salvation and a Theology of Love
An underrated book by Stowe, Overshadowed by Uncle Tom

The Minister's Wooing (Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England Novels)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0917482123

Book Description

Harriet Beecher Stowe's domestic comedy is a powerful examination of slavery, Protestant theology, and gender differences in early America.

First published in 1859, and set in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, The Minister's Wooing is a historical novel and domestic comedy that satirizes Calvinism, celebrating its intellectual and moral integrity while critiquing its rigid theology. Mary Scudder lives with her widowed mother in a modest middle-class home. Dr. Hopkins, a Calvinist minister who boards with them, is dedicated to helping the slaves arriving at Newport and calls for the abolition of slavery. The pious Mary admires him but is also in love with the passionate but skeptical James Marvyn who, hungry for adventure, joins the crew of a ship setting sail for exotic destinations. When James is presumed lost at sea, Mary fears for his soul, and consents to marry the good Doctor. With important insights on slavery, history, and gender, as well as characters based on historical figures, The Minister's Wooing is, as Susan Harris notes in her Introduction, "an historical novel, like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie or A New England Tale; it is an attempt through fiction to create a moral, intellectual, and affective history for New England."

Customer Reviews:

Not a Bad Summer Reading Choice.......2007-06-05

I read this novel for the purpose of completeing a summer assignment for my AP US history Class. It had a decnet plotline and is by the obviously reputable Stowe. A very interesting historical novel that kept me entertained enough to finish and wirte a paper about. Focuses on slavery in new england and the love between a minister and the daughter of the woman with whom he is residing.

The Agony of Salvation and a Theology of Love.......2004-07-25

The Minister's Wooing is the first of Harriet Beecher Stowe's three great novels of New England religion, that weave scenes and folklore of New England life with the debates and religious agonies that led her from her father's Edwardsian revivalist Calvinism to evangelical Episcopalianism. Of the three, The Minister's Wooing is the most satisfying as a story, although Oldtown Folks and Poganuc People give a fuller panorama of old New England life. (David Hackett Fischer used them extensively in his social history of the American colonies, Albion's Seed.) Mrs. Stowe improved her style greatly after Uncle Tom's Cabin which, while powerful as a moral indictment of slavery, is rather poorly written in many passages.

In her New England novels, Mrs. Stowe looks back on her childhood world in Puritan New England, justifying both her desertion of some of its most tightly-held tenets and the high honor she continued to pay to its legacy. To claim that she satirizes Calvinism is a grotesque misreading, sadly typical of most introductions to her novels which desire to place her as a forbearer of secular feminism and social radicalism, rather than let her be what in fact she was, an evangelical, a Republican, and an ardent advocate of the Christianization of American society.

The Minister's Wooing is set around 1798-1800 in Newport, Rhode Island, at a time just after the American Revolution. Real historical characters in the novel include Samuel Hopkins and Aaron Burr, Jr., leading pupil and grandson, respectively, of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards. While the author freely changes events in these characters' lives (Hopkins, for example, had been a foe of slavery and the slave-trade since 1776, long before the novel's time), her interpretation of these characters, both of whom she had met growing up, is insightful.

Mrs. Stowe contrasts the culturally spare and logocentric world of early New England with the visual opulence which she inhabited in genteel America of the mid-nineteenth century. How to relate the insular New England Christianity of her childhood to the Christianity of Raphael, and the great cathedrals of Europe she visited as an adult? This theme is introduced both in her narrative voice (St. Augustine's Enchiridion of Faith, Love, and Hope is cited without name at the novel's turning point) and in the character of Mme de Frontignac, a French aristocratic woman in an unhappy marriage. She introduces the New England matrons to the feminine beauty of France yet finds balm for her wounds in the severe virtues of Protestant New England. Clothe the chaste Protestant New England spirit in a elegant French Catholic gentility, Mrs. Stowe seems to be saying.

The theological groundwork is made more explicit in Oldtown Folks, but briefly, Mrs. Stowe believed that Jonathan Edwards, with his impossibly high standards for Christian life and his revivalist focus on a dramatic conversion experience, knocked the motherly old Puritan consensus exemplified by Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana off kilter and created almost unbearable tensions in many New Englanders. Who can be saved? What was the use of anything in a world where only an infinitesimal number could escape hell? How can we bear the thought of loving God who seems to condemn so many of our own flesh and blood to eternal damnation? Wrestling with these questions paradoxically gave the Yankees energy as they burst their cocoon, trading in China, fighting the Revolution, and allying with France. Some, like Aaron Burr, Jr., responded by embracing the skepticism of the philosophes. Others like James Marvyn's mother slowly expire, tormented by antinomies they can't resolve and unable to find the Gospel of Christ's love in the mazes of predestination. Some, like the deliciously nasty Simeon Brown, use the logical intricacies of Calvinist theology to cover up their utterly unconverted heart.

Mrs. Stowe's own answer is given in part by the exemplary character of Mary Scudder (whose role is taken by Harry Percival in Oldtown Folks), and in part by the Gospel wisdom of the black slave Candace. Mrs. Stowe's answer seems contradictory: in Mary Scudder she says children raised in a truly Christian society (as New England was and America must be) are born not depraved but naturally Christian and saved. In Candace, however, she points to the harder but more believable good news that Christ died for and loves even real sinners. Tragically Mrs. Stowe, like New England theologians generally, ingnored Holy Baptism as God's objective Gospel sign showing His good will toward the little children. Thus she ironically sought comfort and assurance through the image of Mary Scudder in the same impossible ideal of purely holy living that in Jonathan Edwards' hands had begun the madness.

Finally, Mrs. Stowe recasts the theological question of grace and nature into a meditation on the relation between familial (romantic, filial, and parental) love and love of God. Despite her sympathies with Catholicism, Mrs. Stowe firmly sets aside the monastic ideal that sees family love as in competition with love of God. Instead she sees the former as the true stepping stone to the latter. God planted in our hearts this bond of love to our families, even for those who we fear are rejecting Him, because it is this human love that leads us to Him. For Mrs. Stowe, the Christian home is truly God's school of character; desecration of that school is veritable blasphemy.

If all this sounds rather too thoughtful and theological, this is, as Mrs. Stowe states, the problem with old New England. It was born and conceived in theology and a novel true to that ethos must itself be thoughtful and theological. There is humor here, sudden plot turns, pathos, shrewd observation of character, and lovely description of North American nature, but the heart of the novel is a theology of love, divine and human.

An underrated book by Stowe, Overshadowed by Uncle Tom.......2002-03-07

I had to read this book for a Neglected Novels of the 19th century class. Stowe's examination into the problems of calvinism and the role of women in American society are insightful. Stowe's prose is entertianing and clear, but can be a bit droning, especially if the reader isn't acquainted with the style of 19th century novels. Overall I'd recomend this book to anyone who enjoys 19th century Lit.

Americans in Fiction Series Vol 70 (The Minister's Wooing By Harriet Beecher Stowe)

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Americans in Fiction Series Vol 70 (The Minister's Wooing By Harriet Beecher Stowe)

Manufacturer: The Gregg Press/Ridgewood, N.J.
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Binding: Hardcover

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Minister's Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: W.B. Conkey Co.
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Binding: Hardcover

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Novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

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THE MINISTER'S WOOING
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: Hurst and Company
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Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000WLMKGY

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The Minister's Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: Derby and Jackson
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Minister's Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Minister's Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Company
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Binding: Hardcover

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The Minister's Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Manufacturer: A. L. Burt
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The Minister's Wooing
Stowe Harriet Beecher
Manufacturer: Derby and Jackson
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ASIN: B000UJ479Q

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