Perhaps the most salient feature of the stories collected here is their presentation of the multiplicity of voices of Caribbean women: Parable II, No Dust is Allowed in This House, of Nuns and Punishment, Reminds us of the accomplishments of Caribbean women and promise of their writing.

In Blanca Muratorio's book, we are introduced to Rucuyaya Alonso, an elderly Quichua Indian of the Upper Ecuadorean Amazon. Alonso is a hunter, but like most Quichuas, he has done other work as well, bearing loads, panning gold, tapping rubber trees, and working for Shell Oil. He tells of his work, his hunting, his marriage, his fights, his fears, and his dreams. His story covers about a century because he incorporates the oral tradition of his father and grandfather along with his own memories. Through his life story, we learn about the social and economic life of that region. 

Time and the Town was the last of Mary Heaton Vorse's books. It is about many things — a town and its people, the author, a certain kind of idyllic life. As much as anything else, it is the biography of the house Vorse bought in 1907 and lived in, off and on, for the next thirty-six years. The moods of the house mirrored her own. "Our houses," she wrote, "are our biographies, the stories of our defeats and victories."

Combining vivid description with thoughtful analysis, Sara Mitter reveals the condititions that shape women's lives in a traditional, patriarchal society. Mitter introduces us to diverse women who live and work in Bombay, from construction crew laborers and illiterate domestic workers who live in shanties, to well-educated, middle-class women. She also confronts the question of gender in Indian society, as she examines the influence of the Goddess mythology and the persistence of such normative models as Sita of the Ramayana in contemporary daily life. In a final section, Mitter tells of the increasing moblilization and resistance of Indian women since the 1970s. She looks at the nature of the conflicts and choices facing Indian women today, and the potential consequences for the India of tomorrow. Sara S. Mitter is an American writer based in Paris. Married to an Indian physicist, she has made many visits to India and has lived there for periods of her life.

"One of the sharpest and most productive analyses of our contemporaneity and the place of cinema within it and of our new historical relations as spectators to the imaginary universe on the movie screen. This is a study that will be of intense interest to film theorists and historians, cultural critics, mass media analysts, and anyone concerned with the complicated place of culture in our world today."--Dana Polan, English and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh How have modern advertising techniques, the widespread use of VCRs, conglomerate takeovers of studios and film archives, cable TV, and media coverage of the Vietnam war changed the ways we watch movies? And how, in turn, have those different habits and patterns of viewing changed the ways in which films address their viewers? Drawing on a wide variety of American and European films and on many theoretical models, Timothy Corrigan investigates what he calls "a cinema without walls," taking a close look at particular films in order to see how we watch them differently in the post-Vietnam era. He examines cult audiences, narrative structure, genre films (road movies, in particular), and contemporary politics as they engage new models of film making and viewing. He thus provides a rare, serious attempt to deal with contemporary movies. Corrigan discusses filmmakers from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, including Martin Scorsese, Raoul Ruiz, Michael Cimino, Alexander Kluge, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Frears, and Wim Wenders. He offers detailed analyses of films such as Platoon; Full Metal Jacket; 9-1/2 Weeks; The Singing Detective; Choose Me; After Hours; Badlands; The King of Comedy; Paris, Texas; and My Beautiful Laundrette. Orchestrating this diversity, Corrigan provides a critical basis for making sense of contemporary film culture and its major achievements. Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and film at Temple University. He is the author of Writing about Film and New German Film: The Displaced Image, and editor of The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History.

The papers in this volume represent original work to celebrate the centenary of the American Society of Zoologists. They illustrate the impressive nature of historical scholarship that has subsequently focused on the development of biology in the United States.