New Releases by Elizabeth Cook

The story of a psychologically frail woman in an unhappy marriage who became emotionally dependent upon a fundamentalist minister who then seduced her. The account is told from the woman''s point of view, largely using her own language and interpretations. Elizabeth Cook is an occupational therapist specialising in psychiatric practice, now engaged in Master''s studies on sexual abuse. Her husband is an educationalist and Director of Aboriginal Programs at Macquarie University.

The fifteen stories contained in The Power of Horses portray, each in a different way, the sensitive and enduring culture of the Dakota of the Upper Plains and convey many of the basic truths that have sustained Elizabeth Cook-LynnÕs people for countless generations. Though the stories are often filled with violence and grief, they are also brimming with beauty, gentleness, charm, and humor. In these striking and memorable tales of Dakota country, Joseph grieves that the body of his middle son will never be returned to his native shores from the distant World War I battlefields where he was killed; family members gather to bury their father and barely survive their own weaknesses and bickering; a grandmother takes her grandchild for a walk and imparts to the child some of the old wisdom of times past; a whining hound dogÑprimordial to the DakotaÑcompetes unwittingly with Reverend TilestonÕs efforts to bring the word of the Christian God to a tight-knit family, and wins; Magpie is a poet but is also on parole, and just as his friends have begun to rethink the finality of justice, he is ÒaccidentallyÓ shot and killed in the white manÕs jail. Cook-Lynn writes unsparingly yet compassionately of reservation life in the last century. In each of these gemlike stories she reveals something of the mystery and essential toughness of the Dakota people.

A young rabbit''s fear that the earth is breaking up spreads to the other animals, until a wise lion teaches them all to investigate their fears before jumping to conclusions.

This perceptive and illuminating study offers a stimulating, new approach to major aspects of late Renaissance literature that tend to be either misunderstood or neglected. It is an account and an analysis of the way in which English poetry in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries registers a new kind of attentiveness to the material world and unusually full awareness of the resources peculiar to language.

The Elizabethans viewed society chiefly in religious terms; they shared a fundamental belief in the preservation of the social order and in moderation. “Take away authority,” said Edwin Sandys, bishop of London, “and the people will rush headlong into every thing that is bad.” But across a wide spectrum of religious belief there were differences in emphasis and at times sharply divergent views on matters of social conduct. Through scholars have given considerable attention to Elizabethan political and religious ideals, Richard Greaves’s book - based upon carefully scrutiny of religious writings (including biblical marginalia), social documents, diaries, and letters - is the first full analysis of the era’s social thought. It is also an assessment of the extent to which that thought was reflected in social practice. Greaves points out that Elizabethan religious groups make up a continuum in the Christian tradition, from militant Catholicism at one end to Seperatism and various fringe sects at the other, and in the middle Anglicans and Puritans of more than one stripe. It is these two persuasions that receive most of his attention, though he also examines the views of Catholics and Separatists, who did not write as extensively on social issues as their Anglican and Puritan brethren. Greaves’s opening chapters are devoted to the clergy themselves, as the principal exponents of appropriate social behavior - to the social pressures they confronted, their behavior in society, and the reasons for hostility against them. Greaves then turns to such areas of social thought and practice as marriage, sexual relations, family life and education; attitudes toward work and social mobility, the sabbath, recreation, food and drink, costume and language, suicide and war. In the economic and legal spheres he surveys Elizabethan views on business and legal ethics, usury and surety; the proper use of wealth, the enigma of poverty, and the provision of legal redress for the poor; enclosures and landlord-tenants relations; and controversies surrounding the use of ecclesiastical courts and oaths. Greaves’s study ends with death - an analysis of Elizabethan funeral rites and related matters of contention: funeral pomp and expenses, brasses and monuments, and demands for reform.