Statistical Aspects Of The Design And Analysis Of Clinical Trials Revised edition by Brian S. Everitt, Andrew Pickles (Imperial College Press: World Scientific) About 8000 clinical trials are undertaken annually in all areas of medicine, from the treatment of acne to the prevention of cancer. Correct interpretation of the data from such trials depends largely on adequate design and on performing the appropriate statistical analyses. In this book, the statistical aspects of both the design and analysis of trials are described, with particular emphasis on recently developed methods of analysis.
According to Sir David Cox, the randomized controlled clinical trial is perhaps the outstanding contribution of statistics to 20th century medical research. Nowadays about 8000 such trials are undertaken annually in all areas of medicine from the treatment of acne to the prevention of cancer. Although the vast majority of these trials take place away from the glare of public interest, some deal with issues that are controversial enough to make even the popular press; an obvious example is the use of AZT for the treatment of AIDS.
There are many excellent books available which give comprehensive accounts of how clinical trials should be carried out and organized. The aim of this book is different; the authors attempt to give relatively concise descriptions of the more statistical aspects of the design and analysis of clinical trials, particularly those methods developed over the last decade or so. Topics discussed in this text include randomization, interim analyses, sample size determination, the analysis of longitudinal data, Bayesian methods, survival analysis and meta-analysis. Many examples are included alongside some of the necessary technical material, the more difficult parts of which are confined to tables. An Appendix gives details of relevant software. The book should be useful to medical statisticians and others faced with the often difficult problems of designing and analyzing clinical trials.
The controlled clinical trial has become one of the most important tools in medical research and investigators planning to undertake such a trial have no shortage of excellent books to which to turn for advice and information. But unlike the many other books dealing with clinical trials, this text is primarily concerned with the statistical issues of certain aspects of their design (Chapters 2 and 3) and, in particular, their analysis (Chapters 4 to 10), rather than their day-to-day organization. This restriction will enable us to give fuller accounts of some recently developed methods that may be particularly useful for the type of data often generated from clinical trials. Some details of the software available that implements the methods described will be given in the Appendix.

Algebraic Theory of Automata & Languages by Masami Ito (World Scientific Publishing Company) Although there are some books dealing with algebraic theory of automata, their contents consist mainly of Krohn-Rhodes theory and related topics. The topics in the present book are rather different. For example, automorphism groups of automata and the partially ordered sets of automata are systematically discussed. Moreover, some operations on languages and special classes of regular languages associated with deterministic and nondeterministic directable automata are dealt with. The book is self-contained and hence does not require any knowledge of automata and formal languages.
The theory of formal languages began with the classification of languages by N. Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957. Now, this classification is called the Chomsky hierarchy of languages. On the other hand, the theory of automata was initiated by M.O. Rabin and D. Scott in 1959. Their work can be regarded as the most important first step in the theory of automata in spite of its simplicity. Since then, these two fields have been developed by many researchers as the two most important theoretical foundations of computer science.
In this book, the author mainly handles formal languages and automata from the algebraic point of view. In the first two chapters, Ito investigates the algebraic structure of automata and then he deals with a kind of global theory, that is, partially ordered sets of automata. In the following four chapters, he studies grammars, languages and operations on languages. In the last section, ito introduces special kinds of automata, i.e. directable automata. The subjects in the book seem to be unique compared to other books with similar titles. The contents of the book are based on the author's work which started in the mid 1970s. His work offers some alternative ways to conceptualize ideas in Wolfram's New Kind of Science.
This book consists of 9 chapters:
• In Chapter 1, Ito mainly deals with the automorphism groups of strongly connected automata and (n, G)-automata, that is representations of strongly connected automata.
• In Chapter 2, he generalizes the results in Chapter 1 to the class of general automata.
• In Chapter 3, he considers partially ordered sets of automata where partial orders are induced by homomorphisms of automata.
• In Chapter 4, he deals with the compositions and decompositions of regular languages under n-insertion and shuffle operations. Moreover, Ito considers a decidability problem with respect to the shuffle closures of regular commutative languages.
• In Chapter 5, he determines the structure of a shuffle closed language.
• In Chapter 6, insertion and deletion operations is treated in details.
• In Chapter 7, shuffle and scattered deletion operations is dealt with.
• In Chapter 8, first Ito provides the concept of directable automata and then the deals with nondeterministic directable automata.

Adolescent Psychiatry: Developmental and Clinical Studies edited by Lois T. Flaherty (Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol 27: Analytic Press) Much of this volume of Adolescent Psychiatry focuses on trauma and violence. These are not new issues to psychiatrists, especially those who work with adolescents. Indeed, they are hardly new issues for the world. What is new is a growing awareness of the psychological, biological, and social impact of trauma on its victims, especially on the young. What awaits is the translation of this new knowledge into public policy, so that the effects of trauma can be mitigated and, ultimately, so that children and adolescents can be protected from harm.
The two Schonfeld Award papers in this volume deal with violence. Michael Kalogerakis has devoted much of his career to developing programs for violent youth in New York, where he served as Commissioner of Mental Health. He reviews the history of the pendulum swings in juvenile justice, revealing how far we have come from the original aims of the juvenile court. At the same time, the link between trauma and violence in adolescence is now firmly established, and there are programs that have good data for their effectiveness. My paper on terrorism attempts to show the appeal of ideologies that espouse violent revolution to young people.
Christopher Thomas et al. present a study from their groundbreaking work on youth violence in Galveston, Texas. The study links gang membership with serious violent crime, and by demonstrating the importance of the peer group, it points to ways that youth can be socialized away from gang membership.
The federal regulations on seclusion and restraint in inpatient settings that went into effect in 2001 were greeted with much apprehension. The study by Theodore Petti et al. shows that effective interventions can reduce the use of seclusion and restraint even with the most difficult state hospital adolescent populations. Most crucial to their findings is the importance of staff support.
Mani Pavuluri and colleagues present a comprehensive review of what we know about early-onset schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.
They discuss differential diagnosis and treatment strategies, with emphasis on newer pharmacological agents.
A series of papers by the Committee on Adolescence of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry deals with the nature, scope, and impact of trauma as well as implications of what we know for training and public policy. Freud's early discovery that histories of psychic trauma were prevalent among his patients-later put aside as he developed his theory of unconscious conflict-has been rediscovered as we have become aware of the appalling prevalence of child abuse and its lasting impact on its victims. Epidemiological studies have shown that traumatic stress is so prevalent in many societies and in subcultures of our own society that it can almost be considered a normative part of growing up. In areas as disparate as the inner cities of the United States and war-torn countries throughout the world, adolescents are traumatized by man-made violence. Natural disasters and disasters caused by human negligence take their toll everywhere.
Thanks to developments in neurobiology, we now have compelling evidence that this impact is in part mediated by measurable changes in brain function, as Patricia Lester et al. discuss in their paper on neurobiology and trauma. Cultural and gender issues are equally important in understanding the impact of trauma, as Warren Gadpaille demonstrates. These new awarenesses are being translated into clinical practice, as Monica Green's paper on intervention discusses. Finally, in this section, Max Sugar looks at the vulnerability of a particular group-late adolescents-to combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder, linking their vulnerability to developmental features of this period. His findings have particular significance for public policy, as late adolescents and young adults make up most of the frontline troops in combat.
Saul Levine dissects a multitude of self-deceptions and myths that he sees as having infected the mental health professions. Some of these involve beliefs (or purported beliefs) on the part of policymakers and funding agencies, others have been accepted uncritically by professionals themselves. All, in his view, have led to neglect of appropriate therapeutic care for adolescents.
James Gilfoil discusses the importance of families' attitudes toward psychotherapy in the outcome of therapy with teenagers. His paper includes a series of illustrations that constitute clinical pearls for the adolescent psychiatrist.
The final section consists of a resource paper on youth violence written by Charles Huffine, chair of the ASAP Topical Studies Council. This paper, which discusses the contributions of societal attitudes about youth to the perpetuation of violence and lack of appropriate interventions, was adopted as an official American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry (ASAP) position paper.

Babylonian Witchcraft Literature: Case Studies by I. Tzvi Abusch (Brown Judaic Studies) These essays resulted in the study of Mesopotamian magical and medical texts centering on witchcraft and sorcery. They address difficulties typology in the sorting of texts into coherent categories and to understand individual prayers and incantations. These studies focus on individual texts and suggest solutions to complications and intricacies in the material to aid in understanding of magical texts generally. Part One follows a diachronic approach, Part Two a synchronic one. In this sense, the studies are broad: while unraveling knots in individual texts, they highlight textual problems while exemplifing some solutions for common problems in traditional Mesopotamian therapeutic literature.
In Part One, Abusch examines such well known Akkadian incantations and prayers as KARL 226 IV 3ff. and related texts (Chapter 1), Mag1û VII 119-146 and related texts (Chapter 2), and KAR 26 and BMS 12 (Chapter 3). This examination grew out of various attempts to determine the limits of the witchcraft corpus and to categorize the many texts that display divergent and sometimes contradictory textual features. These texts contain indicators that suggest that they were used not only to combat witchcraft but also for other purposes as well. Such changes resulted in the appearance of disjointed and/or contradictory statements and of features pointing to multiple and often unrelated uses of the text. Accordingly, Abusch argues that a determination of the stages of development of such compositions is necessary for an understanding of the text and is one way to decide whether a text should be included in, or excluded from, the corpus.
Part Two focuses on an individual incantation, Maglû I 1-36, an address to the gods of the night sky. Although this opening incantation in Magli is a famous and oft-cited example of magical literature, Abusch's initial study of the text raised new questions and revealed unexplained details. He constructs a coherent and comprehensive statement of the meaning and function of the incantation. Accordingly, Abusch subjects this incantation to a detailed and sustained analysis. The painstaking examination of the individual elements of an incantation and of their relationship to each other is laborious, but at least in this case it resulted in a fuller understanding of the text and of its place in Maglaî. Moreover, this type of analysis showed the incantation to be the product of a literary creativity that draws together magical and legal imagery for the purpose of creating an indictment in which social and moral dimensions of the witchcraft accusation come into play.

The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God by John Foster (Oxford University Press) presents a clear and powerful discussion of a range of topics relating to our understanding of the universe: induction, laws of nature, and the existence of God. He begins by developing a solution to the problem of induction-a solution whose key idea is that the regularities in the workings of nature that have held in our experience hitherto are to he explained by appeal to the controlling influence of laws, as forms of natural necessity. His second line of argument focuses on the issue of what we should take such necessitational laws to be, and whether we can even make sense of them at all. Having considered and rejected various alternatives, Foster puts forward his own proposal: the obtaining of a law consists in the causal imposing of a regularity on the universe as a regularity. With this causal account of laws in place, he is now equipped to offer an argument for theism. His claim is that natural regularities call for explanation, and that, whatever explanatory role we may initially assign to laws, the only plausible ultimate explanation is in terms of the agency of God. Finally, he argues that, once we accept the existence of God, we need to think of him as creating the universe by a method which imposes regularities on it in the relevant law-yielding way. In this new perspective, the original nomological-explanatory solution to the problem of induction becomes a theological-explanatory solution.
The Divine Lawmaker is bold and original in its approach, and rich in argument. The issues on which it focuses are among the most important in the whole epistemological and metaphysical spectrum.
The Divine Lawmaker is a slightly revised version of a series of lectures that Foster gave at the University of Oxford under the title of `Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God'-a title that explicitly indicates the topics that form their subject matter.
Foster covers quite a lot of philosophical and theological ground. And, on the face of it, diverse ground. But there is a connection between the different topics. One of his main aims is to provide an argument for the existence of God-a personal God of a broadly Jewish Christian type. Foster develops his arguments in four stages that include the topics of induction and laws of nature.
Foster begins by looking at the familiar problem of induction, claiming that certain ways of attempting to solve it do not work. The idea of induction occupies the first two lectures. Next-at stage two- Foster introduces and defends what he asserts is, in its core, the right solution to the problem of induction. It is a solution that the Australian philosopher David Armstrong has also proposed independently at virtually the same time-Armstrong presenting it in his 1983 book What is a Law of Nature?, Foster in his 1983 paper to the Aristotelian Society entitled `Induction, Explanation, and Natural Necessity'. Armstrong and Foster are at opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum. Armstrong is the foremost modern champion of total materialism. Foster is one of the few modern defenders of a Cartesian conception of the mind; and, more exotically, Foster combines this mind-body dualism with an idealist view of the physical world (though claim is not developed in the context of this book). Both Armstrong and Foster find it amusing, and in a sense reassuring, that, with such contrasting metaphysical outlooks, they manage to converge on the same view in this understanding of induction and natural law.
Now this proposed solution to the problem of induction involves accepting the existence of laws of nature, and it involves recognizing these laws not just
as regularities in the behavior of things (consistencies in how the world works in different places and times), but as forms of natural necessity-as laws whose obtaining ensures that things behave and interact in certain regular ways. It is this that brings the discussion to its third stage in Foster's argument. Foster demonstrates that accepting the existence of laws of this kind, though facilitating a solution to the problem of induction, creates its own problem. The problem it creates is simply that, given the kind of necessity these laws involve, it is hard to see how to make sense of such laws-how the relevant notion of a law can be considered coherent.
It is in relation to this new problem that, in the fourth and final phase of the discussion, Foster constructs an argument for the existence of God. For he argues that, given the problem of unintelligibility or lack of coherence, one can only achieve a satisfactory account of the of the coherence of laws if we entertain that there is a God of the relevant (broadly Jewish and Christian) type, and that it is God who is the creator of the natural world and the source of its laws. With the argument for theism in place, Foster concludes the discussion by looking again at the issue of induction, and showing how his earlier proposal needs to be reworked, in certain key respects, in response to the theistic necessity of holding moral and natural law. Foster's arguments, if one is able to follow them, may bolster faith and might seems irrelevant to those with nonthestic neutrality.

The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters edited by Eldon Jay Epp, George W. MacRae (Scholars Press) (Hardcover) This volume has been designed both to survey and to evaluate New Testament scholarship since World War II. In several respects this period of about forty years comprises one of several eras in NT studies that were extraordinarily productive both in quantity and quality of work and also in significance of results. Similarly productive periods surely are to be identified around 1835-1840, when David Friedrich Strauss stirred up a world-wide debate on the historical Jesus and when the priority of Mark seemed secure; or around 1865, when the basic Two-Source theory of Synoptic origins seemed assured and C. Tischendorf was discovering or publishing some of the most important NT manuscripts; or around 1900, when the impressive scholarship of Adolf Harnack and the other learned "Old Liberals" set the modern standard for excellence in critical scholarship and at the same time misled two generations on the kingdom of God and the historical Jesus, and when Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer effected a revolution in NT scholarship on the latter issues; or around 1920, when Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans (1918) had appeared and when the stage was set by Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann for the form-critical analyses of the NT, but especially by Barth and Bultmann for new theological/ hermeneutical approaches that were to have far-reaching influence in the post-World War II period and down to our own times; or, finally, around the mid-1930s-just before the war - when Rudolf Otto and C. H. Dodd emphasized (and Dodd overemphasized) the reality of the present kingdom in the ministry of Jesus, and when the Chester Beatty papyri were published and brought new life to textual criticism.
Our forty-year period began in 1945 and the immediately following years with the reestablishment of those international scholarly ties that had been broken and had lain dormant during the war years when North America and virtually all of Europe were involved in conflict. Obviously, British-American ties were quickly and almost automatically restored, but perhaps most striking in this reconnection was the early and close cooperation of German and American NT scholars. This was symbolized, for instance, in the broad use of English-language publications in the work of European scholars like W. G. Kümmel and others, but was demonstrated very concretely, for example, in the interconnection between the German "Neutestamentlicher Arbeitskreis" and the American "New Testament Colloquium." Prominent in the former group were scholars like Hans Conzelmann; the latter group emphasized "the study of issues raised by or resulting from the scholarly work of . . . Rudolf Bultmann" (as described in the
Encyclopedia of Associations, 10th ed.) and included among its senior members Hans Jonas, Kendrick Grobel, and Amos Wilder, as well as (then) younger members such as Robert W. Funk, Helmut Koester, George MacRae, Norman Perrin, James M. Robinson, and about a dozen others. Fully half of these members of the American group were either European by birth or had studied on the Continent. Renewed recognition and cooperation between those on both sides of the Atlantic were not limited, of course, to the German-American scene, but were worldwide, and no longer would any national group form an isolated "cell" of NT scholarship.
At the same time, due primarily to the encyclical of Pope Pius XII in 1943, Divino afflante spiritu, Roman Catholic NT scholars no longer traveled a separate path, but began to walk in the mainstream of critical scholarship (see Brown: 18-19, 117). This dramatic change can be seen, symbolically and in actuality, by observing in North America the extraordinary degree to which the memberships of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Catholic Biblical Association now overlap-and also in recent years by the numerous Roman Catholic presidents of the former and the recent Protestant president of the latter. As a further instance, Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit, has served as editor of both societies' journals, first of the Journal of Biblical Literature for six years (1971-1976) and then of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1980-1984). Examples could be multiplied, such as the appointment of Roman Catholic (and Jewish) NT scholars to permanent positions and endowed chairs in Protestant theological seminaries (and conversely), or the "denominationally blind" appointments now made in most of our college and university programs in the study of religion. These developments, which appear matter-of-fact to us now, could not have been foreseen or even imagined prior to World War II. Anyone who doubts this statement will find striking confirmation of its accuracy in a 1947 article in The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow-a collaborative volume similar to the present one-by J. H. Cobb on "Current Trends in Catholic Biblical Research," where the "Catholic" and the "liberal" scholars are seen as radically different in their approaches and results:
The Catholic scholar, on the other hand, begins with Scripture and tradition, the total deposit of the faith as, and only as, this is officially interpreted by the living magisterium of the church.... He cannot doubt the reliability of the channels by which the biblical literature has been transmitted, nor can he consider portions of it as mere myth, legend, fiction, symbol, etiological explanation, or apologetic. He cannot employ one portion of it to disprove the factual character of another portion. To illustrate, when accounts of a given event, such as the resurrection narratives, differ widely in detail, he must harmonize the records in such a way as to affirm both the truth of the detail and the truthfulness of the total story of which it is a part. (117-18)
Raymond E. Brown, S.S., speaks for the current view on the relationship between the magisterium and the theologians or biblical scholars:
I do not think that the members of the magisterium can speak authoritatively about matters of theology or Scripture unless they have elementary competence in the field, either by their own learning or by consultation. . . . I am saying that bishops must listen to theologians and acquire information, and pray over it, and think over it, and then teach pastorally what they judge the Church must hear. (48-49)
To be more specific, he speaks, for instance, of the Catholic Church's "acceptance of a developmental approach to the Gospels, recognizing that the final Gospels go considerably beyond the ministry of Jesus and that later Christology had been retrojected into the accounts of the ministry" (67), and he cites as one example Matt 16:18: "Today, the majority of scholars would recognize that Mark is older than Matthew and that the sentence about building the Church upon Peter is a Matthean addition (from post-resurrectional material) to an account which originally lacked it, as we see in Mark and Luke". These somewhat random statements from Brown are symbolic of a fresh and refreshing ecumenical unity among NT scholars that is a distinctive feature of the postwar period.
Another refreshing change has been the steady decline of anti-Semitic expressions and anti-Jewish sentiments in NT scholarship, though the task has not been finally completed. As one example, the pejorative (and inaccurate) description of the Judaism of the general NT period as Spätjudentum ("late Judaism") has in our time largely disappeared from our parlance. In addition, a new openness to face the issues of anti-Semitism within the NT - and to face them honestly-has been evident throughout the post World War II period, involving both Protestant and Catholic -and, of course, Jewish-participants in the continuing discussion and the growing literature.
Bultmann's brief but provocative essay, serves appropriately as the pivot between the prewar and postwar phases of NT scholar-ship, for not only does it bridge chronologically the gap created by the war, but it is symptomatic of widespread changes that were to take place when studies resumed on a broad scale. This is evident, as examples, in renewed investigations of the Christian kerygma and its meaning to moderns, in hermeneutics generally and in the application of existentialist categories to the NT in particular, in the study of NT language and "language-event" and the new literary-critical approaches to the NT, in the application of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy to the study of the NT, and in the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus. Indeed, when one takes into account the other aspects of Bultmann's work-form criticism and the sayings of Jesus, NT theology, and Pauline and Johannine studies-it is obvious how pivotal he and his work have been in our discipline. Even those who may eschew the "Bultmannian" or "post-Bultmannian" points of view will admit both his deep influence and the character of his work as a turning point in postwar NT studies.
This list of significant contributors, long as it is, represents only a small portion of the highly influential scholars who have shaped NT studies over the centuries. It does, however, bring us to the beginning of World War II, where the present volume again takes up the narrative of the ongoing development of NT studies.
It will be obvious that the essays that follow have at least two significant omissions, for there are neither separate chapters nor substantive discussions of either the social world of the NT or feminist perspectives on NT scholarship. Perhaps the editors were remiss in not assigning separate contributions on these subjects, but in the late 1970s, when this trilogy on The Bible and Its Modern Interpreters was planned, investigations of the NT social world were only beginning and a distinctive feminist perspective on NT studies was even less well articulated than were such perspectives on the study of religion generally, or on theology, or even on the OT-from which NT studies has so often taken its cue-for in that field also only a modicum of work had been done prior to the present decade. It will be the responsibility, therefore, of the next generation to assess NT scholarship in these two areas, for surely during the coming decades NT social world and anthropological studies will demonstrate their vital significance for interpreting the NT, and all along feminist perspectives will continue to correct the male-dominated biblical scholarship of the past eighteen centuries and more.

Ugaritic Narrative Poetry edited by Mark S. Smith, Edward L. Greenstein, Theodore J. Lewis, David Marcus, Simon B. Parker (Society of Biblical Literature) (Paperback) The Ugaritic narrative poems all come from the ancient city of Ugarit, which lies half a mile inland from the Syrian coast opposite the eastern tip of Cyprus. The city was discovered after a farmer's accidental exposure of an ancient tomb nearby in 1928 and has been excavated almost annually since 1929. The excavators have uncovered a large palace; an acropolis with two temples, the house of the high priest, and the house of a divination priest; and numerous other large and small buildings, both sacred and secular. These all date from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.E. The levels from this period lie closest to the surface, have been most extensively excavated, and have yielded several archives and libraries. The uninscribed and inscribed remains together disclose many aspects of the city's culture during the Late Bronze Age.
Ugarit was well situated for trade. Trade routes extended by land east-ward to the other major cities of Syria, to Mitanni, and to Assyria; by sea westward to Cyprus and the Aegean; by land and by sea northward and westward to Asia Minor and the territory of the Hittites; and southward to Palestine and Egypt. Through economic and cultural contacts with these various regions, Ugarit became a rich and cosmopolitan city in the Late Bronze Age.
Excavators have found in the city the scripts and languages of several of the cultures with which it had relations. Two languages and scripts predominate, however. Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, was the international language of the period and was used especially for communications between states, including Egypt. (Ugarit was predominantly under Egyptian influence in the first part of the Late Bronze Age but after ca. 1350 B.C.E. was dominated by the Hittite state to the north.) Akkadian was written in the complex cuneiform writing system, in which each of several hundred signs consisted of a cluster of wedge-shaped impressions on soft clay and represented a syllable, word, or indicator of a semantic category. But Ugarit also had its own native language, related to several Semitic languages, but generally classified as Northwest Semitic, reflecting its proximity to the hypothetical ancestor of the first-millennium languages of Syria-Palestine: Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and so on. To write this language, the scribes of Ugarit devised their own script. They exploited the alphabetic principle that had already inspired the invention of the Canaanite alphabet farther south, but devised signs using cuneiform impressions on clay, as for Akkadian. The Ugaritic alphabet consists of thirty simple cuneiform signs, each one representing a consonant (except for three which represent the same consonant -a glottal stop-with three different vowels). In this script the scribes of Ugarit wrote numerous internal administrative records of the city government, many letters and religious texts, and a few literary texts.
The Ugaritic texts include the only collection outside of the Bible of native poetry and narratives from pre-Roman Syria-Palestine. These narrative poems are of unique value as a source of information about Syro-Palestinian poetry, narrative, and mythology toward the end of the Bronze Age. As such, they also provide us with a sample of the traditional background of some of the poetic, narrative, and mythological material in the Hebrew Bible. We find in the Ugaritic narrative poems representatives of a developed poetic tradition that lies behind the poetic achievement now pre-served in the prophetic, liturgical, and wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible; versions of traditional tales or motifs that are later recast in Hebrew prose narratives; and a world of gods, with their conflicts and assemblies and interventions in human affairs, that is still dimly reflected in the surviving Hebrew literature.
The Ugaritic narratives are all apparently poetic; that is, they consistently use parallelism and/or poetic formulas. Parallelism, familiar from most biblical poetry, refers to the juxtaposition of phrases or clauses in usually two, sometimes three, and occasionally more, poetic cola of similar syntactic structure and/or semantic import. Poetic formulas include standard epithets for common characters, including gods; standard expressions for the introduction of direct speech, for a character's arrival at or departure from aplace, for the passage of time, and so on; and standard pairs of words or phrases used in parallel cola. Many formulas constitute a complete colon and even appear in pairs or larger clusters of cola. While a prose translation that did away with these features would offer a more fast-paced and engaging narrative to the modern reader, we have retained them in the interest of giving a sense of the traditional, poetic character of narratives that would have been not read silently but recited orally.
The first three narratives translated here, Kirta, Aqhat, and Baal-stories of a king, a patriarch, and the gods respectively-are recognizably literary works, whatever the social purposes they served. Several of the other, shorter narratives, however, appear to have some more immediate, practical use, as is suggested by references to ritual acts, prescriptions, or social circumstances in conjunction with which the narratives were recited. This suggests the immediate power of specific narratives in relation to specific situations.
The first three works are best known and have been translated several times. The other, shorter texts have in many cases not been included in the standard translations of Ugaritic texts, and the translations that are available sometimes exhibit the translator's creativity and imagination where a sound basis for determining the meaning of the original is lacking. The more fragmentary and obscure texts are included because of their obvious relations with those that are better preserved and understood and also because they have been used in some bold hypotheses concerning Ugaritic mythology and religion.

The William Freeman Murder Trial: Insanity, Politics, and Race by Andrew W. Arpey (Syracuse University Press) Antebellum culture is compellingly exposed in this book of horrific multiple murder and madness in Upstate New York. Andrew W. Arpey offers insight into a wide variety of subjects that will have broad appeal to historians and scholars of law, journalism, religion, psychiatry, politics, and race and reform.
In 1846 William Freeman, a young man of African and Native American descent, stabbed to death four members of the Van Nest family with no apparent motive. His victims, all of whom were white, included an elderly woman, her pregnant daughter, and her two-year-old grandson. Free-man was quickly apprehended, but his mental health soon became a matter of controversy. Led by future Secretary of State William H. Seward, his counsel entered a plea of insanity, one of the first uses of the insanity defense in the nation.
The Van Nest killings and the trial of William Freeman, though illustrative of many aspects of antebellum society and culture, have never received in-depth attention. Drawing on newspapers, trial accounts, and private papers, Arpey firmly shows the political machinations of the case, the heated debate it set off on the relation-ship between race and crime, the use of punishment, and the boundaries of legal responsibility. His superb reconstruction of the trial, the motivations of the many actors, and the trial's status in American history place this book alongside the best crime novels of its kind.
Excerpt: On Friday, March 13, 1846, the editor of the Albany Evening Journal received details, via telegraph from Utica, of a `Most Horrible Murder' that had taken place the previous evening. The earliest details of the bloody scene were shocking, and were made all the more terrifying by the fact that the perpetrator was still at large... . Freeman's arrest did not result in an immediately satisfactory answer to the question being asked across the state: Why did this man kill violently this particular family? That the victims included a pregnant woman, a two-year-old child, and an elderly woman made the crime seem incomprehensibly brutal and bizarre. . . . In Auburn, local residents of `every class and sex' flocked to the county jail to cast their eyes upon Freeman. ... The brutality of the killings and Freeman's bizarre behavior following his capture thrust his mental health into question.... Anger and suspicion regarding the man in custody for the atrocities committed at Fleming only increased with time. `Since his confinement he has endeavored to convince him [sic] that he is insane, by talking to himself, saying that they were asleep that he killed, and using all sorts of incoherent expressions,' the Rochester Daily Advertiser reported several days after Freeman's arrest. . . . Suspicion that Freeman feigned insanity was not surprising. To many, insanity seemed but a clever conspiracy concocted by crafty lawyers to spare their depraved clients appropriate punishment."

Theoretical and Empirical Investigations into New Age Spiritualities by Dominic Corrywright (Peter Lang Publishing) This book provides a detailed examination of theoretical and empirical approaches to New Age spiritualities. The author explains how the diverse and dynamic nature of New Age spiritualities requires methods of research that highlight plurality. His analysis of current descriptions of the field shows that many typologies of the thought and practices of those within the New Age have not reflected the actual experiences and beliefs of those they seek to describe. This text proposes a new theoretical model, and a detailed methodological framework for research using the idea of a weblike network. The empirical investigations into organizations and individuals provide ideographic evidence for the web model. Corrywright offers some empirical survey research as an corrective to the too bookish studies of New Age religions where the literary output of leaders is given often scarily critical scrutiny.

Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good by Susanne M. Decrane (Georgetown University Press) it is widely recognized that postmodernism has shaped contemporary approaches to theology and ethics) Given this fact, a writer must make clear at the outset the ways in which she responds to the postmodern challenge regarding the use of classic texts and universal claims. However, the issue is not as simple as responding to a singular postmodern challenge. Rather, the postmodern critique of modern, liberal, Enlightenment-based convictions holds within it a range of orientations toward purported universal truths. This book is a response to these postmodern positions. At the same time, it offers a constructive method for retrieving a classic text from the Christian tradition-Thomas Aquinas's principle of the common good-from a feminist, liberationist perspective, and applying this text to contemporary issues in women's health care in the United States.
Some postmodern positions reject many, most, or sometimes all classic texts as no longer relevant or usable because they bear the enduring (some would say imprisoning) presumptions of the contexts in which they developed and which render the texts otiose, having little or no cultural, philosophical, scientific, sociological, religious, or ethical bearing on the current situation. From a feminist perspective, the misogyny identified in many classic texts-or the negative presumptions about women (and nonwhite persons) embedded in universal claims-appears so blatant and/or pervasive, that it seems impossible to find in these texts any contribution to the human project. This is also true for most feminist scholars in the Christian tradition who find in the classic texts-especially, but not limited to, the Scriptures-and in many Christian doctrines judgments about women presented as universal truth claims that in themselves are denigrating and untrue, and which have functioned historically to justify social, economic, and religious relationships of power that are extremely harmful to women. In the face of this critique, some Christian feminist scholars withdraw the designations "canonical" "authoritative," or "revelatory" from Christian texts or from parts of texts that reveal insupportable presumptions and judgments about women. Rosemary Radford Ruether's now classic statement represents this position:
Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive. Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemptions.
Other Christian feminist scholars have responded to the scriptural and doctrinal aspects of the Christian tradition that denigrate the dignity of women by withdrawing from the Christian tradition altogether, judging it to be irredeemably misogynistic.
Postmodernity has given rise to another trajectory. Here, efforts to find rapprochement between diverse views-such as Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of the "to and fro" of conversation as a model of interpretation, and David Tracy's effort to bring the wisdom and values of a theological tradition into the public arena-are rejected. Rather, the classic texts and traditional doctrines (and traditional interpretations of the doctrines) of the community are given pride of place by the community or person. This approach finds expression in the Christian tradition in the writings of George Lindbeck. In his framework, priority is given to the Scriptures among the various sources for Christian theology, and reason and experience are given less weight.
Decrane's argument is that many of the postmodern critiques regarding the oppressive, crippling presumptions identified in many classic texts (as well as in traditional formulations of many Christian doctrines) are deeply needed in order to argue effectively against the texts, interpretations, and doctrines judged by women to be facile, erroneous, oppressive, and reductionistic. This critique is not simply a worthy intellectual exercise, but extends to a critique of systems, institutions, and policies that are based on these texts and doctrines and which have harmed women in particular. At the same time, however, a feminist, liberationist retrieval of the principle of the common good not only contributes to the project of feminist ethics but makes the Christian moral tradition richer by exposing the relevance and significance of the classic principle in a venue very different from its historical origins.
The more radical forms of postmodern relativism, which reject the possibility of virtually any universal claims, are a shortsighted response to the abuses of universal claims in the past. In fact, classic texts of a tradition may serve as sources of insight and wisdom if retrieved through a rigorous, critical process. To reject classic texts leaves the human community stripped of enduring sources of human wisdom and moral insight. In order to defend this claim, however, one must demonstrate a critical way to adjudicate and retrieve both classic texts and traditions that have been part of sustaining the oppressive social and religious systems against women. This is essential if one is to prevent merely cosmetic realignments of the same oppressive insights and conclusions.
In order to accomplish this, Decrane retrieves Thomas Aquinas's principle of the common good-a fundamental ethical proposition in the Christian (and particularly the Roman Catholic) tradition-and apply it to two issues in health care in the United States: women's health in general, and black women and breast cancer in particular. Retrieving this principle is significant in that it will demonstrate that a feminist, liberationist approach to ethics can accommodate and appropriate a universal claim that has seemed, for centuries, to oppress-not liberate-women.