Pulled between the disparate spheres of home life with a minister father he loves and respects, and the world of sex, drugs, and violence of his closest boyhood friends, author Stephen Haven relates his journey of self-discovery in this poignant memoir. After a fourteen-year absence from his home in Amsterdam, New York, Haven returns in the week before Easter, 2003, to the town that molded his character.A true bildungsroman, "The River Lock" traces the forging of Haven's identity from the clash of his youthful home life and the streets of his native mill town. Through memories of adolescence,...

Nihonjinron is the Japanese term for Japanese national character, or the way the Japanese characterize themselves. Befu, a bilingual anthropologist who has studied Japan for 40 years, examines hundreds of original Japanese sources, and argues that Nihonjinron is a civil religion for the Japanese and

Here is a book of memoirs by a writer of the South Dakota plains who travels to South Korea. It is full of vivid landscapes...outer and inner...in a beautiful style by author Mary Alice Haug.