The Divine Art of Forgiveness

Getting someone to forgive you is a difficult matter, but David J. Lieberman (Get Anyone to Do Anything) shows how to do this and defuse a host of other common conflicts in Make Peace with Anyone: Breakthrough Strategies to Quickly End Any Conflict, Feud, or Estrangement. Lieberman guides readers through personality clashes, passive aggressive behavior, dealing with criticism and delivering criticism in such diverse situations as family feuds, workplace squabbles and marital discord. He stresses listening and showing respect as vital for dealing with most contretemps, but also includes last ditch emergency measures for the most intractable conflicts. (St. Martin's, $19.95 208p ISBN 0-312-28154-4; Feb.)

Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting, insists Fred Luskin in Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, nor does it mean condoning bad behavior. What it does mean is that you "take your hurt less personally, take responsibility for how you feel, and become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell." Luskin, a practicing psychologist and cofounder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, shows why forgiveness is important for mental and physical health, explains how to form a grievance and suggests practical steps for healing. He uses examples from his clinical practice—including instances of broader cultural grievances like those between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland—in this solidly researched and convincing guide. (Harper San Francisco, $24.95 224p ISBN 0-06-251720-1; Jan.)

Feel-Good Stories

Imagine having both your legs amputated below the knee. Picture yourself relearning to walk, finally making it to the disabled Olympic games and winning 18 gold medals and 14 world records. Then envision yourself becoming the first disabled person ever admitted to the National College of Physical Education. Ronan Tynan has done all this and more, and he explains how he overcame such adversity in his moving art biography, Halfway Home: My Life 'til Now. As Tynan (now one of the popular Irish Tenors and currently planning a U.S. tour with his two partners) says, "Faith is the bird that fells the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." (Scribner, $22 240p ISBN 0-7432-2291-1; Jan. 8)

In a similar vein is Brooke and Jean Ellison's Miracles Happen: One Mother, One Daughter, One Journey. When she was 11 years old, Brooke was hit by a car and was paralyzed from the neck down. Her mother, Jean, nurtured her with optimism and confidence, and 10 years later Brooke graduated from Harvard University, becoming the first quadriplegic to do so. This two-person account (in which the authors trade off chapters) covers a lot of ground: living with a disability, the importance of mother-daughter relationships and celebrating everyday wonders. The book's publication coincides with the broadcast of the ABC-TV movie about the Ellisons directed by Christopher Reeve. (Hyperion, $22.95 224p ISBN 0-7868-6770-1; Jan.)

The Small Stuff

A cup for holding caudle ("A drink made from thin gruel, spiced, sweetened, and mixed with ale or wine"), a chafing dish, and even clobbering ("a crude application of heavy overglaze") are potential sources of speech in If These Pots Could Talk: Collecting 2,000 Years of British Household Pottery. London-born Ivor Noël Hume (Here Lies Virginia), former chief archeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, presents 648 illustrations (560 in color) of everything from a black Roman-era poppyhead beaker to a thin-walled, brown salt-glazed stoneware "gorge" from the early 18th century and beyond. Organized by use rather than chronology, the 16 chapters take readers from "Broomsticks and Beer Bottles" to "Mentioning the Unmentionables," reconstructing the objects' uses and social contexts along the way. (UPNE, $65 until Jan. 1, 2002 and $75 thereafter 472p ISBN 1-58465-161-X; Dec.)

Disturbing closeups of lipsticks; a collection of heartbreakingly earnest lost-pet fliers; painstakingly documented differences in the scribbles produced by Eraser Mate or Dynagrip pens—all help make up Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things. Peter Buchanan-Smith, art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, presents various odd obsessions of 25 artists in various media, and the result is this set of 200 color and 50 b&w illustrations of "projects" that come dangerously close to drawing charges of haphazard artmaking—and are all the more engaging for it. (Princeton Architectural Press, $25 224p ISBN 1-56898-297-6; Jan. 24)

A half-ruined Beirut apartment building from the early '80s, its parquet floor hanging precipitously over a debris-strewn courtyard, is juxtaposed with a shot of the mellow parquet of a gallery in which a lush European landscape hangs. Such contrasts are just some of the Details of the World documented by Paris-based photographer Sophie Ristelhueber. As curator Cheryl Brutvan of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts shows in this masterfully produced little book (7 x 41/2), Ristelhueber's largely people-less landscapes—whether natural, extreme, man-made or ruined—take on larger resonance by ingenious changes in scale, framing and setting among the 81 color and 64 b&w shots here. Ristelhueber's work is a step toward a truly global imagination. (MFA [Distributed Art Publishers, dist.], $35 312p ISBN 0-87846-625-8; Jan)

The Massacre at Fort William Henry, near upstate New York's Lake George, happened in August 1757, when French troops attacked British forces stationed in the area, and Native American fighters sacked the Brits as they attempted to fall back to Fort Edward. The episode formed the basis for James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, to which Plymouth State College archeologist David R. Starbuck (A Shaker Family Album) here devotes an entire chapter before marshaling fascinating and minutely detailed evidence (musket balls: 251; cut shot lead 14; wine bottles: 1,004) against many of Cooper's artistic liberties. The bulk of the book consists of descriptions of site excavations and reconstructions of the lives of the men and women from all sides of the conflict via the artifacts they left behind. (UPNE, $16.95 paper 152p ISBN 1-58465-166-0; Apr. 1)

Living Architecture

The majestic, vital streets of European cities and world capitals are most often their grandest and largest in scale, like the Champs Elysées. The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multi-Way Boulevards celebrates these thoroughfares, created in the 19th century and currently out of favor because of safety concerns and the devotion to vehicles-only roads. Yet urban studies professors Allan B. Jacobs and Elizabeth Macdonald, along with Jerusalem planner Yodan Rofe, argue that boulevards could play an important role in revitalizing blight by getting people back in the same places as other traffic. Barcelona's Passeig de Gracia, Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway, C.G. Road in Ahmedabad, India, and even the Esplanade in Chico, Calif., serve as important examples among the 200 b&w illustrations. (MIT, $39.95 272p ISBN 0-262-10090-8; Dec.)

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, former administrator of New York City's Central Park (The Forests and Wetlands of New York City), begins Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History with stone circles and ziggurats, and traces design's evolution through to today's suburbs and theme parks. An encyclopedic account of man-made landscapes around the world illustrated with a stunning 633 photos and drawings, more than half in color, the book reveals a 1720 English turf ampitheater, the "Tea, Moss and Stones" (as one chapter is titled) of Japanese gardens, the grand genius of Versailles designer André Le Nôtre, as well as today's "Earthworks, Golf Courses, Philosophical Models, and Poetic Metaphors." It's an accessible and elegant respite. (Abrams, $75 544p ISBN 0-8109-4253-4; Dec.)

A scholarly look at the role of architecture in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict shows why controversies over monuments (like Ariel Sharon's infamous visit to Haram al-Sarif, which touched off the current intifada) can explode into violence. Focusing particularly on the British Mandate period and using examples like the Wailing Wall riots of 1929 and the restoration of the Dome of the Rock, Daniel Bertrand Monk, a SUNY—Stony Brook art and architecture professor, explores how holy sites were transformed into political symbols. Academic in tone, this unusual study offers a new perspective on a still roiling dispute. (Duke Univ., $18.95 paper 248p ISBN 0-8223-2814-3; Feb.)

Artists Articulate

Those familiar with artist Damien Hirst's preserved cows and medical vérité exhibits of human skeletons and pickled fetuses won't be surprised to learn that at age 16 he snuck into a morgue to have his picture taken with a severed head. These and other revelations of early life come out in On the Way to Work, a book-length interview with the controversial Young British Artist conducted by Whitbread-winning novelist Gordon Burn. Modeled loosely on John Lennon's conversations with Rolling Stone's Jan Wenner, the book offers Hirst's lively, irreverent takes on Francis Bacon, McDonald's burgers, Freud, the notorious Brooklyn Museum Show and, of course, his art. (Universe, $49.95 232p ISBN 0-7893-0664-6; Jan.)

Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Phillip Guston, Jasper Johns and many other luminaries of postwar 20th-century art were part of a celebrated series of interviews British art critic David Sylvester (Looking at Giacometti) recorded for the BBC during the 1960s. Transcribed, edited and collected here as Interviews with American Artists (along with a handful of more recent interviews with Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, Cy Twombly, and others), the interviews transport readers back to a moment of boundless artistic confidence and possibility. (Yale, $34.95 400p ISBN 0-300-09204-0; Jan.)

Taking on "Captain Shit and Other Allegories of Black Stardom," Performance artist and cultural theorist Coco Fusco (English Is Broken Here) presents The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings, a series of meditations on and interviews with artists like Chris Offili (the captain himself) and Tracey Moffatt; dialogues on "Stuff" including wry instructions on how to rhumba ("Fantástico, OK—let's add the shoulders!"); essays about her own performances; and ruminations on sex workers in Cuba and Mexican art in the age of free trade. Uniting this various collection is Fusco's provocative, sharp-tongued commentary on the relationship between art and the daily, bodily experiences of formerly colonized peoples. (Routledge, $22.95 paper 252p ISBN 0-415-25174-5; Feb.)

Up and Out

The title and subtitle of Come Out Fighting: A Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation may appear misleading, for the collection features essays not only by gay rights leaders (Adrienne Rich, Harvey Milk, etc.) but by fellow travelers (Justice Harry Blackmun), ambivalents (Freud, Havelock Ellis) and downright adversaries (William F. Buckley Jr.). In short, these are the works that, for better or for worse, galvanized the liberation movement. Collected by The Advocate correspondent Chris Bull, some selections are predictable, but many, like Michael Bronski's ("The Liberation of Pleasure") or David Wojnarowicz's, are not—this is probably the only time Milk, Blackmun, Buckley and Audre Lorde will appear together in one anthology. (Thunder's Mouth, $17.95 paper 352p ISBN 1-56025-325-8; Jan.)

In No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships, University of Manitoba women's studies professor Janice Ristock presents one of the first studies of lesbian domestic violence. Basing her work on interviews with victims and social workers, she evaluates firsthand testimony, piecing together how and why lesbian relationships become violent and how the medical and criminal justice systems react when they do. The book concludes with suggestions for battered individuals and for wider community action. (Routledge, $21.95 paper 224p ISBN 0-415-92946-6; Feb.)

In this era of Ellen and Will and Grace, it's hard to remember that only half a century ago gays could not appear on screen unless they were killed or otherwise punished by the end of the film. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America looks at the mass media's relationship to homosexuality from mid-century to the present day. Communications professor Larry Gross at the Annenberg School shows how Stonewall, the AIDS epidemic and the much-vaunted purchasing power of '90s "guppies" have influence the media representation of gays. (Columbia Univ., $49.95 320p ISBN 0-231-11952-6; Feb.)

Correction: In PW's Nov. 26 review of Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres's The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Guinier's son, who is quoted, was misidentified. He is black.