Richard Read

This volume of essays frames a comparative history of landscape painting in Australia and the United States through recent considerations of the Anthropocene, arguing that careful and deep analysis of specific nineteenth-century artworks reveals issues of environmental concern both past and present. Carefully drawn from two symposia held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth in 2016 and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne the following year, the volume includes eight essays and a conversation between artists. Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between brings together the fresh insights of scholars and artists from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and provides a resource for thinking critically about the historical, imperial, and environmental information that can be gleaned from looking closely at landscape paintings.

William Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the question, from those of William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to those of nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guérard.

The Go Between would appeal to teens between thirteen and sixteen. In the story, the protagonist is almost sixteen, his girl friend fourteen, and his sister who plays a major role in the story is thirteen. Parents may also find this book helpful as a springboard for discussion with teen children on risky sexual behavior encountered in the early teen years. Bill McCoy believes that his major winter challenge will be surviving two weeks of being the wrestling "dummy" for Blake Proper. Bill, a sophomore at Lionwood High, is committed to helping prepare his senior teammate for making a run at the state wrestling championship. On a daily basis, Bill knows he will be pummeled and pinned when the two boys work together after school on the school's wrestling mats. However, a bigger challenge for Bill arises when his thirteen-year-old sister, Diana, is accused of coercing younger brother, Jack, into an inappropriate sexual act. Bill's overbearing dictatorial father reacts to the news about his son and daughter in a characteristically irrational fashion. He refuses to allow Diana to reside any longer in the McCoy home and blocks Mrs. McCoy's desire to visit Diana when Diana is temporarily assigned by the juvenile court system to a juvenile detention center. When Diana disavows her involvement with her younger brother to Diana's court appointed therapist, Carrie Thompson, Bill becomes the go-between. He seeks help in his role of diplomatic liaison between his parents and Carrie and his sister from Susan Myers with whom he has developed a tentative, budding romance. Susan's and Bill's relationship, rapidly strengthening by their respect and concern for each other, is juxtaposed with the debilitating and gradually disintegrating relationship of Bill's father and mother. Bill's maturation is evident as he struggles to assist in the healing of his sister, to deal with his difficult father, and to manage his own romance. The Go Between also reveals both a family whose unstable relationships are exposed and shattered by the ill conceived behavior of daughter with son and the processes followed by social services in their attempts to remedy the emotional damage that results from the family's incest. The story also tactfully illuminates a current trend in the sexual experimentation of high school students.

Discovered in an illicit romance with her uncle, Megan Morgan is forced to face life without her uncle's counsel. Initially, Megan pushes back into her many school activities to fill the void but soon finds herself frustrated by several situations. Kelly Simmons, Megan's recently discovered sister-in-arms, has time only for new love, Ryan Royek. Kate, Megan's mother, is enamored with an attorney, Gus Leone, who she meets through her court-reporting endeavors. Joe Edwards, with whom Megan attended her school's Mistletoe Ball, is sidelined from dating Megan with a sport related injury. Megan must also deal with Harry Campbell, the counselor that Kate requires Megan to see for ten sessions in order to acquire insight on Megan's affair with Jack Morgan. Matters come to a head the night of the school play. Megan becomes involved in bizarre activities at a clandestine post play party at the home of the son, Paul Ugalini, of a wealthy plastic surgeon. New alliances formed at the party will later prove crucial in Megan's life. She finds Paul Ugalini and Nadine Cortez alluring and perplexing and discovers why Paul's precocious younger sister refers to the family bathroom as the "great bath". On her return home, Megan is forced to accept assistance from a person she despises and encounters two overwhelming traumatic events. Megan must draw on the help of family and friends plus her own resources to survive and overcome the aftermath of those events. Jose Saco is a pseudonym for the author who lives in rural northwest Pennsylvania. He bases much of his fiction work on his experiences when working as a high school teacher, counselor, coach, and sex abuse therapist.

In Illicit Liaisons, Volume 3, The Studio, Megan Morgan works on four basic issues. She struggles to put her relationship with her uncle in proper perspective and to relate to Uncle Jack in an appropriate fashion. She faces the complexities of dating two very different boys, Paul Ugalini and Joe Edwards, and with her own confusion of how she wishes to behave when she is on a date with any boy. To complicate her dating experiences, she discovers she has a third issue to tackle. As a consequence of being kidnapped and raped, she has developed a post traumatic reaction that emerges when her dating encounters turn sexual. Finally, her friendship with Paul's sister, Francesca, leads Megan to take on the responsibilty of assisting Francesca's friend, Emmanuelle, with drug related difficulties. This last issue begins to dictate much of Megan's experiences and behavior over the course of her tenth grade summer. Both Megan and Nadia Cortez, the free lance photographer that Megan met at Paul's unchaperoned party, build a closer bond as they try to gain insight into the child pornography ring operating somewhere around the greater Pittsburgh area, and with which Emmanuelle has become involved in order to earn money to pay for her growing drug addiction. Emmanuelle's low self esteem has made her vulnerable and she becomes entangled in the devious web cast by the adults who profit from her beauty. Even the combined efforts of the three young women, Megan, Francesca, and Nadia may not be enough to save Emmanuelle.