At once a travel book, autobiographical novel and free-style historical survey, "News of the Swimmer Reaches the Shore" begins with its narrator suspended in the salty, buoyant waters of the Mediterranean. Not only is the book a paean to the south of France, it is a history of things that explode under water, taking the reader by way of the trenches of World War One and the Rainbow Warrior bombing to the writer's experiences of diving off Menton. Adrift on an ocean of art history, literature and music, the book introduces a cast of underwater characters including Jacques Cousteau, Dominique Prieur, Henri Matisse and the naked river-swimming Mother Aubert, a 19th century nun who presents something of a role-model for the narrator as he negotiates various streams of thought.

This important treatise reviews the latest clinical models for working with developmental disability and behavioral problems. In the first section contributions explore the causes and nature of behavior problems among people with physical, learning, language, and sensory disabilities, and such specific conditions as epilepsy and acquired brain damage, while those in the second section describe the assessment approaches for evaluating these behaviors. The third section covers treatment strategies emphasizing the importance of an eclectic approach. The contributors, all acknowledged experts in their fields of pediatrics, psychology, and psychiatry, provide a comprehensive overview of this set of major challenges, indicating the importance of auditory detection, understanding, measurement, and treatment.

It has long been recognized that people with identifiable congenital causes of developmental disabilities display peculiar patterns of behavior and temperament. An explosion of new information in the field of so-called behavioral genetics has precipitated a need for a book describing behaviorial phenotypes. The book consists of three parts: Part I opens with an account of the evolution of behaviorial genetics in developmental disability. The second part covers measurement and research methodology and includes chapters on various types of self-injurious behavior that occur in different phenotypes and a chapter on Fragile X--a model for inquiry into behavioral phenotypes. The sections on genetic analysis are particularly useful to clinicians who are unfamiliar with contemporary genetic techniques. Part III summarizes behavioral phenotypes of over thirty biologically distinct conditions.

"Days Beside Water" is an ideal introduction to the poetry of Gregory O'Brien, one of the best younger writers (and artists) of New Zealand. The poems are set where sea, land and sky, past, present and future, meet in different lights and moods. There are lyrics, comic interludes, an imagined account of the marriage of Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missioner. The theme of spiritual marriage - a union of clements in imaginary or historical contexts - recurs in two sequences: an invented life of the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, and "The Milk Horse", about a foundling and the Mother Superior of an orphanage. The poems capture the permanent value in moments and emotions, chiefly love. O'Brien's involvement with the graphic arts and add richness to his imagery.