Jean Barr opens the antique chest she inherited from her great-great-uncle Alexander and unravels the strands of his life as an evangelical Presbyterian minister in late nineteenth century Italy, unpacking the cover-ups in Britain's history of Empire, and bringing to light the ingenious but ordinary ways in which a handful of families, even today, continue to shore up their wealth. She uncovers a series of marriages that placed Alexander within shouting distance of a network of powerful families stretching over generations, families whose staying power has been rooted in hoarding and passing on land and capital. This is the backdrop to Alexander's extraordinary life. It enabled him to flourish in Italy and, in his final years, to become a cheerleader for a dictator. The Legacy: A Memoir is a telling of family history as world history.

While knowledge can be liberating, what counts as knowledge is contestable. Drawing on her experience in adult education, research and feminist theory and practice, Jean Barr mounts a radical challenge to current orthodoxies in adult learning and continuing education and proposes a programme of research which is geared to articulating urgent problems with people other than academics. Running through the book is the recognition that methodology underpins all theory-making. Questions of whom we hear, whom we address and how, are key methodological, epistemological and political issues. How these questions are answered is crucial to the kind of theory or knowledge which is produced. The guiding metaphor is that of 'healing the breach' between 'words and things' and between forms of knowledge which are usually separated in our culture: cerebral and emotional understanding; literary and scientific knowledge; knowledge developed 'from above' or 'from below'. "Liberating knowledge" will appeal to those interested in a radical and democratising education which reaches beyond the academy. It is particularly relevant to participants and tutors of women's studies who wish to cross the boundaries between arts, social science and natural science, and to those involved in community-based adult education.

Do you enjoy a chronicle of the transformation of a small Southern town girl into adulthood? Interested in spirituality,Christianity, and philosophy from a both a child's perspective and a median aged Southern woman? Then you definitely want to read this. The 1960's poetry are written from a young teen's viewpoint which is simple, yet profound. A little girl muses about the meaning of life and talks to her confidant doll in "Petula". "The Almond Tree and the Austrailian Pine" is from the "Still Searching" 1970's section. In this poem, two trees in are personified in a conversation with loneliness and hopefulness as its themes. "Losing Me, Finding God" from the 1980's contains "The Process". "Sift me through your sifter, Lord. Grind me in your mill, Mix me in your mixer, Lord Until I know your will." But "Complaints" in the author's opinion is the most well written of all the 80's poetry. Read about the heartbreak of divorce and subsequent renewal in "Empty Spaces, Empty Places" from the 1990's section. But the author believes her best work is in the millennium section. It's here where she writes about a middle aged housewife's frustration over perceived death of dreams in "Frostbitten Dreams". And "A Fine Line We Walk","Water Under the Bridge", and "A Coal Minin' Man and a Wayward Wife" focuses on frustration of poverty in the South and the development of an almost stoic philosophical acceptance of it.