This book is a fresh and humorous way to look at the responsibilities we have to give to others, as well as the responsibility we must show in taking from others. No matter what titles we hold, parent, teacher, friend, sibling, etc., we have a responsibility to our fellow man, as the Bible teaches us.

This is the first major effort in twenty years to reassess the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne.Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers.Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that ""looms like a grand hooded phantom"" over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence - Hawthorne's on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville's on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances - are also discussed. The other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville's times.Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

This quite humorous book was written for my daughter, ROSE, so she may learn that life's teachings sometimes come from the most unlikely of sources, and they don't cost a penny to obtain. I've broken this book up into two parts: first, a desciption of some of those who influenced my life, and then second, some real funny (and perhaps, some not too funny) stories about growing up in the Bronx, in the '60's. I'm Cold.Put On a Sweater, was a favorite adage of my mom, and I've since learned that it's sometimes just the easiest way to get your thought (or demand) across. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it.