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AT THE END OF RIDGE ROAD by Joseph Bruchac '64 (Milkweed Editions). “Some circles are so large that you have to walk a long distance before you realize that you're returning to the place where it all began,” Bruchac writes. His memoir moves full circle from his childhood near Saratoga Springs, New York, to his first poetry at Cornell to teaching in West Africa and back to his grandfather's house. Storyteller, novelist, poet, and editor of the Greenfield Review Press, Bruchac shows how the stories of his Abenaki ancestors and other Native Americans can teach us lessons in social justice and responsibility to place, and remind us that we are meant to be keepers of the earth.

SIGNING SMART WITH BABIES AND TODDLERS by Michelle E. Anthony and Reyna Lindert '94 (St. Martin's Griffin). By using sign language to communicate with a hearing child, parents can eliminate much of the frustration and missed communication that comes as children's speech develops. Signing children eighteen months old know an average of seventy-nine signs and 105 spoken words, compared to the developmental norm of ten to fifteen words. Developmental psychologists Anthony and Lindert show how signing brings the added benefits of building language skills and enhancing closeness.

EMPIRE OF NATIONS by Francine Hirsch '89 (Cornell University Press). Before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they advocated national selfdetermination for all peoples in the Russian Empire. But when the Bolsheviks were faced with building the Soviet Union, they reconciled their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold onto as much territory and as many resources as possible. Hirsch, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin,Madison, examines how ethnographers from the former tsarist regime conducted censuses, drew up internal borders, and helped shape the formation of the Soviet state.

RESPONSIBLE MEN by Edward Schwarzschild '86 (Algonquin). In Schwarzschild's debut novel, Max Wolinsky, a salesman and small-time swindler, returns to Philadelphia on the eve of his son's bar mitzvah in an attempt to be a good father and son. As he tries to pull off one last scam to help out his father and uncle, he meets Estelle, a woman who just might keep him honest.

THE LION OF ST. MARK by Thomas Quinn '73 (St.Martin's Press). This historical novel begins in 1452, one year before the fall of Constantinople, as two powerful Venetian noble families vie for supremacy. The conflict between Captain Giovanni Soranzo and volunteer marine commander Antonio Ziani plays out against the backdrop of Venice's fifteenth-century war against the Ottoman Turks, who are intent on crushing the city's power and wealth. Both men must learn to put aside their animosity when their republic's survival is at stake.

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