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| Volume I, Issue 3 This preholiday newsletter is written in the hope that we will all find a little time over the holidays to curl up in front of a fire (or in a deck chair) with a good book. Here's to the quiet joy of reading!! Read on to find out how to share the love of reading with your students, in a free book from a bestselling author on the subject.
Berkshire Publishing admires the work of best-selling author and English teacher Mary Leonhardt and is delighted to convey her offer of a free copy of How to Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired. This book, like her many books about how to get kids reading and writing, is full of practical tips. The world needs enthusiastic readers and literacy matters a whole lot to us as publishers and parents, as it does to all teachers and librarians. It matters to society: we need citizens who can think, write, and speak with clarity and understanding! To get your own copy of How to Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired, just send $1.50, to cover postage and envelope, to Devens House Press, 41 Walnut Street, Devens, MA 01434.
By the way, your school or town librarian is cordially invited to visit us at the Berkshire stand (#1529) at Midwinter ALA in Boston. Mary will be signing and giving away book on Saturday 15 January from 2.30-4.30. We'll also have free fun reading lists, one related to World History! 2. The Golden Bough and Point of ViewBy David Levinson, a cultural anthropologist who served as vice president of Yale's Human Relations Area Files, president of Berkshire Publishing and the only non-historian editor of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is one of the most influential anthropological works ever written. It is a comparative anthropological and historical survey of religion, magic, and folklore. First published in two volumes in 1890, it was expanded to 12 volumes in 1915 and then released in a single volume condensed edition in 1922. The 1922 edition remains in print and is available free online though Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia. The book had an enormous influence on 20th century literary figures including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Sylvia Plath, and Joseph Campbell. A dip into The Golden Bough helps us understand how social scientists in the 20th century came to see and explain the modern world. Frazer gathered information through surveys sent with world travelers and provides a vast amount of information about the cultures of the world. Especially relevant to world history teaching, Frazer was path-breaking in his exploration of religion as a cultural institution. He compares different societies and different religions, and searched for commonalities across religions and cultures. Frazer’s work is in the broad tradition of world history as he attempted to increase understanding of the human story through study of the ways of life of all peoples in all places at all times. Not surprisingly, Frazer made many assumptions and came to conclusions now rejected by historians and anthropologists. These include his linear notion of progress, his occasional use of untrustworthy information, and his placing too much stress on similarities across cultures. Like some anthropologists (and other scholars), he often found data that supported his preconceptions. Chapter 3, on Sympathetic Magic, is especially useful. Students can quickly relate to Frazer’s conclusions, set out in the first few paragraphs, about behaviors we call superstitions today. This reading will help them develop an appreciation for a form of religious belief common to all peoples. Visit The Golden Bough. Related articles in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History include “Comparative History” (by R. Bin Wong of UCLA), “Comparative Ethnography” (by David Levinson), and the “Religion – Overview” (by Martin E. Marty, University of Chicago). 3. Wearing World History
The Berkshire Publishing Shop is now open, offering sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and more bearing original artwork and quotations related to the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. We're selling these at only fractionally over cost as a way to make the wonderful original cover art available to teachers who want to wear the subject they love. The design you see here bears the words: "The whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge – was no more than a blink of the Earth Women’s eye.”--Arundhati Roy (1960-) 4. Ordering the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World HistoryBooklist magazine EDITORS' CHOICE for 2004! 
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