Walter Holland

The fourth book of poetry by this New York City poet, Walter Holland's Reconstruction is a work of poetic reconciliation with his boyhood in Lynchburg, Virginia. Weaving both vivid lyric language into these short narrative poems, Holland reconstructs a flawed yet nostalgic past. Uprooted northerners, Holland, his sisters, and his parents sought the bucolic charm and unfettered economic opportunity of 1950s Virginia. But boyhood brought with it a complex emotional and psychological complicity with the perverse cultural mores and institutionalized racism of the south. White, privileged, and sexually conflicted, Holland, who was drawn to the arts, negotiated a world of natural beauty and solitary retreat. His mother struggled with depression. His father, a doctor, kept true to the stoic virtues of fifties masculinity. Middle-class and affluent, Holland went to ballroom lessons, piano lessons, lived in a home attended to by a maid, and grew into a society, on the one hand as an outsider-northern born, Catholic, liberally inclined, studying modern dance and performing in community theater-and on the other felt obliged upon to take a date to her debutante party, attend the cotillions, hunt on one occasion, and obediently comply with the rules of segregation. Holland's poems weave the rural landscape of Virginia and its distinct country local with the burgeoning arrival of suburbanization and corporate industrialization in the late fifties. He gives a sense of the swift transition from the old south to the New South. He layers his poems on top of the brutal remains of the Civil War, the daily evidence of the Jim Crowe south, the rotting foundations of tobacco shacks, segregated neighborhoods, and aged downtown businesses. He describes the prosperity of the sixties, a race riot at his high school, the institutionalization of his mother for shock-treatments, and the travel-hungry father who circles the globe. Above all these are poems that will evoke the beauty of a remembered past and its many illusory and problematic realities.

First published in 1999, this volume recognises that the role and status of public health in Europe has again become increasingly recognized and features contributions on various nations within the European Community. This is not only in individual countries but also in the policies of the European Union as exemplified in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties. This book is a critical account of the present structures and policies of member countries and how policies have evolved within the European Commission. It describes both possible models and needs and contrasts these with the current legislative framework. It thus serves the needs of both practitioners, policy makers, policy analysts and students interested in public health and social policy developments.

First published in 1999, this volume recognises that the role and status of public health in Europe has again become increasingly recognized and features contributions on various nations within the European Community. This is not only in individual countries but also in the policies of the European Union as exemplified in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties. This book is a critical account of the present structures and policies of member countries and how policies have evolved within the European Commission. It describes both possible models and needs and contrasts these with the current legislative framework. It thus serves the needs of both practitioners, policy makers, policy analysts and students interested in public health and social policy developments.

The memoir of an unusually lucky 84-year-old Englishman.

Twenty years after its release, Phish’s double-CD collection A Live One has something rare and precious going for it: it still doesn’t sound like anybody else. Oversized, perverse, requiring an unusual amount of listener background knowledge? Yes to all. Yet the collective improvisations it captures, unprecedentedly coherent yet freewheeling and open-ended, are unique in rock ‘n’ roll. This book considers the music and moment of Phish's ecstatically inventive 1995 live document, a mix of weirdo acid-psych, ambient moonscapes, vaudevillian Americana, and riotous arena-rock energy, all filtered through bandleader Trey Anastasio's screwball compositional sensibility and the band’s idiosyncratic approach to spontaneous group creativity. It places Phish and their fandom in historical and cultural context, and picks apart the mechanics of their extended group jams. And it examines the mystery of how a quartet of nice boys from Burlington, VT could have been, all at once, one of America’s biggest touring acts and one of its best-kept secrets.

This insightful book describes how Health Services Research (HSR) can be developed and used to evaluate, advance and improve all aspects of health services. It demonstrates the need for good HSR to avoid the continuation or development of ineffective or cost-inefficient services. Drawing on his extensive personal experience in the development of HSR, Walter Holland provides examples from the US and the UK to illustrate important lessons for the future improvement of health services. Taking a distinctive approach to describing the purposes and activities of HSR, the book focuses on the significance of close collaboration with those responsible for the delivery and decisions of health policy. The major message is the importance of heeding the findings of HSR so as to develop evidence-based health policy, and to understand and influence the actions of health professionals, managers and politicians. Holland strongly advocates greater use of HSR and emphasizes its ability to provide vital evidence on how to improve health services. This highly informative and detailed book will strongly appeal to health service researchers, public health practitioners, clinicians, health-service managers, administrators and health policymakers.