“I love Christmas, that Muslim holiday.” (K. Biebl) In 1926, the communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) travelled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In his texts, poetic and often comic, both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen disorientingly anew, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.” On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle takes the reader on a journey crisscrossing the poet’s life and work, with particular attention to his travel writing and his dreams and memories of travel, as they mirror the book author’s own life experience as a Czech scholar of Indonesia living in island Southeast Asia. Biebl’s poetry and travels are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, the attitudes to colonial/social injustice, and the representation of otherness in Czech literary and visual imagination, beyond Biebl’s times. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, the book moves scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new ground. Jan Mrázek grew up in Czechoslovakia and lives on an island in the Malay Archipelago. He is Associate Professor in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and has published widely on Indonesia, seafaring, and Czech travel writing.

Excerpts from and citations to reviews of more than 8,000 books each year, drawn from coverage of 109 publications. Book Review Digest provides citations to and excerpts of reviews of current juvenile and adult fiction and nonfiction in the English language. Reviews of the following types of books are excluded: government publications, textbooks, and technical books in the sciences and law. Reviews of books on science for the general reader, however, are included. The reviews originate in a group of selected periodicals in the humanities, social sciences, and general science published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. - Publisher.

Americans' health improved dramatically over the twentieth century. Public health programs for disease and injury prevention were responsible for much of this advance. Over the century, America's public health system grew dramatically, employing science and political authority in response to an increasing array of health problems. As the disease burden of the old scourges of infection, perinatal mortality, and dietary deficiencies began to lift, public health's mandate expanded to take on new health threats, such as those resulting from a changing workplace, the rise of the automobile, and chronic and complex conditions caused by smoking, diet and other lifestyle and environmental factors. Public health measures almost always occur on contested ground; accordingly, controversies and recriminations over past failures often persist. In contrast, public health's many successes, even the imperfect ones, become part of the fabric of everyday life, a fact already apparent early in the last century, when C.E.A. Winslow reminded his peers that the lives saved and healthy years extended were the "silent victories" of public health. In its exploration of ten major public health issues addressed in the 20th century, Silent Victories takes a unique approach: for each issue, leading scientists in the field trace the discoveries, practices and programs that reduced morbidity and mortality from disease and injury, and an accompanying chapter by a historian or social scientist highlights key moments or conflicts that shaped public health action on that issue. The book concludes with a look toward the challenges public health must face in the future. Silent Victories reveals the lessons of history in a format designed to appeal to students, health professionals and the public seeking to understand how public health advanced the country's health in the 20th century, and the challenges to protecting health in the future.