If possible, I would gift this movie to everyone I know.

Part documentary, part narrative drama, and part visual hallucinogen, this is a film that blows the door off the metaphysical closet. Everyday folks are realizing that they are not alone in contemplating the nature of reality, exploring the convergence of science and spirituality, and yearning for something more to the human experience.

Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artifacts proving that humans like us have existed for millions of years. Mainstream science, however, has suppressed these facts. Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a knowledge filter, giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect.

Deloria, one of the most outspoken Native American voices of the century, is back this time to take on the scientists. Demonstrating that a theory is just that until it has been solidly proved, the author of Custer Died for Your Sins (Univ. of Oklahoma, 1988) takes the scientific community to task for insisting on uniformity of opinion within academia while neglecting Native oral traditions about such events as the peopling of the Western Hemisphere and the disappearance of the giant animals of the Pleistocene era. While many will challenge Deloria's arguments, the author's insistence that scientists investigate non-Western knowledge in their search for the truth echoes a cry heard through Native American communities. An important addition to all collections.?Mary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib., N.Y. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--

Each season of the year brings its own teachings and gifts and by forging a partnership of mind, heart, spirit, and body, the seeker may receive those gifts and awaken to a spirit of place that is indigenous to the land and accessible to all. Arranged to follow the four seasons of the year, The Spirit of Place offers an annual cycle of ideas and ceremonies for integrating all aspects of awareness. Visualizations and prayers focus the mind; acknowledging totems and allies strengthens the will; meditations centers the spirit; and heightened intuition opens the heart to change and acceptance. The practices suggested here, brought into daily application, align the reader in a deeper relationship with life's sacred matrix of plants, animals, and minerals sharing our world. A resource guide, with its extensive descriptions of birds, stones, animals, herbs, and trees, offers unique and practical information and advice for strengthening alliances with nature's totems. Respectful of Native American ways, the author draws on those and other earth-oriented traditions to create an eclectic yet truly authentic spiritual practice that relies on a direct experience of the interrelatedness of all life.

Lovelock readily admits that the book serves more to promote the dialog about our planet as a living, breathing whole and to share key discoveries that support his concept. (He states in the Preface that his follow-on book, "The Ages of Gaia" aims to build the scientific argument to the Gaia theory.)

Is a wonderful example of instrumentalism. Instrumentalism, briefly, is the idea that theories about phenomena, insofar as they depart from simply recounting the phenomena in a dry manner, are interchangeable. That is, there are a multitude of possible theories for the metaphysics "behind" any observed event, and even allowing Occam's Razor (which is just a convention, not a fact, so we need not allow it-it could be misleading), any of them that accounts for the observed event is just as good as any other.

The technique of using acupressure to relieve pain has been around for 5000 years and even predates acupuncture. It is possible to learn to perform acupressure on oneself by following the well-illustrated instructions and diagrams in this book. Two clearly written chapters give the history, theory behind the technique, and some general instructions, followed by 40 chapters which cover specific disorders--acne, insomnia, shoulder tension, etc.--and how acupressure can help relieve them. There is also a glossary. Libraries that don't have other works on this subject will want this one; those that do will still want to consider this as a worthy additional purchase. - Natalie Kupferberg, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., New York Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.