The Ways of the World

There are two basic types of relationships, explains Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade) in The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life. The "dominator model" is based on intimidation, while the "partnership model" is based on mutual respect. Most people have some of each in their lives, and Eisler explains how to effectively adopt partnership models for all relationships, whether with family, colleagues, the "international community" or with nature. Written in a simple, no-nonsense style, Eisler's book offers a new paradigm for looking at the way we interact with the world around us. (New World Library, $22.95 272p ISBN 1-57731-178-7; Mar. 15)

New technology—particularly computer software and the internet—has transformed the relationship between consumers and producers, yet marketing is still handled in the same old ways, argues marketing guru and McKenna Group chairman Regis McKenna (Real Time). Total Access: Giving Customers What They Want in an Anytime, Anywhere World, McKenna shows marketers and business owners how they can use today's software and gadgetry to reach their customer base in novel and more effective ways. He also contends that marketing firms and departments will have to be reconceived, with more employees and resources dedicated to technology development. (Harvard Business School, $27.50 256p ISBN 1-57851-244-1; Mar. 29)

Veteran Wall Street Journal career columnist Hal Lancaster shows readers how to advance their careers in the face of all kinds of professional obstacles in Promoting Yourself: 52 Lessons for Getting to the Top... and Staying There. Lancaster's brisk, straightforward advice covers every step of one's career, from the initial interview to the buyout. He offers counsel on managing hostile employees, benefiting from a company crisis, making mid-career changes and working with a nutty boss, as well as special situations like free agency, working from home and turning a hobby into a career. (Simon & Schuster/Wall Street Journal, $24 240p ISBN 0-7432-1363-7; Feb. 13)

Women Warriors

For two years after the Civil War, a former slave named Cathy Williams disguised herself as a man and served in one of the all-black army units formed after the war. Cathy Williams: From Slave to Buffalo Soldier describes her unlikely story, piecing together what written records she and her unit left behind. Author Phillip Thomas Tucker, a historian for the U.S. Air Force, traces the activity of her company and speculates on the combination of luck and skill that kept Williams from being discovered—in spite of frequent medical treatments—until she finally decided to reveal her own identity. (Stackpole, $26.95 256p ISBN 0-8117-0340-1; Feb.)

Few remember that over 12,000 women served in the U.S. Navy and Marines during World War I, the first time those branches allowed females to enlist. In The First, the Few, the Forgotten: Navy and Marine Corps Women in World War I, Jean Ebbert, a Navy Times columnist, and Marie-Beth Hall, an editor and writer at the Department of Energy, have painstakingly researched every aspect of these women's involvement in the war. While most were listed officially as clerical workers, they actually drove trucks, made munitions, operated switchboards and undertook many of the same tasks as men. (Naval Institute, $29.95 250p ISBN 1-55750-203-X; Feb.)

A different kind of "she" joined the navy in 1940: the British luxury liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were converted to warships. Daniel Allen Butler's (Unsinkable) account of the two ships, Warrior Queens: RMSQueen Maryand RMSQueen Elizabethin the Second World War offers a unique perspective on WWII naval history. Their cocktail bars stocked with medical supplies, their public rooms lined with dozens of sleeping bunks, the two vessels were operated jointly by the U.S. Navy and the British Admiralty, and ended up logging over a million nautical miles. (Stackpole, $26.95 224p ISBN 0-8117-1855-7; Feb.)

Speaking Out

Over his 50 years as a civil rights activist, pastor and politician, Dr. Horace Patterson has had his tires slashed, his dog poisoned and his life threatened. He has also been reelected as city councilman of Talladega, Ala., a city with a white majority. In his memoir, Unbroken and Unbound, Patterson, an unapologetic integrationist, recalls the turmoil of activist life, as well as the improvement in race relations he's witnessed in Talladega over the last few decades. Describing picket lines and hotly contested school board elections, Patterson shows how national controversies reverberate in the neighborhoods and schoolyards of individual towns. (NewSouth, $17.95 paper 214p ISBN 1-58838-055-6; Feb.)

Walter Mosely, Kobe Bryant, Forest Whitaker and Calvin Butts are among the nearly 100 men whose reflections are gathered in Black Men: In Their Own Words. Edited by Essence Books director Patricia Mignon Hinds with Essence magazine editorial director Susan L. Taylor, the book is organized by subjects like "Family," "Success," "Passion," and "Manhood," with testimonies by prominent black men on each topic. Johnnie Cochran recalls how Thurgood Marshall inspired his career choice. Gordon Parks, author, musician and the first black photographer for Life and Vogue, talks about using his camera as a "divining rod" to find people who needed help and couldn't speak up for themselves. (Crown/Essence Books, $30 252p ISBN 0-609-60366-3; Apr.)

"If a black person gets in trouble, he calls out two names, Jesus and the NAACP," said Washington, D.C., radio talk show host Joe Madison. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of NAACP lawyers successfully arguing the Brown v. Board of Education case, former teacher and education consultant Janet Cheatham Bell has put together Till Victory is Won: Famous Black Quotations From the NAACP. The voices in this book form a who's who of 20th-century black America. George Washington Carver, Jackie Robinson, Madam C. J. Walker and many others are quoted on the subjects of civil rights, educational achievement and economic and political power. (Pocket, $14 192p ISBN 0-7434-2825-0; Feb.)

Of This Earth?

Fifty years of UFO sightings and alien obsession is amusingly documented in Shockingly Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist. The author of this memoir-cum-encyclopedia of ufology is James W. Moseley (UFO Crash Secrets at Wright Patterson Air Force Base), chairman of the National UFO Conference. He's been researching UFO sightings since 1953 (when he collected testimony about UFOs from Harry Truman, among others) and is less interested in the UFOs themselves than in the nutty antics of the people who believe in them. The book is written with Karl T. Pflock, a former CIA officer who tracked UFO reports and wrote an investigation of the Roswell incident. (Prometheus, $25 360p ISBN 1-57392-991-3; Mar.)

The depiction of aliens in pop culture has its roots in Seneca's Agamemnon, medieval European religious painting and Mexican images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, among other artistic and literary works, argues New Mexico State University art history professor John F. Moffitt. His scholarly study, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Culture is a comprehensive look at the contemporary iconography of aliens, from Spielberg's E.T. to the ubiquitous pointy-chinned creatures with enormous cat eyes. Moffitt's book is accessibly written and should entertain anyone fascinated by—not to mention intimately acquainted with—alternate life forms. (Prometheus, $30 535p ISBN 1-57392-990-5; Apr.)

April Publication

How to reconcile postmodern theories with today's clinical psychoanalysis is the overarching concern of Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis, a collection of scholarly essays edited by practicing psychoanalysts Susan Fairfield, Lynne Layton and Carolyn Stack. The essays cover a variety of subjects, from a case of satanism to the depression that accompanies racial assimilation, focusing on the ways that these cases can be approached with postmodern notions of an unstable, constantly shifting self in mind. While the entries are primarily academic, most avoid jargon and are accessible to those with an interest in psychotherapy. (Other Press, $30 paper 408p ISBN 1-892746-85-9)