This is a gathering of poetry and antique photographs in search of the healing power of the mother. It takes a hard look at the enormous world consequence of diminishing her life force, which is the healing and nurturing part of humanity. There are poems from Bright’s work as an educator and poems that strip bare institutionalized child abuse. There are poems about the Heartland, America, in the ’50s and ’60s and poems about how the Mothers hold our lives together with love, creating relationship–the thread of life.

“Susan digs down to the dirt to make you see the dark realities of womankind’s struggles from pre-civilization to present day, which I call The Destructive Era. Images she fills us with: raising our children in a violent world; the storms of the raging Earth Mother; keeping track of our planetary brothers and the newest forms of their ideology; women’s rights or shall I say lack of them; how what was happening 100 years ago was woven with misery, (for misery is always our shadow), the timelessness of racism . . This book is not to be missed and I sincerely mean it.”

Even in the flattest landscape there are passes where the road first climbs to a peak and then descends into a new valley. Most of these passes are simply topography with little or no difference in climate, language, or culture between the valleys on either side. But some passes are different: they are true divides. History too knows such divides. Once these divides have been crossed, the social and political landscape changes; the social and political climate is different, and so is the social and political language. Some time between 1965 and 1973 we passed over such a divide and entered “the next century.”

Challenging, insightful, and provocative, Peter Drucker’s The New Realities anticipates the central issues of a rapidly changing world. When it was initially published, in 1989, some reviewers mistakenly thought The New Realities was a book about the future, or in other words, a series of predictions. But, as indicated in the title, the book discusses realities. Drucker argues that events of the next thirty to forty years, or even further on, had already largely been defined by events of the previous half-century. Thus, Drucker discusses episodes in world history that had not yet happened at the time of the book’s initial publication, such as: the archaism of the hope for “salvation by society” in “The End of FDR’s America”; the democratization of the Soviet Union in “When the Russian Empire is Gone”; the technology boom of the 1990s in “The Information-Based Organization”; and the evolution of management in “Management as Social Function and Liberal Art.”

Graced with a new preface by the author that discusses both reactions to the original publication of the book and how important it is for decision-makers to consider the past and present when planning for the future, The New Realities is mandatory reading for understanding politics, government, the economy, information technology, and business in an ever-changing world.