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When a natural disaster occurs, the media directs the public’s attention to the key elements of disaster management and provides accounts of how effective the government is in responding to it. This study analyzed 80 reports contained in 21 stories published in three international newspapers and 35 editorial statements from 21 editorials obtained from two national papers regarding the Japanese government’s responses to the great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake. Issue clusters for different levels of government responding to the crisis were identified. The lack of systematic reactions to the crisis provoked the most media scrutiny. The legitimacy of the government’s behaviors in this area were perceived more negatively by the media than were the inappropriate behavior of elected officials or the lack of care expressed towards the victims by local officials.

While there is considerable evidence supporting the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment, the relationship between the antecedents of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and career commitment are not clearly understood. This study seeks to clarify whether these antecedents have an effect independent of job satisfaction on career commitment or whether these antecedents are mediated by job satisfaction.

In total, 2,799 questionnaires were mailed out to members of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). The responses received were 643 (22.9 percent) and after eliminating retirees or students, a sample of 456 respondents currently employed in the health care industry was obtained. Path analysis was conducted to test the hypothetical relationships between work situation, career experiences and career commitment.

It was found that job satisfaction mediated the influences of job tenure and career pattern on career commitment. Job satisfaction partially mediated the influences of perceived job security and one's satisfaction with career on career commitment. Both of these measures had a direct influence on career commitment. Career experience such as sector change was also positively associated with career commitment.

While the research offers some insights into the factors affecting the career commitment of health care executives, the sample was limited to respondents who were members of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and thus may not represent the views of all managers in the health care sector.

To retain high‐valued health care workers it is important that an organization has a work environment that enhances their commitment to their occupation as well as their careers.

This study clarifies the influence of job satisfaction on the career commitment of health care managers during a very dynamic period.

This brief narrative seeks to capture the 12-year relationship between the author and V. LeRoy Nash, who at 94 has been the oldest death row prisoner in the United States since 1996. LeRoy's life includes many killings, and over 71 years in prison, before Johnson and Nash developed this unique father–son love relationship.

Containing as it does many of the finest books published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Garrison Library of Gibraltar is no ordinary services' library. Its founding was due to that perceptive Captain (later Colonel) John Drinkwater, author of one of the most famous histories of the Great Siege of Gibraltar which lasted from 1779–1783, the History of the late siege (Spilsbury, 1785). Having suffered from a lack of reading material during the siege, Colonel Drinkwater saw the need for a good circulating library and club as a means of saving the officers of the garrison from “having their minds enervated and vitiated by dissipitation”. His appeal for books, shortly after the seige, attracted nearly 500 gifts which enabled the library to open pending the arrival of the 674 volumes on order from London, there being no bookshop in Gibraltar at that time.

The winter 1991 issue of Reference Services Review featured an annotated bibliography of literature on Christopher Columbus from 1970 to 1989. That literature covered such topics as Columbus' ancestry, heraldry, and the locations of both his American landfall and burial site. This annotated checklist focuses mainly on Columbus' legacy, on works that offer a dissenting point of view from most previous writings about Columbus (and on works that react to the dissenters), on material written by Native American and other non‐European authors, and on materials published by small and noncommercial presses.

“I LOVE the great despisers,” said Nietzsche, “for they are the great adorers.” If my attitude towards Mr. Squire, Mr. MacCarthy and the other grandees of contemporary criticism appears to be lacking in respect, let me, at the outset, give as my explanation the fact that I happen to cherish good criticism and am grieved to see the art falling into disrepute. For no interested observer can fail to be impressed with the circumstance that the delicate process of literary criticism, in latterday hands, is fast becoming tarnished and stale. Gosse and Walkley, whatever their limitations, were the last of a noble line; passing from us, they left, so far as I can see, no inheritors of their tradition. This is a serious loss. For criticism, despite Whistler's scoffs, may be necessary if the arts are to exercise their maximum influence upon the mind of the nation. Art is an apocalypse; but without the intercession of the critic the artist, so far as the majority of mankind is concerned, is a Memnon casting his music upon the desert. Moreover, criticism, at its best, has an independent and quite precious value of its own. “The adventures of the soul among masterpieces”—the definition may be jejune, but it holds at least a kernel of truth. We are not, perhaps, considering the full implications of the phrase, an artistic nation. The fates have denied us that integrality, that great continuity of achievement which distinguishes the literature of, say, France and Russia. But we have had our moments. We can point to periods of an intense national flowering of the impulse. And if we can boast of no critic with the gesture, the amplitude of a Taine, “we have at least a perceptible if frequently broken lineage of good criticism. Dryden, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Gosse: these were, in the finest sense of the word, critics, men equipped with rich sensibilities and with minds that waxed radiant at the contact of literature: interpreters, illuminators, in whom criticism was itself a centre of creativity. And now?

THE scientist and philosopher will tell us that the mind of man cannot in a lifetime fully grasp and understand any one subject. Consequently it is unreasonable to expect that the librarian—who, in spite of popular belief, is but man—can have a complete understanding of every department of knowledge relative to his work. He must, in common with his fellows in other callings, content himself with a more or less general professional knowledge, and may specialize, if he be so disposed, in certain branches of that knowledge. The more restricted this particular knowledge is, the greater will be its value from a specialistic point of view.

Birding, the active seeking out and identification of birds, is a wide‐spread and fast growing avocation on this continent, and indeed throughout the world. Jon Rickert's A Guide to North American Bird Clubs lists 17 national/continental organizations for both professional ornithologists and amateur birders and 844 state, provincial, and local associations. In addition, there are those legions of “unorganized” bird watchers and occasional, inquisitive discoverers of backyard birds. Members of this diverse congregation of birders have at least one thing in common — the need for a reliable identification tool enabling them to correctly label the just‐seen, unfamiliar bird. A field guide is just such a tool.