Books with author Joan V. Brien

Learn how Christmas is celebrated around the world by coloring 30 pictures, among them vignettes of young carolers in Great Britain, Mexican children playing under a piñata, a Swedish girl wearing a traditional crown of candles, Greek children parading with drums and triangles, and an Australian family picnicking on a beach.There are also scenes of youngsters decorating a "tree of light" in China, French children leaving shoes for Père Nöel to fill, Americans hanging stockings on the mantle and leaving Santa milk and cookies, Polish children looking at the North Star, and 21 other illustrations. Each scene appears with an informative caption.

An innovative teaching tool for beginning students and text for comparatists lacking facility in Greek, this inter­linear translation of seven related pas­sages provides an introduction to the art of Sophocles. In addition, a long introductory essay on the dimensions of the play analyzes Antigone’s androgy­nous nature. The passages chosen readily illustrate Sophocles’ diction and style and the play’s ironic structure. They also reveal the characters of the antagonists. Three are character studies of the heroine. Another, the famed Ode on Man, re­veals some of the dramatist’s deepest thoughts. O’Brien provides summaries of inter­vening portions of the play, the Greek alphabet, and a grammatical appendix. A transliteration of two passages—the Prologue and the Ode on Man—is de­signed to help the beginner learn the Greek alphabet and to show combined or elided words in their complete form.