Book Reviews

Book Reviews: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer ; Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook's Voyages Changed the World by Brian W. Richardson ; Pacific Encounters: Art & Diversity in Polynesia 1760-1860 by Steven Hooper ; All Men Are Brothers: The Life & Times of Francis Williams Damon by Paul Berry ; Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, & Political Manipulation at America's Largest Charitable Trust by Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth ; Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai'i's Cherry Blossom Festival by Christine R. Yano ; Combat Chaplain: The Personal Story of the World War II Chaplain of the Japanese American 100th Battalion by Israel A. S. Yost ; Hawaiian Volcanoes by Clarence Edward Dutton ; Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii's Interracial Labor Movement by Moon-Kie Jung ; Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawai'i by John L. Culliney

Sixteen diverse laboratory mouse reference genomes define strain-specific haplotypes and novel functional loci.

We report full-length draft de novo genome assemblies for 16 widely used inbred mouse strains and find extensive strain-specific haplotype variation. We identify and characterize 2,567 regions on the current mouse reference genome exhibiting the greatest sequence diversity. These regions are enriched for genes involved in pathogen defence and immunity and exhibit enrichment of transposable elements and signatures of recent retrotransposition events. Combinations of alleles and genes unique to an individual strain are commonly observed at these loci, reflecting distinct strain phenotypes. We used these genomes to improve the mouse reference genome, resulting in the completion of 10 new gene structures. Also, 62 new coding loci were added to the reference genome annotation. These genomes identified a large, previously unannotated, gene (Efcab3-like) encoding 5,874 amino acids. Mutant Efcab3-like mice display anomalies in multiple brain regions, suggesting a possible role for this gene in the regulation of brain development

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

GENCODE reference annotation for the human and mouse genomes

The accurate identification and description of the genes in the human and mouse genomes is a fundamental requirement for high quality analysis of data informing both genome biology and clinical genomics. Over the last 15 years, the GENCODE consortium has been producing reference quality gene annotations to provide this foundational resource. The GENCODE consortium includes both experimental and computational biology groups who work together to improve and extend the GENCODE gene annotation. Specifically, we generate primary data, create bioinformatics tools and provide analysis to support the work of expert manual gene annotators and automated gene annotation pipelines. In addition, manual and computational annotation workflows use any and all publicly available data and analysis, along with the research literature to identify and characterise gene loci to the highest standard. GENCODE gene annotations are accessible via the Ensembl and UCSC Genome Browsers, the Ensembl FTP site, Ensembl Biomart, Ensembl Perl and REST APIs as well as https://www.gencodegenes.org.National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Healt

Change and Conflict in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps Since 1945

Army chaplains have long played an integral part in America\u27s armed forces. In additionto conducting chapel activities on military installations and providing moral and spiritualsupport on the battlefield, they conduct memorial services for fallen soldiers, ministerto survivors, offer counsel on everything from troubled marriages to military bureaucracy,and serve as families\u27 points of contact for wounded or deceased soldiers--all whilerisking the dangers of combat alongside their troops. In this thoughtful study, Anne C.Loveland examines the role of the army chaplain since World War II, revealing how thecorps has evolved in the wake of cultural and religious upheaval in American society andmomentous changes in U.S. strategic relations, warfare, and weaponry. From 1945 to the present, Loveland shows, army chaplains faced several crises thatreshaped their roles over time. She chronicles the chaplains\u27 initiation of the CharacterGuidance program as a remedy for the soaring rate of venereal disease among soldiers inoccupied Europe and Japan after World War II, as well as chaplains\u27 response to the challengeof increasing secularism and religious pluralism during the culture wars of theVietnam Era. Religious accommodation, evangelism and proselytizing, public prayer,and spiritual fitness provoked heated controversy among chaplains as well as civilians inthe ensuing decades. Then, early in the twenty-first century, chaplains themselves experiencedtwo crisis situations: one the result of the Vietnam-era antichaplain critique, theother a consequence of increasing religious pluralism, secularization, and sectarianismwithin the Chaplain Corps, as well as in the army and the civilian religious community.By focusing on army chaplains\u27 evolving, sometimes conflict-ridden relations withmilitary leaders and soldiers on the one hand and the civilian religious community on theother, Loveland reveals how religious trends over the past six decades have impacted thecorps and, in turn, helped shape American military culture.https://repository.lsu.edu/facultybooks/1167/thumbnail.jp

Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds : The Art and Pageantry of His Farewell Tour of America, 1824-1825 : Essays

Produced to accompany an exhibition commemorating General Gilbert du Motier Lafayette\u27s triumphal visit to America nearly 50 years after the outbreak of the American Revolution--in which his participation proved indispensable--this felicitous mesh of history and art presents such curiosities as a coach that carried Lafayette from Albany to Buffalo and a breast pin con taining locks of Lafayette\u27s and George Washington\u27s hair. Idzerda (co-editor of Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution ) contributes a biographical essay. Loveland ( Emblem of Liberty: The Image of Lafayette in the American Mind ) captures the reactions of the populace to this hero of two revolutions and defines the manner in which his visit acted as ``a crucial impetus to American nationalism.\u27\u27 Miller, curator of the Queens (N.Y.) Museum, distinguishes the styles of portraits and busts of the period, examines Lafayette\u27s influence on the restoration of Revolutionary War sites and traces the shapes of monuments to their classical origins.https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/history_books/1012/thumbnail.jp