AS we started speaking about my visit, Father Jose Maria removed the telephone cord from the receiver in one deft, well-practiced move. I knew that move well from my youth in Communist Poland, when it was wise to assume not only that every telephone line was bugged but that each telephone could serve as a listening device. We were on the outskirts of one of Cuba's provincial cities, in a tiny reception room with decrepit furniture and peeling paint. Even though Fr. Jose had a rotund face that radiated good humor, there was an otherworldliness in his manner, like that of the Solidarity priests I knew in the old days in Poland. The Cuban secret service's favorite extermination method is simply running someone over with a police car, and Fr. Jose has had a couple of brushes with death recently.

But having faced martyrdom, he had clearly passed the threshold of fear. "What's this?" I pointed to an unframed painting with animals in jolly colors and a bold red hammer and sickle in the center. The Communist symbol was upside down, with a broken white line in the middle of the sickle leading up to a hut perched on top of the handle of the hammer. "It's an allegory of George Orwell's Animal Farm by our local artist," he explained. "The road markings on the sickle are meant to say that the road of the revolution leads to the pigsty."

BROKS, Paul. Into the silent land; travels in neuropsychology. Grove Press, 246p. bibliog, c2003. 0-8021-4128-5. $14.00. SA

Not for the faint of heart, Into the Silent Land is a series of essays, musings, meditations and reflections on what it is to be human and to have a brain. Broks fuses his own thoughts on what it feels like to have a "self" with mini anatomy lessons on the brain and its functions. The short essays more from his lecture platform to his family memories, from his conversation with his patients to his conversations with hallucinatory chimera of various types.

Because he reflects of the nature of the self, on questions about the existence of a soul, on the improbability of life after death, Broks is not for every reader. He is, however, a gifted writer with a serious purpose: to pose basic questions and to probe for their answers. He does give suggestions for further reading, but reading Broks alone can be more than enough for long and heavy thought. Patricia Moore, Brookline, MA

Travels And Researches In Native North America, 1882-1883

Herman ten Kate

University of New Mexico Press

MSC01 1200, 1 Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001

0826332811 $55.00 1-800-249-7737

Travels And Researches In Native North America, 1882-1883 by Herman ten Kate is an amazing travelogue that has only recently been Collaboratively translated by Pieter Hovens, William J. Orr, and Louis A. Hieb from the author's native Dutch into English. Offering studies and impressions of the Pima, Hopi, Apache, and Zuni people, with especial interest in the roles of women and children in these tribes, Travels And Researches In Native North America, 1882-1883 offers a clear and insightful perspective that is especially remarkable for its respect of native attitudes and culture, which it holds in higher regard than many other late 19th century treatises. A highly recommended addition to reference shelves that cover Native American history as well as outside cultures' perceptions of them.