Written with obvious gusto, and containing witty and elegant prose that seems to flow by effortlessly, this is popular science at its very best. Nicolaus Steno (aka Niels Stensen in his native Danish) was a gifted dissectionist with a deft touch. He discovered the glands that produce tears (before this discovery, it was thought that when a person got extremely upset their brain leaked water, and this water came out through the eyes as tears!). Branching out from his anatomical studies, he studied seashells embedded in mountains and came to the conclusion that the sediments had been produced in the oceans. He also theorized that either the oceans had once been higher, or the mountains had been uplifted. These conclusions were far from obvious at the time, as the periods necessary to produce thick layers of sediment and to raise mountain ranges would be quite lengthy....which would conflict with interpretations of the Bible which stated that the world was about 6,000 years old. In order to avoid this conflict, many people- rather than admit that seashell fossils were actually seashells- came up with the notion that the "shells" had actually grown right inside the rock. Therefore, they weren't really seashells! Steno was a very religious man (he was born a Protestant but converted to Catholicism) but he didn't believe in interpreting the Bible literally. He eventually gave up science, but not out of any conflict with his religious beliefs. He just believed it was more important to convert Protestants back to the "true faith." The author does a wonderful job of immersing the reader in the intellectual climate of 17th century Europe, so that we can understand the scientific and religious debates detailed in the book. Mr. Cutler also provides interesting and sometimes amusing biographical snapshots of some of the famous people of the time, such as Isaac Newton and the tremendously gifted philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. (Regarding Leibniz, the author quotes the duchess of Orleans who, after meeting the great man, said "It is so rare for an intellectual to be smartly dressed, and not to smell, and to understand jokes.") If you are at all interested in the history of geology, Mr. Cutler's book is a marvelous addition to the non-technical literature available for the curious layperson.

Probably you have never heard of Niels Stensen, or Nicolaus Stenonius as his name was Latinized, or Steno for short. He has a right to the title of "Father of Geology," though, and it was through his efforts that we started scientifically assessing the age of the Earth, rather than relying on interpreting the Bible as a geological text. But he was no religious iconoclast; in fact, he was even made a saint. In _The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth_ (Dutton), Alan Cutler has not exactly brought Steno back to life; there is too little documentation of his life to do that well. But he has given basics of the life, and more importantly has examined the originality of Steno's thinking and put it in the context of his times.

Steno, born in 1638, was raised in Denmark as a Lutheran. He became a famous anatomist, but in his travels, he took particular interest in the land he traveled through. The great puzzle of the time was how could seashells be found, far from the sea, embedded in rock, and at the tops of the mountains? The prevalent explanation was that shells actually grew inside the Earth; they were not seashells, but the product of some mystical force, the same sort of thing that produced the manifestations of magnetism or made flowers grow. Steno produced clever and well reasoned arguments against shells growing inside rocks, and he laid out principles of geography which have stood the test of time. Steno well knew the persecution of Galileo by the church, and he worried that his ideas would receive the same condemnation. For instance, merely supposing that rock layers were formed gradually from sediment might be heretical to those who insisted that God had made the Earth all at once. Cutler shows that Steno paid attention to the evidence he could see on his travels, at the same time paying close attention to the scriptures.

Steno was a pious man who after much thought gave up Lutheranism to become a Catholic; he also largely gave up his scientific endeavors to do so. He became a priest, took up a vow of poverty, and stuck to it, destroying his health and bringing about an early death. He had risen to Bishop within the church hierarchy. Pope John Paul II praised both Steno's faith and his scientific work when he beatified Steno in 1988, although the scientific work was really all that had made him famous. The Catholic Church had long since stopped insisting that seven days of creation were of twenty-four hours each, and geologists were using Steno's principles every day. Cutler, himself a geologist, has written a useful book to bring a forgotten thinker to our attention, as well as documenting the beginning of scientific rather than religious explanations for the forces that formed our planet.

Nicolaus Steno first entered my consciousness when I took G. Sc. 1 or 2 at Penn State during the 1977-1978 school year. He hadn't been beatified yet, but our professor pointed out that some folks wanted him to be declared a saint. This seemed at odds with his extreme importance to the science of geology, at least to my 18 year old brain. At 44, I understand that humans can be extremely complex creatures and welcome Alan Cutler's wonderful Steno biography The Seashell On The Mountaintop to the lay-literature concerning the science of geology.

Steno [aka Niels Steensens, Nicolai Stenonis] contributed [among other things] the principle of superposition to the science of geology, without which Earth history can not be done. After reading The Seashell On The Mountaintop, I better understand how the seemingly disparate elements of Steno's life flow one from the other. Cutler's prose style made Seashell an enjoyable read and I was particularly pleased that Seashell doesn't suffer from the hyperbole that scarred the otherwise fantastic The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester. I strongly recommend The Seashell On The Mountaintop to any reader interested in geology, history, biography, and the relationship between science and religion.

As a high school earth science teacher, I'm very sensitive about the hegemony of biology, chemistry, and physics over science education in the United States. Maybe the recent string of popular books on geology and the other earth sciences will help a little to restore the earth sciences to their proper place in American life.

I'm pretty sure Steno hasn't performed any miracles in my life, but he did inspire this little piece of grad school doggerel:

Saint Steno
Went to Reno
Looking for an angle.
He found some gold,
Some riches untold,
And he made the rocks untangle.

A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, drafted during the winter of 1857-8, exploring the themes and theses that dominate his later writings, including Marx's own version of Hegel's dialectics, and thoughts on alientation. While not as sophisticatedp--or lengthy--as Das Kapital, it remains a "must read" for anyone interested developing a sophisticated understanding of Marxist philosophy.

Unlike many other works, the Grundrisse exposes in more obvious ways Marx's dialectical thought. The Introduction should really be read as a great antidote to the 1859 Preface to a Critique of Political Economy, which gave us the base-superstructure analogy. The weakest link in Marx's though may very well be found there. The Grundrisse Introduction starts from the point of view of class struggle, whereas there is no place for the class struggle as the driving force in the base-superstructure schema.

Also, Grundrisse starts in a different place from Capital. There is a reason for this, and a good discussion of this can be found in the writing of Raya Dunayevskaya and a counter discussion can be found in Roman Rosdolsky. The choice to eventually shelve the organization of the Grundrisse for the organization of Capital flows in part from the changes in the intervening years, most notably the U.S. Civil War.

Real life constantly shaped Marx's thinking, hardly fitting the representation we commonly get of him from ideologues and capital's priests (economists). As a result, Grundrisse also has serious limitations in its understanding of the logic of capital. Basing the entire understanding of Marxism and capital on Grundrisse leads to the kind of mistakes made by Italian Autononmist Marxism, esp. Antonio Negri, who find themselves engaged in a very subjectivist understanding of capitalism. A useful, but sympathetic, antidote can be found in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway's writings.

This book is a sketch of what would become, a couple of years later, the author's masterpiece: Das Kapital. It was written in an intense effort during revolutionary agitations in Europe, such hard work had as goal to show the inherent contradictions of capitalism and the way it would soon collapse. Well, capitalism did not collapse then and did not so far, but this book remains a classic in the critique of classical political economy. It is indded shorter than Das Kapital, and in parts not as mature as, but it has the advantage of providing discussion on themes not discussed elsewhere in marxian works. Thus, the most famous part of Grundrisse are its Introduction and the part on "Pre-capitalistic modes of production". A must for anyone who wish to get acquainted with marxian thought.

I'm a college student and was asked to read this book for one of my classes. Going into reading this book, I knew absolutely nothing about the history of immigration, the details of the legislation, or the problems our nation is facing.

The first thing that makes this book stand out from other similar books I have been reading for this course is that the book is organized. There are 11 articles by various authors and Mills does a great job in splitting these articles up into 5 categories.

Every article was easy to read and understand. There were many times when I would get so into a story that I didn't want to put the book down until I finished it. Mills did a great job in selecting articles that didn't just pour facts and statistics at you.

The most important thing I enjoyed about this book is that Mills did not take a side. The book contained articles that were for immigration, against immigration, and some articles that were neutral. I did not feel like I was being pulled in one direction with this book. Through these articles, the reader is left to decide whether he or she believes immigration is a good thing.

Immigration is a very big topic, but Mills did a great job in discussing almost every aspect of immigration in a very unbiased way.

This text is a composition of short essays that lends insight into one of the most controversial issues of today. It provides the framework for a heated debate by arguing various perspectives of immigration. It's a quick read (not dry at all!), informative, interesting and succinct. Highly recommended for those who know very little about the controversy surrounding immigration and would like to catch up.

Giordan Bruno is still today a controversial philosopher. In this book he exposes his philosophical/cosmological ideas and, in doing so, he uses the new Copernican theory as the basis for a new, daring vision of the universe.
Anybody who would like to familiarize him/herself with the work of Bruno, or is interested in the development of Western ideas will find this book extremely challenging. However I would like to say a few words on the interpretation that the translators give of Bruno's ideas. The translators appear to follow completely an interpretation of Bruno based on the theory of the english scolar Frances Yates. According to this theory Bruno was an exponent of the (then popular) Hermetic movement.
It is imperative to underscore that Yates theory is not universally accepted. While it is known that Hermetic influences can be traced in Bruno, to reduce his whole cosmology and his understanding of Copernican theory to a "hieroglyphic" is misleading if not plainly wrong.
Bruno was not a scientist, but he was the first to intuitively realize the revolutionary consequences of Copernican theory (not only for science) and to bring that theory to its logical conclusions: an infinite universe with infinite earth-like worlds. This vision can not be reconciled with the world of the hermetic "Magus". The whole purpose of the hermetic Magus was to ascend the material world to the world of the perfect spheres. In Bruno's universe there is nothing to ascend to. The universe is composed of a thin air where an infinity of worlds and stars are suspended and move following universal (animistic) principles. The other worlds are corruptible as much as the earth and may be inhabited by earth-like people. The very base of the hermetic doctrine is missing. I would therefore encourage the interested reader not to stop the investigation of Bruno's ideas to the hermetic interpretation, but to also read different points of view (for example Yates interpretation of Bruno's use of images has recently been challenged with very solid arguments by the finding of italian scholars). In particular I found the book of Hillary Gatti "Giordano Bruno and the renaissance science" extremely interesting and complete.

Giordano Bruno stands at the cusp between the Renaissance and the modern world. His unique attempts to extract philosophical and theological meaning from Copernicus's forward-looking work provide us with striking insights into the Weltanschauung of his troubled times. Gosselin and Lerner have brilliantly translated Bruno's elegant but involuted Renaissance Italian into clear modern English that nevertheless preserves the spirit of the original. Their thoughtful notes bring comprehensibility to previously misunderstood passages, and the linkage they establish between Bruno's travails and Galileo's later troubles is highly convincing. A must-read for the scientist as well as the philosopher

Es un relato real apasionante, que nos cuenta la travesia de un pequeño velero, de España a Cuba y el regreso. Interesante para los navegantes y todos aquellos amantes de los viajes, la aventura, la mar y la naturaleza.

Es un relato real, interesante para los navegantes y para aquellos a los que siempre les atrajo la mar, los viajes, las aventuras, la naturaleza, y... CUBA..."La tierra más hermosa que ojos humanos hayan visto".

I would hate to discourage anyone from reading this book. I loved this book, but it is challenging. An undergraduate degree in a technical field and a fair amateur's knowledge of spherical astronomy is probably a minimum requirement for fully appreciating this book. This is not to say that Professor Gingerich is obscure, rather he writes with remarkable clarity but he aims at his peers, who are mostly Oxford dons. I would recommend borrowing it from your local library before investing in it.

I am sure there are thousands of high school freshman who will digest this book without any problem, I wasn't one of them and I never met any such.

This book is essential for anybody who wants to understand what Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler really did. It's a bit more technical than "The Great Copernicus Chase", but if you're serious, you'll appreciate it.

And if you're really serious, you'll get a copy of the paper by James Evans in Am. J. Phys 56 (Nov, 1988) 1009-1024. It answered tons of technical questions for me. Just do it, you'll thank me (and Jim Evans!).

This is a must for anyone working on array signal processing.

I was very lucky to get the book with a very special offer.

Bailey's Constitution is a pathbreaking attempt to show how an economy might be operated so as to provide public goods and services in a manner that "mimics" the operation of private competitive markets. Using principles pioneered by Wicksell and Lindahl, this has long been a goal of public economics but until the advent of so-called demand revealing mechanisms (described in Chapter 2 of his book), there was to known way to achieve this result in real world institutions. Bailey has shown the way this result can be achieved through the provision of the appropriate constitutional decision making and self enforcing incentive structure in a small public economy.

The "incentive compatible" mechanisms that Bailey utilizes received recent attention by the Nobel Prize Committee. In awarding the 1996 Nobel Prize to William Vickrey, the Nobel Committee recognized the importance of Vickrey's contribution to providing ways to "overcome the public goods problem" (the subject of B&T's Chapter 2). The Committee noted that an idea analogous to the Vickrey auction "underlies the so-called Clarke-Groves mechanism for eliciting truthful tenders for public projects. Vickrey anticipated this important result by an important time margin". Whereas this and other work cited by the Committee (particularly the "Vickrey auction") has had many important practical applications in the allocation of goods in private markets (i. e. spectrum auctions and Treasury debt auctions), it has been more difficult to apply the ideas in the public sector.

Part of this difficulty may be the result of certain perceived "technical limitations" of what Bailey calls the (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves" (VCG) mechanisms, the operation of which are described thoroughly in Chapter II of B&T. Over 25 years, the literature has spawned a number of criticisms centering on these technical limitations. Throughout the body of the work and especially in Part II, Bailey has shown how most, if not all, of these difficulties can be surmounted, mostly through the self enforcing incentive structure embedded in the appropriate constitution.

In my own 1980 book (which was an extension of my 1978 University of Chicago dissertation), I tried to deal with many of these difficulties as well as other difficulties being raised outside the conventional "rational choice" framework of analysis. For example, political scientists were asserting that altruism invalidates the VCG mechanisms. Bailey's work greatly extends previous attempts, such as mine, in dealing with these technical limitations and criticisms, and offers important and pathbreaking fresh perspectives as well.

The book, in my mind, does an excellent job at stimulating readers ranging from the layperson with only a rudimentary understanding of economics all the way to mathematical economists thoroughly familiar with the current state of the art in "incentive compatible" mechanism design. The great strength of the work is in how it is all put together through a combination of incentive compatible devices and self enforcing incentive mechanisms, starting in chapter 2, and running through the exciting "draft constitution" in Chapter 3, concluding with a Chapter 4 with "perspectives and alternatives" which analyses other attempts to address the public goods problem and deals with the possible objections that others might raise to the approach suggested by Bailey. The ways in which Bailey combines the mechanisms (i e. the VCG mechanisms and the Thompson mechanism, the latter being treated separately in Chapter 5 of this book), for example, is particularly important and stimulates one to immediately want to explore practical applications.

Others would surely find important insights in carefully studying Bailey's response to criticisms and misunderstandings (for example the perception that altruism invalidates the VCG mechanism) all the way to perceptions that abound in the political science literature that subvert any attempts to institute decisionmaking mechanisms that would amount to a simple aggregation of individual preferences. (This is the longstanding "liberalism against populism" debate that would try to invalidate any mechanism that relies on direct democracy implemented through a mechanism that relies on voting rules that reflect the intensity of individual voter preferences). In this respect, Bailey's book is a useful supplement to Mueller's Constitutional Democracy (1996) which also provides a defense of the more complex, sophisticated procedures (though not necessarily the VCG mechanisms), leaning somewhat more to the use of the "preference intensity" rules for use in representative or parliamentary settings, rather than through individual voter referenda. All this is a roundabout way of saying that Bailey's work is a important and pathbreaking addition to the rapidly growing "constitutional democracy" literature and will be stimulating to anyone interested in this area.

I should note the relationship of this work to Bailey's other work on social choice, now readily accessible in his 1994 Essays on Normative and Positive Economics. His approach to "social choice" (contained in a "commentary" in those essays) sets the stage for this book, where he truly demonstrates that the impossibility results that haunted social choice for many decades is really a problem of a "plenty of possibilities". Whereas I may be an enthusiast for his particular perspective, the rigor and thoroughness of his work will be appreciated by those approaching the subject matter from sharply differing perspectives and who will find the rigor of his analysis helpful in sorting through the "plenty of possibilities". In this way, his work makes an important contribution to scholarly research in this important area.

I became aware of Bailey's work in late June, 1996 when Professor Bailey sent me a earlier draft. Professor Bailey has made strenuous efforts to cover some of the areas that I and others felt deserved more treatment. For example, I pointed out the altruism (Margolis) controversy and Bailey subsequently devoted an entire appendix to Chapter 2 in dealing with the controversy in what I believe to be a convincing and dispositive manner.

In terms of real world applicability, Bailey explicitly recognizes that a more complex Federal structure (rather than a small country) would require the use of a more complex decisionmaking structure than is set forth in this book. He has pointed the way for useful further research in this more complex area and in the field of constitutional democracy (and economics) generally. Others, like myself, have been or will likely be stimulated to develop possible real world applications of these principles in particular institutional settings.

I believe the book will be widely read by scholars in the fields of social choice and public choice. It will also command a good general audience along economists and political scientists, all of whom will find Part I readily accessible. It is hard to judge how wide ranging the general audience could be. I suspect there will be a good deal of "retailing" of Bailey's ideas, so the work will likely be widely cited in the economics, political science and some of the other social sciences. The ideas may catch on in a wider general audience in the near term and even become a public economics classic in later years. I think it could eventually become one of the "great books" in public economics. It will also possibly command some interest in such areas as philosophy and social theory and will surely become a classic in the rapidly expanding literature on "constitutional economics", perhaps ranking beside Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962) which first stirred modern interest in this field.

In some respects, particularly the material contained in appendices A-D in Chapter 6) is heavy going for any nonmathematical economist, like myself. However, Chapter 6 (which summarizes these appendices) is a masterful and understandable presentation of very difficult material (i.e. adjustments for income effects) that has previously perplexed me, a close student of this subject matter, for many years. I can now say I much better understand what has been a difficult real world condition (i. e. income effects) that I usefully assumed away in originally developing and presenting my formulation of the VCG mechanism, but which must be adequately dealt with in many practical settings where one seeks to make decisions based on a consistent ordering of preferences. In this respect, Bailey's treatment of the asymmetry between the "willingness to pay" of those opposed and those in favor of a public project in Chapter 6 is an important new contribution to the literature....

Though some of his ideas or "philosophys" are extreemly out of date, it is a marvel to read the book that first experessed the "crazy" ideas that are now common knowledge for a 3rd Grader. I feel that anyone intent on studying philosophy, astronomy, mathamatics, or is just very intrested in the greatest works of all time should deffinitly read this book. Although sometimes hard to understand (Nicolaus is not the greatest writer) because of it's crypticness, it is a "must read."

"Land and Taxation" contains contributions from five different economists, each of whom put forth persuasive arguments for switching to a land-based tax system -- a system in which the rental value of land and natural resources ("rent" for short) is the sole source of public revenue. Doing so, they argue, would "restore full employment, banish poverty and sustain economic activity."

In the prologue, Fred Harrison defines economic rent as "the value of land and natural resources after deducting the rewards that must legitimately accrue to those who invest labor and capital in and on the land (buildings, fences, drainage, and so on)." He then points out that the idea of shifting taxes entirely off labor and capital and onto land values goes back hundreds of years, but did not become widely known and understood until the publication of Henry George's masterwork, "Progress and Poverty" (1879). George argued that, because land is in fixed supply, landholders are able to grow rich without working simply by levying tolls on the fruits of other people's labor -- not in exchange for services rendered -- but in exchange for mere access to the earth on which all humans must live, yet which none produced.

More specifically, since the growth and progress of society tend to drive up land values, and since an increase in land values tends to come at the expense of wages (the return to labor) and interest (the return to capital), the paradox of increasing poverty amid advancing wealth is the direct result of allowing publicly created land values to be privately pocketed by a landed few at the expense of the productive many. To eliminate this paradox, and to uphold the true right of property (property in oneself and the fruit of one's labor), George proposed making land rent the sole source of public revenue -- a policy that was later dubbed the "Single Tax."

In "Land and Taxation," the authors explain that the Single Tax is just as relevant and just as needed today as it was 120 years ago, and do an excellent job refuting the various myths propagated by neo-classical economists concerning the nature and role of economic rent -- including the myth that the concept of economic rent applies, not just to land, but to any factor of production that is in scarce supply.