This is a strange book and I would be interested to know how well it was received by the academic community. On the one hand, Levy quotes and footnotes a large number of original sources. (Most of these seem reliable, but he uses several Chicago newspapers somewhat uncritically, which worries me a little.) On the other hand, his analytical statements sometimes seem questionable or even simply wrong. As one example, his claim that Morgan's raid "pointed the way for" Sherman's march through Georgia is not, I think, supportable. The book overall lacks a thesis or analytical framework. The edition I read was also very badly edited, with several paragraphs actually cut off and the text missing. Having made these criticisms, the original sources, particularly prisoners' diaries, quoted by Levy do reveal a vision of a horrific place to be. At Camp Douglas, unusually for the period, prisoners were actually beaten by guards and forced to sit unclothed in the snow, among other "punishments". Levy does not analyze the fact that this brutality worsened significantly as the war went on, with the camp being reasonably tolerable in 1862 and a hellhole in 1864. Overall, this book collects interesting information but I would treat all unsupported statements made by the author with extreme caution.

George Levy does an excellent job in presenting the life and times of a Civil War prisoner of war camp -- from its origin to its closing after the completion of the War. The most positive aspect of the book, however, is that it lacks bias; Levy is objective throughout his presentation. The only detractions of the book are what I perceived to be poor editting. For instance, several statements and facts were often repeated in later chapters. Also, tables of data were poorly presented in their format. This is not the author's fault, but rather the editor's. With regard to content, I would have preferred to read more descriptions of Camp Douglas from the Union soldiers' point of view (especially those within the Camp's garrison or the VRC). Nearly all of the views of the Camp from the Union perspective were based on administrator's reports and communications. How different were the views between the common Union soldier and the Confederate POWs? We really don't get a clear picture of this dichotomy from Levy's book. Overall, the book is better than any Andersonville book that I've read.

To Die in Chicago is a wonderfully researched and well-written book that provides a vivid and heartbreaking account of the Confederate prisoners who lived and died in a Union prison camp. It gives much information for anyone seeking information about ancestors held there and it offers a real sense of the prisoners' daily lives and ordeals. I checked it out six times from the library and decided it is time to buy it. You should too!

Once again, it's Oscar season. I just finished reading Emanuel Levy's Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards, and I found a stellar overview of Hollywood's exercise in self-congratulation. What's good about the book is that Levy identifies the motives behind the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 as a desire to establish the film industry as "a respectable, legitimate institution."

Reading Oscar Fever is like reading the history of the sound era since the two events overlap. Additionally, Levy provides many facts and anecdotes that make up for a fascinating read of America's most glamorous industries. It's the kind of book that film buffs would want to keep on their shelves for future references.

Those interested in Oscar trivia and gossip will not be disappointed by the book, either. Oscar Fever is the kind of book that could be read as light entertainment as well as a serious expose of the one of the most popular media events in the world.

Of all Hollywood books I read over the past few years, Oscar Fever is one of the most illuminating. For all those reasons, I'm giving the film the highest rank, 5.

Emanuel Levy's Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards is a fascinating account of the most popular movie event in the world.

Scrutinizing the awards from their very beginnings, Levy appears to know everything which is worth knowing about the Oscars. His book combines both serious and light-anecdotal analysis of the Oscars, which makes for a wonderful reading.

Levy draws on aa wide variety of sources of Hollywood history, providing intriguing factoids to supplement his examination of the effects of age, gender, and race on the film industry. For example, he details the discrimination against women as well as against artists of color in Oscar's history up until the last decade.

I felt that no sociological or political issue related to Hollywood and the Oscars remained unanswered in this wonderfully researched and written book.

Of all the Oscar books I have read so far, Oscar Fever is decidedly the most comprehensive and illuminating. I give it the highest rank (five) one could give a movie book.

Emanuel Levy's Oscar Fever: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards is the only serious chronicle of the Oscars, placing them in their broader socio-political contexts, from 1927 to the present.

Oscar Fever (a very good title, in terms of the nasty and fevrish camaigns last year) provides the most comprehensive examination of the Oscars as a uniquely American phenomenon, now embraced by the entire world.

The systematic data that Levy provides about the difference between male and female winners and nominees, the underrepresentation of black and Latino artists, the biases against women directors, such as Barbra Streisant (The Prince of Tides) and the type of movies and screen roles that win Oscars, are fascinating.

I recommend the book to those readers who would like to know more about the Oscars specifically or American pop culture in general.

My 7th grade teacher would always read a story to us. She would make us think about it until the next day if we didn't get it the first day. This was a very cool book. :)

When I was in the fifth grade my teacher would, on fridays, read on of these "holey" stories and we would take the class period to figure out the rest. It was so much fun and it was also challenging. I never really figured any out but ever since then I remember a bunch of the stories. Plus this is five years later.

when i was in high school, my math teacher used to make us ask yes or no questions to fill the gaps in these holey stories. they also helped us to learn to think outside the box in both life and math class.
we used to beg her to let us solve these fun little stories!

This book is extremely heavy on the esoteric, philosophical lingo. As a virtual environment systems designer, I found it to be essentially useless. My guess is that it would be of value only to academicians and others not directly involved in the technological aspects of VE and other digital domains. Although I suspect there might have been some useful stuff here, the writing is too tangled to unravel. If you speak academese, you might fare better than I did.

The word 'virtual' has had a fair amount of exercise in the last few decades, and it would be a pity if some were put off reading this wonderful book due to the misguided belief it may be populated with computer lingo and people with wetware engaged in simulated 'virtual' sex. Levy's understanding of the virtual extends far beyond information technology; he gives the concept a proper philosophical and even anthropological foundation, and even goes so far as to show that we have in fact always been virtual, and this is what has made us human.

Technology is probably what separates us from all other living creatures, or at least sophisticated technology, such as machines. Yes, other organisms utilise simple tools and what have you, but none of them are going to the moon in any sort of hurry. Levy's work is essentially about artifacts, be they software like language or symbols, or hardware like tools and machines. However, following on from the work of philosophers such as Deleuze and Serres, Levy is profoundly against the two common (mis)conceptions about them: that they 'dominate' us, or that they are simple tools in our hands, doing our bidding. Heidegger and his ilk were very keen on the domination idea, but that's only because they didn't really understand machines; sure, your VCR will seem to dominate you, if you can't work it, as many older people will tell you, but after a good dose of swearing and fumbling the usual result is a machine that just sits there doing nothing. Hardly despotism. Or you may have its measure, and say it's just a tool for capturing video images, for whatever purpose, and yet it changes the way you watch TV, capture memories of your kids, and the entire institutional set-up of the film industry. Quite a clever tool, that.

If you read this book (and you should), Levy will tell you that all artifacts, including less 'material' ones like language, virtualise our lives. That doesn't mean making them less real, the common usage of 'virtual'; it means problematising them, opening them up to possibilities. Making them MORE real. And this isn't naive techno-optimism, because not only are not all these possibilities not nice, but when you virtualise something you take on-board the requirements of the virtualising medium, which have to be met to keep it running, and you become entwined with the other people associated with these artifacts, such as video repair men. Technology can truly make you feel like a god, but it always needs to be fixed, and you have to undertake profound social relationships for it to happen at all (nobody builds an aircraft carrier alone in their backyard). Or take our oldest and most 'simple' artifact: language. Language, says Levy, virtualises 'real-time', by which he means our everyday interactions with other people. That's what it means to 'discuss' something, you take an immediate issue confronting two or more people, and you use language to open it up to different resolution paths which aren't immediately obvious. And again, this isn't artifact as god or slave: the language doesn't dominate you, although it has in-built constraints which you must adhere to if you want to be understood, and you can't just tell people what to do and see it happen, because not only are allowed meanings consensual or social, but also there is no direct causal link between utterance and action.

Levy explores the way we virtualise every aspect of our lives, from real-time interaction through language, to our actions through technology, and our social relations through institutions. And in each case the mechanism is the same: we create some artifact, more or less material, which allows us to shift what's at stake away from the immediate here-and-now and towards a problematic where new possibilities open up. And again Levy avoids simplistic determinism of any persuasion by emphasising that each of these artifacts simultaneously creates new social arrangements, and introduces new imperatives through the need for their upkeep. This is how the philosophy becomes anthropology, and why Levy says to be human IS to be virtual; it is our species that has taken these artifacts into our collectives, that has used the world to mediate our social lives. And the world extracts a price too, because artifacts impose requirements back upon us, if we want them to keep working, that is. The end of domination, either of artifact by human, or human by artifact.

This is Levy's most accessible book, in English, relatively free of the sometimes over-blown prose of Collective Intelligence. Like Bruno Latour, also an admirer of Serres and Deleuze, Levy allows us to see exactly how our technological, modern world is every bit as religious, barbaric, enlightened, enchanted, mystical or whatever as it has always been; you just have to understand artifacts. (It is also a tremendous asset for philosophy students who don't fully understand the scope of the Begsonian/Deleuzean 'virtual'.)

And as another reviewer has hinted, there's even theology in nuts and bolts, if you know where to look.

This is one of those rare books that will re-wire many minds. Lévy gives us a new way of seeing culture. He achieves this by linking specific cultural activities, and thereby humankind, to a fundamental process that is outside place and time - the process of virtualisation.

That the book produces its profound cognitive effect in so few words is stunning. Part of the credit for this feat must go to the translator, Bononno.

'Becoming Virtual' in my view surpasses that other classic,'Understanding Computers and Cognition' by Winograd and Flores. Lévy depicts cognition and action as both social process, and process occurring within the individual. He introduces concepts sparingly and tellingly, illustrating them with examples reaching from the dawn of the human era to the present day.

A book that can be read at one sitting, but will demand to be picked up again many, many times in the years ahead.

While there are tons of anthologies on Postmodernism in many socio-political-philosophical and critical forms, few seem to focus on the actual literature. This anthology is a step towards fixing this problem. It contains almost every major author and is organized as well as can be expected given the lack of form that postmodernism seems to engender. However, there is a major flaw to this work. It contains mostly excerts from larger works. This makes reading the thing uninspiring. It gives one a good idea about what books one should read to understand postmodernism but I do not think it really contributes much in itself. Having said that, I should say that the Introduction and organizing chapters are much stronger than what one normally finds in an anthology. Also the section on Postmodern theory is much stronger than the fiction sections.

as a novice to postmodern fiction, i was impressed by the scope of the anthology. though there are only short excerpts, it's possible to come away with a greater understanding of this innovative and broad field of literature.

This book with it's lucid chapter introductions offers an anthology which could be useful as a textbook for a class on arts and culture in America in the second half of the 20th Century.

Also, it is a good read, a nice collection of literature.

What is missing in the book is answers to the questions and problems. Is it posible to get these answers.

I found this an excellent book for an MBA. Thorough, detailed, and well-organized. I would recommend it to someone who wants to study finance at an intermediate-advanced level.

Benefit of this book is only if you do not have the physiology book by the same author or if you want to carry around a section of the huge book. By itself the book is very clear in explaning cardiac cycles and rest of the hemodynamics. Hearth sounds forget it, ECG or ECG graphs, forget it but whatever is explained is explained in easy terms whit some nice diagrams/figures.It is expensive book per page compared to physiology book.

This book has a lot of useful information but could be a little more reader-friendly

One word of warning - the entire content of this book is to be found word-for-word in section IV of the Berne & Levy textbook "Physiology". Don't make the mistake I made and buy them both !

I've read many books on this subject and find this book to be out dated. Some of the author's recommendations are not up to today's standards.

Juliette de Bairacli Levy is first and foremost one of the world's most famous herbalists. She lived and learned from the Gypsies of Europe how to grow and use medicinal plants for people and for animals. There is a wonderful video of her life by Tish Streeten called "Juliette of the Herbs". Cats Naturally is based on raising cats according to the cat rather than the human. Diet is determined in large part by their diet in the wild, medicines according to their own means of healing when left alone. There are herbal remedies for parasites and insects (mange, ear mites, ticks, lice, fleas & ringworm), and herbal remedies for digestive problems and other ailments. It is a great book and one I have used happily with my very beautiful and very healthy cats. This is a very sensible book by a very sensible, wise and loving woman.

While there is no doubt that the author is highly proficient in the subject matter the book was a difficult read. Terms and theories were explained clearly however this is not an introductory level chemistry book. This book is written for chemical or environmental engineering students. Illustrations and tables are also inserted at points where you are engrossed in some pretty heady material so it gave the impression of jumping around. I say this b/c illustrations and tables had a lot of information included. The formulas were high level mathematical computations that I found bewildering. I am not Einstein but I also have 10 years of in the trenches environmental chemistry and field management. There were excellent problems to work at the end of each chapter but the answers were not to be found in the book. I have no idea if I worked the problems correctly which defeats the point of working them in the first place. I would not recommend this book as a "beginner level" chemistry book. This is more appropriate for a graduate school level which may have been the intended audience. If you are looking for a book packed with theory and formulas then this is the book for you. I had expected a book that was a little more general in nature.

This is a reasonably priced textbook for advanced undergrad & grads studying the environmental sciences in Engineering, Hydrology, and Chemistry. Environmental consultants in the private sector could also employ this textbook as a reference. Harry Hemond (of MIT) and Liz Fechner-Levy (consultant in Bethesda, MD) deliver a quantitative treatment of processes. Battle-tested at MIT for many years, this volume features time-saving exercises at the end of each chapter and an accompanying solutions manual.

The only writers who can get away with telling, telling, telling are writers with great voice and masterful use of language. This was flat and silly and needn't have been longer than a two page short-short. Exemplifies what's wrong with the state of French letters which is nothing more than navel gazing.

This book, at least in the Spanish version is a very interesting monologue about the relationship between a young woman and her mother, who always lived an independent life, following the May '68 values as much as the elder generation followed the old ones.

Promising debut for the daughter of a well-known French philosopher. Makes you want to read her next book.

...The author does an wonderful job of making the protagonist sympathetic without vilefying the mother. My heart went out to the girl as she sat and waited for her mother, knowing, on some level, that she wasn't going to arrive. The use of flashbacks to tell the story of the girl's childhood neglect by her mother is well done. Some of the descriptions are captivating. It is amazing how much depth that the characters have, given that the story is really an interior monologue from one person's perspective. This is a book about hurt, disappointment, hope, regret and loss. Even if the reader hasn't experienced the sort of neglect that the lead character does, we can relate to her pain -- the emotions she is feeling are ones we have all felt at one time or another, for one reason or another. As such, the device of not giving her a name works really well.

This book may be hard to find now, but I strongly reccommend that you make the effort, ...(it seemed more like a short story than a novel), so as well written as it is, I can understand why a person wouldn't want to spend too much to get it.