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Very Informative

An incredible yet little known true story

Great tool for PR professionals

A good overview of preschool programmingEasy to read format, good examples & graphics, would be useful for staff inservice.


Excellent cookbook for kids, and not bad for adults

logic as it should be

The Irish AlchemistBurke is best known for his opposition to the French Revolution of 1789, which he described in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and for his opposition to aspects of British imperialism in America and India. Even those who disagreed with his politics considered him a man of profound imagination; in fact, his early interests leaned to the literary, as in his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His works suggested a literary sensibility that surpassed his contemporaries'. Largely due to the work of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, and Irving Babbitt, Burke has been considered a major influence on modern conservatism.
Burke's writing, though aphoristic, quotable, and of high literary merit, can be difficult. Daniel Ritchie's intent with this anthology was to introduce the general reader to Burke's major themes by a variety of commentators. Consequently, the book has been divided into five sections: the literary imagination (Coleridge, Arnold); revolution (George Watson, Russell Kirk), constitutional and party government (Harvey Mansfield, Alexander Bickel); the radical mind (Raymond Williams, Conor Cruise O'Brien), and the conservative mind (Irving Babbitt, Robert Nisbet). In each case the critic tends to project his own interests onto the texts, which I consider less a shortcoming of the critic than an indication of Burke's transparent genius. Babbitt, for example, saw in Burke the quintessence of the humane man of letters who could balance opposites in an unsystematic world view.
Some of the essays here will probably try the patience of the general reader. I would have put Steven Blakemore's essay in the "radical mind" section of the anthology, given that I consider his deconstructive approach to be much more in line with radical literary fashion than with traditional explication de texte. But I general I found this to be a useful volume. As I have in the past, I would direct the reader toward the essays by Kirk, Nisbet, and Babbitt for their encapsulation of Burke's themes into plain, yet graceful, English.


Burke's Sublime and BeautifulOf course, the book goes well beyond the characteristics of the two qualities. It focusses on the interesting question of how human nature leads us to experience the two qualities. To me much of Burke's discussion of this point seems quite contemporary.
Burke's preference for the sublime over the beautiful reflects his time at the beginning of the Romantic period in literature, and anticipates Goethe's (and Beethoven's) celebration of the individual and direct appeal to the emotions. His essentialist views of the beautiful as a feminine characteristic seem gratuitous.
I wonder what Burke would have found to say about, say, the Goldberg, with its formality and artifice. These characteristics would seem to place the piece in the beautiful rather than the sublime. But the piece is clearly not merely a frill, nor is it at all sentimental.
Burke's book is well argued and challenging to the modern reader. Give it a try!


Detailed but Dry

The enigma of Carlo