I found this book quite difficult to understand. It has too much jargon, and the instructions to the games are sometimes unclear. There is no glossary. It seems to be aimed at an audience that is already familiar with most of the games.

Frey (the author) provides the rules and history for an impressive, although not exhaustive, list of card, board and casino games. He succinctly describes the history and the rules of each game. The rules are written fairly clearly, although those who are not familiar with the proper jargon may find them difficult to follow. Moreover, Frey provides almost no "expert advice on winning play" as the subtitle of the book promises. Advice on strategy is reserved to only a handful of games and, when provided, it is too short and commonsense to enhance anyone's play. You may wish to purchase this book as a general reference on the rules of the game, but do not expect it to improve your play.

A great read for anyone interested in cards. I managed to pretend to my friends that I knew nothing about cards before cleaning them out after reading this book...

These comments refer to the old Continuum edition, NOT to the Stanford edition, which is a fine translation ...

While not wishing to detract from what has been said about the importance of this book, it is worth mentioning that the English translation is scandalously bad and in need of replacement. I've had occasion to make extensive comparisons between the German original and the translation and the results are not encouraging. Much is simply flat-out wrong (e.g., sometimes the translator mistakes one German word for another) even more is unnecessarily clumsy. While Horkheimer and Adorno adopted a rather dense style of writing, nothing they produced is quite as cumbersome as what readers of this translation have had to endure.

One can sympathize with the translator -- he did the translation at a time when very little by Horkheimer and Adorno was in English and it appears that he worked under a rather tight schedule (it is possible to find errors piling up on a page and then suddenly ceasing -- suggesting that the poor fellow took a break and came back later on, with happier results). But there is no forgiving the publisher for leaving this text uncorrected for so long despite a long-standing consensus among students of the Frankfurt School that this is a deeply flawed translation. That anything of the power of the original makes it through the muck of this translation is a testimony to the force of Horkheimer and Adorno's ideas.

A new translation is long overdue. Until then, readers coming to the work of the Frankfurt School might want to seek out Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason, a summary of the argument elaborated here which Horkheimer delivered in English at Columbia University at about the same time of as the publication of the German original of this book.

"Dialectic of Enlightenment", one of the most celebrated texts of the Frankfurt School, endeavours to answer why modernity, instead of fulfilling the promises of the Enlightenment (e.g. progress, reason, order) has sunk into a new barbarism. Drawing on their own work on the "culture industry", as well as the ideas of the key thinkers of the Enlightenment project, (Descartes, Newton, Kant) Horkheimer and Adorno explain how the Enlightenment's orientation towards rational calculability and man's domination of a disenchanted nature evinces a reversion to myth, and is responsible for the reified structures of modern administered society, which has grown to resemble a new enslavement. Furthermore, Horkheimer's and Adorno's treatise was one of the most ambitious attempts to synthesise Marxist economic analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis, and is developed with much complexity and skill. Their philosophical and psychological critique of the Enlightenment concepts of reason and nature (which they identify as the loci of domination) spans almost the entire history of Western thought up until recent times, from Homer to Nietzsche. The book was written in 1944, during a phase of the war when the threat of Fascist victory still hung ominously over Europe, and when Horkheimer and Adorno themselves had to flee Germany to America. "Dialectic of Enlightenment" thus represents one of the most pessimistic strands of Marxist thought, giving up all expectations of a people's revolution in Western Europe. This was, in addition to the outbreak of the Second World War, due to the meteoric rise of extremely right-wing reactionary parties in the twenties, and their subsequent popularity, which ruled out by fiat any chance of a popular support for the left. The proletariat, instead of embracing the cause of the people's revolution, opted to give their vote to the Fascists. In their psychoanalytic investigation of this phenomena, Horkheimer and Adorno identify the rise of Fascism with the return of the repressed.

One of the more important, and somewhat more readable, founding texts of the Frankfurt school of critical thought, this book (probably because of the influence of Max Horkheimer) is more readable than Negative Dialectics (by Theodore Adorno) but less readable than Adorno's book of short essays, Minima Moralia. Its orange cover, and alarming, intellectual, title, make Dialectic of Enlightenment somewhat of a chick magnet :-).

The unreadability of Frankfurt School texts is an artifact of the very phenomena they criticize. Educated people in America at the time Dialectic of Enlightenment was written were influenced, directly and indirectly, by the pragmatism of John Dewey and English Logical Positivism as mediated by Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. A bit later, the Continental school of Logical Positivism came to America fleeing Fascism.

Pragmatism is the homegrown American philosophy that the useful is the true and the true, useful. Logical Positivism in Britain and on the Continent is the view that the meaningful is only the verifiable statement of natural science. Both traditions are completely inimical to the older Continental views of Adorno and of Horkheimer, based as they are on those of Hegel, Freud and Marx.

Adorno would probably see straight through the question begging that goes on in both Pragmatism and Logical Positivism. Both these philosophies fail to self-apply, in a logical failure which is also a failure to exhibit the intellectual virtue of humility. If we ask the Pragmatist about the utility of his view that truth is utility he cannot answer. Similarly, Logical Positivism's own claim, that meaningful statements are either verifiably true or verifiably false using the procedures of science, fails, even less than Pragmatism, to self-apply, because we simply can't verify the nonexistence of a meaningful but unverifiable statement. This result, which conclusively has shown nearly all major-league philosophers that Logical Positivism is deep nonsense, has been generalized in recent years to show that there are even apparently scientific statements, such as statements as to what transpires inside black holes, which are not verifiable.

However, the nonsense of Pragmatism and of Logical Positivism had in the period 1930 to about 1980 much influence, again direct and indirect, on educated Americans. Directly, they were exposed to it in undergraduate survey courses and of course as philosophy specialists. Indirectly the ideas were in the air, and they have had strong influence on the management, and the mismanagement, of America's economy and its foreign policy.

For this reason, and because of the deconstruction of a decent educational system, contemporary post-moderns in America find actual post-modern classics including Dialectic of Enlightenment tough going.

But to be constructive. "Dialectic" in the title refers to a form of logic which commencing with the early 19th century German philosopher Hegel. It is presented, superficially, in survey classes as a weird kind of pseudo-logic in which things become their opposite, and then the thing and its opposite "synthesize" to form a higher, more involved thing.

But this superficial nonsense fails to account for the dialectic at all. The dialectic is a response, in the real material conditions that have obtained in developed societies since the end of the 18th century, to the fact that mere traditional logic is a closed system. Mere traditional logic seems to the ordinary person verbal games and, strikingly, it is the same to the evolved modern mathematician if he's of the "formalist" school. You merely have to change the axioms to get the results you want in mere traditional logic.

Tradtional (and modern) logic is like a machine for accomplishing our purposes that it becomes (in indeed a dialectic fashion) the opposite of what we need. The 17th century philosopher Leibniz was so impressed by the apparent power of primitive forms of modern logic that he thought that any dispute would be by now, at the close of the millenium, settled in gentlemanly fashion with "let us calculate, sir." As what would now be termed a high-paid "consultant" to the CEOs of his time and place (petty, and small-minded, German princelings) Leibniz included political and social matters in this view.

Leibniz saw in logic a machine that would remove decisionmaking from passion and self-interest and indeed logic, and its technological, embodied form the modern digital computer, does so with such thoroughness that the "fair" decision machine becomes its opposite. We merely have to change the program to get the results we want, whether those results be true and fair and just, or deep nonsense.

Hegel, Marx and Freud were healthy and human reactions to this manipulative spirit, and dialectical logic, far from being anti-modern-logic (as its more hysterical opponents like Quine seem to feel), actually rescues traditional and modern logic from criminal manipulation. For example, in human and in social affairs, the very fact that each actor is not a thing and has capabilities to react to features of the system in totality, consistently makes social planning self-defeating. In the Five Year Plans of the Stalin era, the very fact that factory managers were more or less informed of the direction of the whole caused the numerical decision procedures used in determining whether those targets would be met to be distorted towards optimism that caused famine and war. In the Reagan White House, the commitment of an autistic Chief Executive to meeting impossible economic targets likewise caused his budget director, David Stockman, to fudge the numbers using a primitive spreadsheet and what Stockman called "the magic asterisk" to identify needed savings, not yet identified, that would balance the books.

Traditional and modern logic is a babe in the woods as regards such chicanery. But the dialectic, centering human over technical relationships, sees and can account for this behavior. Its overall procedure is to weigh irreconcilable interests against each other, to predict the synthesis that will result. In Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectical claim is that the very science and technology produced by the 18th century enlightenment would over time produce its opposite. Kant's individual freedom to be a knower (a scientist or independent entrpreneur) would turn, amid the pressure of real human events, into a higher form of enslavement.

A must-have for any student of Monet. Volumne I contains covers his biography proper, while volumes II-IV provide a COMPLETE record of the artist's body of work.

Wilderstein protrays Monet life for the most part as that of a debtor. However to his credit, he tempers the romantic "suffering artist" idealism with insight into Monet the creditor. By illustrating what a jackass the artist could also be, the author creates a deep and lively narrative.

Most of the personal insight into Monet come to us by way of coorespondance with Alice Hoeschede. Due to 'appearances' however she requested of Monet her letters be destroyed immediately and thus we're sadly left with a one-sided portrait of the man. While his artistic talents we're unparalled, it's his devotation to correspondance that allows Wildenstein to bring him back to life. Without giving away the ending, it's Monet's inability to write rather than paint that signals the end.

If you are in love with Claude Monet's Water Lily Pond paintings, this is the best book for an explanation as to their origins and where Monet found his inspiration. There is a photograph from 1926 showing the bridge covered with climbing plants.

The Japanese Bridge at Giverny, 1924 is just one of the outstanding paintings in a series of works devoted to the bridge that preoccupied Monet during his final years.

Monet loved his garden at Giverny with such a passion that one could say it bordered on obsession. Harmony in Green, The White Water Lilies, The Water Lily Pond are all explained in detail. There is even a picture of Monet photographed in his beloved garden in 1917.

In every life there is beauty and sadness. The beauty of the water lilies contrasts with the pain Monet felt when he painted Camille on her death bed.

When Monet's wife died, she not only left him without a companion, he then had small children depending on him. He spent most of his meager earnings on his wife's medical treatments and he was also deeply depressed and alone.

This type of revealing information makes him so very human and the paintings then contain a certain depth when these secrets are revealed.

I loved this book! The pictures were wonderful and the readings that went with them were as well. Learned many things that I did not know about his artwork. VERY informative...give it a try, it would make a great gift book!

I can't believe people are STILL being taken in by this decades old hoax. Edmund B. Szekeley makes many claims which have never been substantiated by any independent witness.

Claim 1: He says he "found" this manuscript in several places, such as the Vatican. The Vatican keeps detailed records of who is allowed to enter it's library and read and research. Strangely enough, Eddy's name does not appear on this list anywhere. The Vatican also has no record of this manuscript, or anything like it, ever being housed there.

He also claims he found this manuscript in
a) A monastery in Monte Cassino monastery which was, as is well known, destroyed by being bombed during the Second World War. Interestingly, Szekeley made no mention of the Hebrew fragments found at Monte Cassino until after the war.

b) The National Library of Vienna. Per Beskow (in Strange Tales About Jesus) says that when he asked the National Library of Vienna about the Old Slavonic text, the reply was sent that there is no such text, that a number of people have made inquiries about the text, and the general opinion was that Szekeley made it up.

Of course, there's always the possibility that a man with no formal training managed to learn ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Old Slavonic, found an incredible manuscript that no one else had ever heard of, or even seen, and then a vast international conspiracy formed in order to discredit him.

It is clear that people who really really really wish hard enough, and are willing to believe anything, will still happily lap up this tripe. Point those people to me, I've got a nice piece of the True Cross I'd like to sell you, and I think I just might have found the undersea location of Atlantis.

I do know that the healing method outlined in this book works.I was bedridden for nearly a year with a severe blood disorder... and the MD's had given up on me. I applied the healing method I found in the Essene Gospel of Peace Book I... eating a diet of raw fruits, vegetables and sprouts... and fasting to cleanse the toxic matter out of the body. My healing was like walking out of a cloud of fog.
I believe that the Essene Gospel of Peace Book I is one of the most important books ever published on health, healing, diet and spiritual living ever published. pete2000@budget.net

This is one of the more inspired books that I have read. As is often said, it is academic to ascertain whether these are the true words of Jesus. What is salient is that one listens to the spirit speak inside you to determine the value of the words.

This book is very short. In short, the book outlines the importance of diet, fasting, and practices that will invite purity into the body. What is more important than these simple mechanics - however - is the greater idea that you cannot defile the one place that houses a direct communication with God - your body. To paraphrase: if you eat of death, you inherit death.

Excellent and inspiring.

I have not yet formed an opinion on "The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ,", but I wish I hadn't bought it. It turns out that this book is only a portion of a larger book by the same translator. It saves money and time to go ahead and purchase the complete "The Gospel of the Essenes" (which includes "The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ") rather than the incomplete, earlier published version. The difference in costs between the two books is relatively small.

Some of the most inspiring scripture to come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I have even quoted it on my Peace Miracles website (but we are not allowed to post URL's here, sorry) The vision described in the Essene scriptures is coming true today. Peace Be With You

Dear Readers: I just received Books 2&3 of "The Gospel of the Essenes". Based upon a misreading of the Table of Contents, I thought Book 1 was included with Books 2 & 3. In fact, the Table of Contents of "The Gospel of the Essenes" state that Book 1 (The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ) is published separately. Sorry about my previous comment(s).

I found this book very disappointing. It's too predictable in the demographics covers. It never ventures beyond the core themes in the field. Its conclusions are mundane and stereotypically leftist. The charts and graphs look pretty but, in general, are not all that functional. Some of the commentary is crackpot conspiracy grist (see page 98 where they argue that the Federal Reserve Bank policy of trying to contain inflation is an instrument of economic oppression). And, occasionally, the charts just simply distort the truth. For example, on page 200, there is a graph charting the sex, race, and education of Democrats. And, on page 202, there is a similar graph charting the sex, race, and education of Republicans. However, the scale of each of these differs: the scale of the Republican one is smaller. At a glance, it looks as though Democrats are statistically more educated than Republicans (which the numbers refute). Perhaps, I quibble over this last point, but I found the leftist bias of this book incredibly annoying. And, by the way, NO, I am not a Republican. I suppose Progressive Democrats, Green party advocates, free trade protesters and other partisan intellectual lightweights might enjoy the sermon but I would have preferred something that was more objective this.

Rock solid analysis of the economy, the nation and each state from a free market, conservative point of view. Lot's of great numbers, charts and graphs.

This book should be well worn and highlighted thoroughly within weeks, then placed right on the shelf next to the dictionary and thesaurus as an invaluable reference guide. US By the Numbers contains invaluable, concise, and well organized information complete with visually appealing and easy to comprehend graphs to emphasize their points. This book is not just for statisticians, policy wonks, or professors - it is a must read for entrepreneurs, voters, and students.

I can't really see a point to this book. It brings nothing new to the Arbuckle story, and the writing is weak. There's nothing here that wasn't covered in more detail -- and better -- in David Yallop's "The Day the Laughter Stopped."

Being a longtime fan of Buster Keaton and his pal Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, I had to pick this up. This story has all the requisite Hollywood characters and themes; the millionaire star, the bigamist old shrew out for money and blackmail, the Hollywood "Party Girl" with a past, a prosecutor with an eye on reelection instead of justice, witnesses threatened, illegal booze...it's all here. Arbuckle's career was ruined in a scandal. Ruined is not the correct word. Imagine a raw egg hitting a brick wall, and you get some idea of Arbuckle's life that Labor Day weekend back in '21. Arbuckle was innocent, but that didn't stop unscrupulous people from using him as a scapegoat for the "sins of Hollywood". This book also contains the only actual version of what REALLY happened. Arbuckle evidently related the actual story to very few people. Read on, the answer's at the end!

Don't let the sensationalistic-sounding title throw you -- this is an EXTREMELY well-written and compelling book about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, the silent film comic who was wrongfully accused of rape and murder. A wonderful, funny man lost his career and his good name -- all because his Hollywood bosses wanted to save a few bucks. This book is well worth the out-of-print wait!

OK, you can't rate this book on the level of literature, cuz it's not. From that point of view it's horrible. But you can rate it on what it might teach you if you let it "speak to you." This is a book that can easily be taken two ways. 1) An inspiring look at theater and at life, and 2) the cheesiest, corniest, campiest thing ever. I myself have wondered at times how I really feel about this book. I have had it read it throughout this past quarter for my Stagecraft class, and it can say a whole lot or it can say nothing, depending on how you read it. The author's absolute passion for all aspects of theater often comes across as wishy-washy, but if you set that aside, you might, if you love theater, find that you can relate to what he is saying. Or you might make fun of it incessantly! Which I have done a few times. But seriously, it's the kind of book that if you tell yourself you'll take a lot out of it, you will. And in several ways, I have.

my set design professor described this as the book to read when one is disillusioned with theater and need to restore faith, and I have to agree. It reminds us of the total art of theater, where poetry is expressed verbally, visually, and through the _presence_ of actors in a setting. It describes the curious not-reality that theater should create. It was written in 1941, so some of the references ring a little false and the language can wax florid, but the essence of what theater should be is described here.

This author seems to rely on secondhand accounts and the book seems more of an attack against non-Christians than anything else. Yes, this book is definitely written from a Christian viewpoint, and as such is a bit biased. It never even mentions the possibility that such activities may be beneficial, or that practitioners of such things as Wicca are genuinely happy. I personally know no one who has been possessed or driven to suicide because of the board. Read such books at your own discretion, but please keep an open mind; this is not the only view, or the only way.

Happy to see (read)some one who is willing to consider the right and wrong of something. Today's age of spiritism is greatly pursuing how to do many things but seldom considers that "because we can" does not mean "we should". Christianity (rooted in Judaism, the oldest faith in existence) has always warned of the dangers of turning to occultism for truth instead of the "father of truth" God. This book explains why christianity is concerned for all those who use ouija boards to explore the spiritism so common in today's culture.

This book includes the history of the ouija board and also cites specific, compelling examples of those who have come to harm thru its use. It is ironic that Monopoly manufacturer Parker Bros Games bought the rights to ouija and then moved its operations to a most appropriate place - Salem, Mass, home of the infamous witch trials. Gruss's book is a must-read for anyone interested in this potentially dangerous pasttime and especially for unsuspecting parents seeking a fun game for the kids.

The collection is very interesting, in that one gets a sense of Zizek's theoretical perspective and methodological tendencies across a range of texts. It also forces one to reconsider Lacan's work. Unfortunately, the book itself is riddled with typographical errors. The publisher should be thoroughly embarrassed by this.

Slavoj Zizek, one of the greatest minds of the late 20th century, is well repersented in this excellent collection of essays. His points of view on everything (women, philosophy, and culture) come through loud and clear. The integration of psychoanalytic, marxist, poststructural, and postmodern critiques is refreshing and his treatment of Lacan through examples from pop culture is particuraly wonderful as it aids those that are new to the subject matter (great teaching tool!). A must read for anyone that wants to get a closer look at the spectre of today's somewhat frightening culture.

In his preface and his original contributions to the selections in this reader, Zizek offers a clearer statement of his position [and of his interpretation of the later writings of Lacan] than in any of his other books. His voice is one which one must engage in dialogue if one is to both appropriate Marxism, psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralism and then move beyond them. He acknowledges post-structualism's accent on contingencies and the limitations of human conceptualization and theorizing while also accenting the irreplaceable roles that imagination, fantasy and idology play in our psycic and social lives. He accents the need to critique ideology and to work through our fantasies so that one can non-reductively acknowledge the uniqueness of ourselves and what we encounter and the ejoyments present in such encounters. He writes so that one can see in the antagonisms present in current forms of neo-capitalism, sexism and racism the grounds for hoping for worthwhile accomplishments in seeking to lessen the domination and oppression they are causing. This reader provides an excellent beginning point for thinkers who want to join cultural and psychoanalytic analyses in a project of social action, and who along the way want to enjoy Zizek's marvelous use of film and literature to exemplify his theoretical points. A must reading for serious students of the current social and cultural world.