Absolutely a wonderful adaptation of the original for younger readers. I have younger kids, ages 5 & 7 and they love this book and the others like it. It is a good book for "Transitional" readers in the 1st and 2nd grade. I just love the fact I can share these wonderful stories with them!

You can also see my review of Aslan, another picture book in this series. The entire series is just wonderful. The text is pure Lewis - all excerpts from the original text. Maze is very true to his descriptions in her illustrations. My daughters love the original novels and they love these books as well! The only concern for this particular book is that some of the illustrations can be a little scary for a sensitive child. The witch is evil but beautiful. Her cohorts are evil and many are gruesome.

I grew up reading the Narnia books, and I was thrilled to find this beautifully illustrated child's version! My 4 year old son loves for us to read this book to him as well as the other two Narnia books illustrated by Deborah Maze. Keep in mind that this book is only a small portion of the original book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." With that in mind, sit down with a little one and enjoy the story and the incredible, detailed drawings from the world of Narnia!

This is a POWERFUL book. A good, quick read from some of our premier modern-day American historians. This collection of essays gives us an inside look at most of the presidencies of the second half of the 20th century. A must read for any history buff.

• Edmund Morris - Last fall, Morris published the controversial biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. His book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

• Ben Bradlee - Author of That Special Grace, a tribute to John F. Kennedy, Bradlee is a vice president at the Washington Post. He previously was the executive editor at the Post who oversaw reporting of the Watergate scandal.

• David Maraniss - A reporter at the Washington Post since 1977, Maraniss earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. He subsequently wrote the Clinton biography, First in his Class. His latest book is When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.

The "Power and the Presidency" series was created on behalf of the Montgomery Endowment by alumnus Robert A. Wilson of Dallas, a communications consultant who put together a similar series, "Character Above All" (dealing with the impact of character on presidential leadership) in 1994 at the University of Texas at Austin.

These well written essays provide vivid glimpses of varying Presidential personalities, with thoughtful discussion of individual strengths and weaknesses. To me, especially in an election year where character is a major issue, it was an enthralling read, with highlights of qualities such as "Reagan's voice, which was a large part of Reagan's power..." or the speaking style of TR, with plosive P sounds, which "would pop with Gatling-gun force. The effect of his oratory was to bury every word in the psyche of his listeners." or the political genius exhibited by FDR who talked "at a level at which very few people could follow him and understand what he was really saying" that FDR also recognized in a young congressmen, LBJ, as "he saw Johnson understood _everything_ he was talking about." I enjoyed reading these examples of behavior and the illuminating contrasts such as: "It is hard to imagine two more different men than Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy..." or "despite the major differences in their temperaments--indeed, I would argue, because of these differences--Eleanor and Franklin forged their historic partnership..." I would recommend to readers the book "Presidential Temperament" by Choiniere and Keirsey, another well researched volume which gives an explanation of "how each President's temperament inevitably expressed itself in his behavior, both in office and in his personal life."

The professor who required this book in the class I took a few years ago knows the author, Edmund Morgan, personally. She told a story of how she and several other professors were having dinner with Morgan during a History convention. One professor remarked that Morgan's resume must be as thick as a book due to his successful career. Morgan responded that he had no resume and the other professors realized that if Morgan needed funding for a certain project, his name was all that was needed. After reading this book, I can understand why Morgan is so respected in his field. Not only is this work well researched but the writing style is very engaging. Morgan covers the following topics: Puritan ideology and views on freedom; marriage (a husband's authority was actually more limited than in other societies); parents and children (children-even girls-left home to live with their master as an apprentice in their chosen, or their parent's chosen, calling or, in the case of girls, house keeping); the importance of early education; punishment; masters and servants (a master was as responsible for the soul of his servant as he was for the soul of his child); the church and social order (Puritans should live in families as solitude was cause for suspicion); and tribalism. In the first chapter, Morgan explains the paradox between good conduct and salvation in Puritan belief. Good conduct was regarded as the result of salvation not the cause of it. . Anyone interested in Puritan life will find this 186-page book an excellent introduction.

I wasn't sure whether this was going to be a positive or a negative survey of Puritan life and times when I started reading it. Most people don't have very many nice things to say about them- usually comments about black clothing and the Salem witch trials. But the truth is, although the Puritans had plenty of problems, they've gotten a bit of a bad rap in history. They were actually far more lively and earthy than most people would suspect; they had much more in common with Shakespeare's times than with Victorian England.

And so Morgan's thesis is not that the Puritan's were ascetics or prudes- they weren't. Rather, their real fault lay in a sort of 'Christian tribalism', in the belief that since the elect in any generation were few in number anyway, they could avoid evangelism in favor of spiritual isolationism. Since the reasoned that the Church of one generation was generally comprised of the children of the last generation, their only real task was to preach to the choir. And so they fell into a decay of the soul that manifested itself as outward prosperity and inward apathy. Their zeal dissipated into mere trans-generational commercial institutionalism and snobbery. And so the foundation they laid down gradually faded into the overall fabric of a quickly growing Colonial society.

But in spite of their faults, the Puritans contributed a vast amount of effort and philosophy towards the make-up of American society today. And although they may be remembered for their obsessions with the devil and witches, they were not in fact the sum of their mistakes. It's easy to criticize in retrospect. Morgan's book helps provide a more thorough understanding of the why's and not just the what's of their history. Once the reader comes to an understanding of how the Puritans thought, he will have more appreciation for their contributions and more charity in his assessment of their foibles.

The Puritan Family was an admirably balanced study of a people with a colorful past. It was first published over 50 years ago, and it certainly won't alter current perceptions of what Puritanism was, but it's still a very informative read for anyone who is interested in the truth, and not in stereotypes.

This is the (slightly revised) doctoral dissertation by Edmund Morgan, one of the most renowned of all American historians. It analyzes Puritan society by exploring the relationships among these early New Englanders. Although he discusses master-servant relationships, his main focus is on the family. The reason for this is that the Puritans saw the family as the highest social institution, and as the foundation of their churches and government. Indeed, he shows how the family relationship is extended to explain their relationship to God (ie-they saw themselves as both the sons of God and as the bride of Christ).

It is one of Morgan's earliest works, and the concluding chapter sets the stage for his later "Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea." No serious student of colonial New England can neglect this book, if only because of the enormous impact of its author.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois, McLuhan 'twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at St.Michael's college in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
Many commentators flirt with the ambiguities of McLuhan's vision but a true understanding of the coherence of this vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly links McLuhan's , at the time rather unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the very early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of 'the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug," the prophetic huckster gives his reason for being satiric and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This is a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, a sort of poet who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan follows Joyce in his unrelenting punning ambiguities - a strategy for multiplying meanings. There is never anything linear, logical or definite in the "probes" that Dr. McLuhan injects into situations. But it is never a matter of listing either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as learning how to follow a both/and approach to events that most interests McLuhan in his Joycean and satiric posture.
Theall, being one of the few people knowledgeable of the deep background of scholarship behind McLuhan's contemporary façade, is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan is neither fish nor fowl, neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and planted the first oar in the side of post-modernism by becoming himself another virtual self.
What is almost always missed except by a very few and Theall foremost, is the perception of the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because ("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature. His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at jfraim@symbolism.org. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

Gotta say, i've used several review book for the boards, and this one certainly has good stuff. easy to use tables, graphs, and a compilation of all the important stuff from the other review books. not a bible like first aid, but a good, clean comprehensive review. helped me match ortho baby.

good luck

Terrific review book. It's in the body systems format and does a good job of integrating material, with the possible exception of pharm. Very useful for Step 1 study.

for a first edition, this book does have some errors but it is by far the best thing out there right now ... excellent diagrams, great figures, and phenomenal systems-based approach to the boards ...

a must buy for the individual who wants to do well on the boards!!!!

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 big problem with this book is the title. The book should have been titled "An Introduction to Economic Data that Impact Investments".

The unstated premise of this book is that you must understand and follow scores of economic indexes to make profitable investments. If you agree with that premise, this book is for you.

I tend to think that making money on the stock/bond markets requires more than just understanding economics. Whatever that is, you will not find it in this book.

The average person does not know much about the U.S. economy, even though they are connected to it everyday. Mr. Mennis' book, How the Economy Works, takes this complex subject down to the average readers skill, and takes them step by step through each aspect of it. I was galvanised by the way Mennis used graphs and charts to back up his text. It was very refreshing to see this, because in school, they explain, but never show you how it works in life. If you want to major in business this would be a great book for you. Mr. Mennis tells about starting up a new business and how to work the stock market, so it doesn't work you. Mennis believes that the five best ideas for understanding investments are listing specific goals, how to meet these goals, set an absolute rate of return so you can see it your goal is realistic, a time in which to measure your results and to determine the risks involved before getting into a situation you can't get out of. If you still want more info buy the book, it's a great way to learn about the U.S. Economy.

this is the handiest book i've found that provides organized historical economic data and information where to find more past and present data. it is a great introduction to understanding what all the data really means that is published on a regular basis.

Cambridge companions are about philosophers and thinkers who have opened new and alternative ways of thinking in history of philosophy and have well established themselves in Western thought. Now there is no problem in writing about Husserl or anybody else in the history of philosophy from whatever vantage point one wants to; it can prove fruitful exercise. But when one claims to illuminate key historical figures for the student, one is responsible to illuminate the point of view from which its really justified at all to compile such a companion on the relevant philosopher. Using this book as a guide to Husserl would leave you wondering "well so what did this guy do all in all." Husserl as presented here is a philosophical logician of Russell variety, but seriously perplexed in his engagement with the problems, but with occassional insights in this or that subject. Well if this is what we should understand from Husserl, then he doesn't deserve a place in no companion to landmark philosophers. If he does he should be taken from the point of view of the tradition in which he has achieved his historical stature as the founder of the phenomenological school (which doesnt mean we should be uncritical and dogmatic)
The essays here deserve much better than two stars, some of them are very good quality. But the overall conception, being the kind of book its claimed to be, is very misleading.

"The Cambridge Companion to Husserl" is useful in the following ways. First it helps to somehow finish with the legend that the reason Husserl turned away from psychologism was because of Frege's review. Secondly there are very good essays on Husserl's phenomenology, particularly Jakko Hintikka's "The Phenomenological Dimension" which restores the role of phenomenology not as merely looking for noemas, but to refer and know the object itself, giving an account of the Husserlian difference between sense (meaning) and reference (object). Another good essay was Dallas Willard's "Knowledge" which accounts for the epistemological dimension of Husserl's phenomenology.

This anthology also accounts for Husserl's analytical philosophy. From these readings the best essay I could find was Kit Fine's "Part-whole", which deals with the often disregarded Husserlian doctrine of the part and whole in the third logical investigation. The other essay that seemed less interesting was Peter Simons' "Meaning and language". This essay has the defect of not taking into account the Husserlian difference between "states of affairs" and "situation of affairs" which leads him into many equivocal views on Husserl.

However, the worst essay in this anthology was Richard Tieszen's "Mathematics". This apparent authority in Husserlian doctrine on his philosophy of mathematics seems to ignore the Husserlian notions of "categorial intuition" and "categorial abstraction" which both are the way in which mathematical and logical objects are known. This is explained in Husserl's sixth investigation from sections 40-52 and sections 59 to 66. However, Tieszen seems to ignore this and attributes Husserlian mathematical epistemology to an unexplained way that we detect invariants from the flow of experience. Readers should take this into account when evaluating Tieszen's essay.

The Cambridge Companion to Husserl contains essays by various Husserl scholars who attempt to show the relevance of Husserl's ideas to many recent issues in philosophy. Barbosa says that I seem to ignore Husserl's ideas of categorial intuition and categorial abstraction and to characterize Husserlian mathematical epistemology in terms of detecting invariants in the flow of experience. Evidently Barbosa did not read the paper very carefully. Footnote 17 gives some examples of places to look in Husserl's writings for the view that ideal objects (including mathematical objects) are to be understood as invariants through the variations in our cognitive acts and processes. Many more citations to Husserl's works could be added to this footnote. In my paper I do not use the terms 'categorial intuition' and 'categorial abstraction'. So I am guilty of not using these terms but I am not guilty of failing to discuss the ideas of intuition and abstraction in mathematics. There are many technical Husserlian terms that I do not use in the paper. I do use the terms 'intuition' and 'abstraction'. In places where I use these terms and describe Husserl's views on mathematical intuition and the abstractions, idealizations and formalizations involved in mathematics, I also cite Husserl's texts on categorial intuition and categorial abstraction. An attentive reviewer would only need to see footnotes 16, 19 and 24. Open Husserl's Logical Investigations, for example, to sections 40-58 and read the Chapter title: Sensuous and Categorial Intuitions.

After hearing the Author on a radio program I decided to get this book. I was a little disappointed. The book has some great ideas on how to obtain information on people, but the author does not tell you how to go about getting this information. Alot of this book is about the author's personal experiences, but again he does not tell you how he got the information from his sources to solve the case. I guess if he did he would be out of a job!

I found this book to be a wealth of information on what information tracks people, is public, or provided to anyone for a minimal fee. I was especially surpised to find information about MYSELF...which is why I bought 'Hide your assets and disappear'. I agree with another review that states that the book is interesting and helps explain how people are traced..but fails to instruct exactly HOW it is you should go about it. I would have liked to have seen a more precise, instructional book...but I still recommend this as a great read. Using the book's advice and the internet I've come across lots of information that has proved useful. It's a small investment with a big pay-off in knowledge. Perhaps he'll write a follow-up where he goes into more detail. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK and enjoyed it.

This is a book that is very current with the information, and has some great information not found in other books on this topic. I have read every book I can find on this subject and this is by far one of the best.

This book was a disappointment as I expected new information of the Allied side and the German side in Normandy. It is actually a discussion of what the Germans did and why everything that Montgomery did was exactly correct. The author then attacks the British military leaders who opposed Montgomery and supported a move to "sack" him after "Operation Goodwood". The Americans are mentioned only in passing in terms of "naive", "not the student of war that Montgomery was", and why Omaha was almost a disaster. There is the argument that Montgomery should have commanded the forces as Eisenhower was not a real General. Contrary to most accounts, the author argues that Montgomery did not suffer from a lack of British manpower. However, he does mentions the problems of trying to make infantry out of sailors and airmen.

This book is not the definitive overview of "Operation Overlord". It stitches together views and opinions of Germans and British soldiers to cover the time period. While these views/opinions are often incisive and convey the horror of battle, too much of the book is spent justifying the actions, or inactions, of Gen. Montgomery and denigrating the actions of British commanders who did not agree with Montgomery's actions. The Americans only appear briefly, all too often, they are belittled as not being equal to Montgomery in "generalship". There are several pages of pictures; but several pages of maps would help the general reader better understand the battle.

Edmund Blandford's book, 'Two Sides of the Beach' offers the reader an interesting insight into the British and German soldiers who were involved in the attack and defence of the Normandy beaches in 1944. This book is mainly a collection of first hand accounts provided by front line soldiers, officers and members of the General Staff. The accounts detail the fighting from the invasion on June 6th 1944, until the final Allied breakout during 'Operation Totalise'. The accounts are woven skillfully together by the author and present a fairly complete picture of the campaign as seen through the eyes of the British and Canadian 'Tommies' as well as soldiers of the German Army and Waffen-SS.

By no means is this a comprehensive account of the Normandy campaign, it is more of an oral history similar in style to Gerald Astor or Lyn MacDonald and just as good. This book would blend in well and complement such campaign studies as Max Hasting's 'Overlord' (1984) or Carlo D'este's 'Decision in Normandy' (1983) as well as many other detailed histories. The beauty of this book is in the first-hand accounts provided by the participants, they are brutally honest and refreshing. They give you a real idea of what the soldiers endured during the fighting for Normandy and the subsequent breakout.

The only problem that I found with this book was the total lack of maps, just a few of the area would have been appreciated. However a number of good black & white photographs were provided in the book that fitted in with the story. Overall this was a most interesting account and the narrative was fast paced and well researched. I am sure that anyone who enjoys a good historical account or has a passion for the Normandy campaign will appreciate this book.