More Pages: Perry Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92


up to date guide to thriving within a large organization

The World's 1st Book In 60 LanguagesI'm in grade 10, in Toronto, the world's most multilingual city. Here, most people don't speak English at home.
I took the book to school for show and tell. My friends loved it. They all wanted copies. I've made lots of new friends, people I didn't know started asking for copies. Suddenly I was cool at school.
It is fun to learn a few words in a foreign language. It really impresses everyone, especially the girls.
It's awesome how students who never spoke to each other are socializing. The Chinese, the Indians, the English, the Africans and the other cultural groups, they used to hang out separately. Now, everyone is talking to each other. I've met so many new friends from other cultures and I've learned so much. It is un...believable. I think this book should be given to everyone in highschool, like a textbook.
I would recommend this book to any student going to school with foreign speaking students. And, it is a great gift. Canada's national newspaper "The National Post" calls it "the perfect stocking stuffer". It has been nominated for the Guiness Book of World Records - as the first book written in 60 languages. I think my Dad should get the Noble Peace Prize.


A very well crafted political and feminist biography.

One Of The Best!

You won't be disappointed

Excellent Resource for Chemists

Blaze Starr's biography that the movie Blaze was based on

The Real American RevolutionPerry convincingly describes this era as a time when new ideas met with new audiences, a time when evangelists like Charles Finney, Lyceum lecturers including visionaries like Emerson, abolitionists such as Garrison, circuit ridingMethodist ministers, mountebanks such as the Twain's fictionalized "King" and the "Duke," beggars and Yankee peddlers, co-created with the people a new kind of democratic theater in a new national imaginarium. Perry shows how the contentiousness between rival groups as to what constituted American culture, a contest which has continued throughout American history, began in this era. For instance in the expanding urban of New York "b-hoys" (antecendents of "b-boys?") invaded the new Astor Place theater (which catered to a newly self-conscious upper-class) and shouting the name of their hero, American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest, pelted a high-toned English actor with rotten vegetables in a gesture of cultural defiance. The conflict ended the next day when the police shot and killed 15 of the rioters.
His main thesis is that in this creation of the new popular culture, the beginnings of "modernism" are visible. Modernism is a slippery term, of course, which he readily admits, but does go to some length to define what he means by it, noting how different disciplines employ different definitions. He notes for instance that most historians draw the line according to economic acitivity positing the beginning of modernism in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and defending this view by citing how the war sped up the process of the consolidation of capital and the centralization of the industrial economy of the United States. But an economic basis for judging the onset of modernism, he argues, is not sufficient. He suggests that in the performative culture of this era, in the radical individualism of this post-revolutionary era, the new subjectivity of modernism was also evident. Free to clothe themselves in new ideas, to invent new livelihoods (evangelist, abolitionist, missionary, democratic politician, etc.) or to move between occupations as necessary (lawyer, doctor, farmer) Americans, during this time when boundaries between professions and careers were not as well policed as they later became, were subject to the same anxieties and radical discontinuities we experience now.
Some of the texts he uses to support his thesis includeWhitman's individualistic and democratic poetry such as "Song of Myself", Melville's adventure novels, the elegaic romances of Hawthorne (who through such works as "The Scarlet Letter," attempted to drive a stake through the still-beating heart of the Purtinanical past). Perry also gives us new readings of works of European visitors such as Toqueville, who often negatively reported on the expressive individualism and economic self-interest unleashed by "democracy in America" to European aristocrats and bourgeious as a way to warn them of what the inevitable democratic wave might look like when it washed up on their shores.
Based on Perry's research and readings, it appears DeToqueville's writings do need a fresh look. Perry shows how DeToqueville was biased by his aristocratic past, and his initial sources in New England, most of whom looked down their noses at the new democratic culture. Too, DeToqueville, although often praised for his objectivity, was sentimental and attached to the life of the ancien regime. Perry, for instance, tells us how DeToqueville, moved by a an account he had read as a young man of a French aristocrat who lived in exile on an island in a lake in Massachusetts, took a special trip there to revel in the fine wistful sentiment of it all. Perry tells us DeToqueville also took a special trip into the "frontier" (near Detroit at that time) to see real "noble savages." On the way he enountered town Indians, miserable, poor, sick and drunk. He was appalled by their "degeneracy," blind to the role of the American settlers in creating such suffering, but thrilled when he met Native Americans on the frontier who had yet to be conquered and fit his idealized picture of the noble savage he'd encountered in books.
Another key work for Perry is Hawthorne's "The Seven Vagabonds," and some striking passeages from Hawthorne's letters reporting on a trip during which encountered peddlers, performers (one with a wagon featuring a model of the wonders of the ancient world), who are later fictionalized in the story. He also does a nice reading of a passage in James Greenleaf Whittier "Yankee Gypsies" in which Whittier tells of a man who knocks on his door and wordlessly hands him a "soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, [is] sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons..." Whittier tells us that this was the beggar's fourth or fifth incarnation, that he had been begging in different guises for years, and that, actually, they had grown up together as boys.
Other examples of the rise of the mass and mass culture he cites are Matthew Brady's photography studio and P.T, Barnum's Musuem, (which were incidentally located across the street from each other in New York). He shows how through all these new "circuits," the great chaotic experiment of freedom began, and how the Jacksonian republic of the multitude set off into with blithe unknowing into the uncharted waters of modernism.


Books for the home library.

Amazing Book