First the good:

This book is an unbiased account of Globalization and it's effect in several different countries. Each section is written by a different Graduate student from that area of the world. Each account gives a first hand look at how the people of that coutnry view globalization through the eyes of one of it's members.

Second, the Bad:

As stated earlier these are grad students writing these passages so it's hit and mis with these articles. For instance the One on China I found to be very informative and well written while the one on India was poorly written and read more like a promotion for the writers religion.

This book is definately worth the time because it doesn't say Globalization is good or evil, it just gives unbiased information. Just take some of the passages as what they are, graduate study level work

Good overview of the theories and impact of globalization. I also recommend Haley's "Multinational corporations in political environments: Ethics, values and strategies" to understand the limits of the economic powers shaping our society.

Imagine a field report from ten countries of the many ways that globalization is occurring, one of which explains globalization in Hungary in the form of the following common joke, as would the average person in the street:

"...I feel sorry for the enthusiasts of globalization too, especially since I have been told the following joke in Budapest, which ridicules the time/space compression, a favorite concept of globalization theorists. It goes like this: How much time would Hungarians need not to stop littering? The answer is, seven centuries and one second. In the first five centuries we get rid of the Turks, the Habsburgs, and the Russians, who - as is well known - mercilessly forced us to litter. Then about one century is absolutely necessary to define the notion of "Hungarian rubbish" and another one to copy and then to approve the current German law prohibiting littering. And what about that additional second? Ah, that we need to learn how to cheat the new law" (from Janos Kovacs, "Rival Temptations and Passive Resistance," chapter 6:173).

Not all the articles in this compilation contain such amusing and illuminating insights as the above excerpt. Nonetheless, this is a treasure trove of papers that avoids the superficiality of the pop studies on globalization one hand ("Belly of the Beast," "McWorld"); and on the other hand mostly avoids the overly academic studies that lose the reader in a number of word abstractions ("time/space compression"). As one author, Janos Kovacs, wryly points out, economists may count the growing number of baseball bats in Hungary and incorrectly conclude that mass consumer sports are pushing out traditional sports and even religion in the Third World. The supply and demand calculus of the economist would miss the cultural fact that baseball bats in Hungary are replacing knives and guns for street fighting and protection.

The book is the product of a three-year study that was initially framed in a "challenge-response" thesis of globalization, which ended up failing to reflect the reality of the phenomenon, much like rejecting a null hypothesis in science. As editor Peter Berger puts it: "the goal of every scholarly enterprise is to blow someone's theory out of the water. In this instance that someone was me."

The field accounts from political scientist Arturo Talavera on Chile, and Janos Kovacs on Hungary are worth the price of the book alone. Ann Bernstein's piece on globalization in South Africa reads a bit like a national chamber of commerce "promo" that glosses over the very tragic underside of globalization that is occurring in that country.

The book punctures the stereotypes of globalization on either side of the political or ideological spectrum. That Latin American women gain most under the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity runs counter to the notion in America that woman suffer most under the influence of conservative religion. That Coca Cola often serves disaster victims in developing countries faster and better than U.N. aid programs is also likely to be a mind buster. But no matter what world-view (modern or traditional) that one might be seeking to affirm by reading this book, it is more likely than not that it will be disconfirmed (as even the editors preconceptions were not confirmed). As sociologists David Hunter and Joshua Yates aptly state in their concluding paper, the complexity and reality of globalization is likely to "burst the mental bubble," or cognitive map, of members of opposing organizations active in globalizing countries, such as Campus Crusade and Opus Dei on one side, or Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace on the other.
One minor criticism was the failure of the book to include Peter Berger's seminal article "The Four Faces of Global Culture" that formed the skeletal framework of the study. I would have also liked to see more emphasis on how globalization, especially immigration, is changing the West as much as the developing world. Highly recommended.

In this book, Samuel Huntington, who, whether one likes him or hates him has been one of the most commented upon political scientists of the last generation takes on American politics: their realities versus their illusions, promise versus practicalities. And on the whole, he is successful at raising issues: although the book is almost twenty years old, it has managed to stay surprisingly current and valid and still remains though provoking.

I'd reccomend this book to anyone interested in US politics or current affairs but especially to people on the liberal/Huntington-hating typically side of the spectrum, because after reading this book, one might become much more pro- this author. It's striking at times how much he seems like Howard Zinn, etc. in this particular book.....

In his work American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Samuel Huntington shows the existence of a gap between the political ideal and the political reality in American politics. The scope the gap covers is, that a broad consensus exists in the United States on basic political values and beliefs. There also exists a changing intensity of these basic ideals, which varies from time to time, and from group to group. Huntington examines various paradigms within the political system, and focuses of the pros and cons of the "American Creed." Although the book was originally published in 1981, it is still relevant and thought provoking in today's political climate. A solid read, and highly recommended for those interested in political science or political culture.

This book shows the evolution of the Indy Car from the early days until the early 1980s. This is a good reference book but will be very hard to find since it is out-of-print. These race cars were state-of-the-art in 1982.

If you've already got both of Mencken's Chrestomathies, his Prejudices series, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days, Treatise on the Gods, and The American Language, this book will be mostly gratuitous. Otherwise, it's a good collection of his opinions, and opinionated he certainly was. It also includes his introduction to The American Democrat by James Fenimore Cooper, various magazine articles (including two published just before his stroke), and some previously unpublished letters.

The major value in Mencken's writings is that he thought outside of the mainstream. I share his views more often than not, but even when I disagree with him, he makes me think.

I am the son of the author. My father, George Kelsey Dreher (1919-1994), began researching Samuel Huntington in the 1960's when he moved to a town in Connecticut rather near Huntingotn's birthplace. Discovering there had been almost nothing written about our de facto first President of the United States he began deciphering Huntington's handwritten letters. Dad had graduated from Dartmouth, a major in English Honors, in 1941. Then he earned degrees from Oberlin Graduate School of Theology and Yale Divinity School and became an historian of church history for Huntington's era. From 1961-1964 he lectured in religion and philosophy at Wichita University and published several pieces in church periodicals. In 1974 he published his retroform of the 16th century play KING EDWARD I, by George Peele, and provided an introduction for the 13th century rebellion of Lluellen, Prince of Wales, who fought the Crown for Welsh sovereignty. While minister of Mystic Congregational Church in Connecticut, he was given a partial sabbatical in 1980 when Yale Divinity School awarded him a fellowship for continuing research on "The Presidency of Samuel Huntington in the Light of New England Religion." He was able to exhaust any known references to Samuel Huntington's tenure as President of Congress and his family's religious background. He completed the manuscript after retirement in 1984 and it was published posthumously in 1996. Dad's writing has been called "fascinating", "comprehensive", "poetic", "forceful", and "brilliant". Others have said, "We may well thank Dreher." And, "This book is a valuable addition to our understanding the birth pains of our nation." It is sold at the Governor Samuel Huntington Museum in Scotland, Connecticut, and at Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia.

Scent in the garden is like the watermark on fine piece of linen stationary: almost imperceptible. Yet the same piece of linen without the faint watermark is noticeably less impressive, blah, boring. Scent is a quality that enhances the emotional experience of the garden but is usually just below the surface of conscious observation. Take the fragrance of the earth and the bounty of scented flowers away, though, and our garden of pleasure becomes noticeably less memorable.

How to get started is often the hardest part of a new gardening venture. Scented Plants by David Squire is the perfect way to start planting for fragrance. Laid out in short chapters that cover many aspects of scented plants, this book provides just enough information for the beginner to truly get involved in aromatic gardening.

The first chapter explains scent and the different ways plants perfume the air. It also provides suggestions for plants that will provide scent throughout the seasons as well as into the evening. The water color graphics of these seasonal gardens will spark your imagination and you will find yourself situating these layouts amongst your own landscape.
The second chapter covers the mechanics of creating the scented garden. How to plant, prune and care for the garden of your fragrant dreams. There are suggestions for everything from doorways to water gardens. Need a fragrant trellis cover or windowsill box filler? How about filling that old wheelbarrow with an ocean of perfume? You can even choose plants to add to your existing gardens, whether they be cottage gardens, wild gardens or formal gardens.

The last chapter is a quickie encyclopedia with full color photos and the particular growing requirements of more than 250 plants.

Just one caveat. We did find one reference to use of a chemical pesticide. There are better ways to fight pests. We suggest The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control.

All in all this is a great book for anyone interested in putting in airs!

This book has 59 tours in the Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Park areas and around Huntington Lake. Describes some beautiful country. Each tour is rated with difficulty, length, elevatnion, navigation, time, and season. The USGS topos for the tour are listed, along with excellent tour maps. Each tour has a description of what you see, where to start, and leads you thorough the tour.

I like the book, but I would also like to see an index and more tours for the Yosemite high country.

Mary Hallock Foote came west with her engineer husband Arthur D. Foote, a dreamer-engineer, to build dams, lay out canals, and tame the vast desert areas. While they waited through one frustration after another with various backers, she kept the family solvent with her delightful sketches and stories, all the while raising her children on the boundary of civilization. Oh, that's with the help of a proper English tutor, of course.

Her prose is grandiloquent in the early chapters, something of an annoying Victorian mannerism in my mind. She lavishes compliments with abandon on her family and associates, as well as the landscape. Thank goodness the editors carefully footnoted Mrs. Foote! Otherwise the reader wouldn't have a clue as to whom she was writing about so ecstatically. (Actually, the volume is soundly annotated and edited throughout.)

However, in the later chapters, when the family settles down in Idaho, near what was to be the highest dam in the world at the time, the Arrowrock, her prose deepens and her style strengthens. She begins to incorporate her western life, the engineers and workers lives, into her stories. The geological phrase, "Angle of Repose," emerges in this section. The prose, like the work, becomes purposeful in its passion.

Is is, after all, of Mary Hallock Foote and her husband, Arthur, that Wallace Stegner wrote in his Pulitzer prize-winning fictional account, "The Angle of Repose." Here we really get the story in the words of those who lived it.

The frustrations of engineering the dam and engineering the financial and political backing are superbly related. The latter half of the book is more than worth the slower early portion. The account it bears of life in the early western United States is a treasure of its times. I heartily recommend it.

This is a very fine, well-written book, and it has become pretty much a standard text in the history of the West. Though the setting is by and large eastern Wyoming of the late nineteenth century, and the subject matter is cattle ranching, this book will be much more satisfying to liberal-minded historians and populists than typical cattle ranchers. Anyone who appreciates or sympathizes with the underdogs in SHANE but would like a more historically accurate picture of the struggles for land and cattle in the West might want to give this a look. It is wholly satisfying from expository, sociopolitical, and historical standpoints.

This book by Samuel Huntington should definitely be read by people who are especially interested in the theories of international relations and by people who have special interest in international affairs. The book is important in the sense that it provides a new and quite interesting point of view on the emerging new world order after the Cold War.
Despite the originality of the ideas, however, the book has quite important shortcomings and wrong generalizations.
To begin with, Huntington makes a very big mistake by explaining culture mainly in terms of religion. This, in addition to being wrong, can result in dangerous ideas and splits that might in the end result in conflicts of religions. In fact, Huntington's clash of civilizations is indeed a clash of religions.
Secondly, there are a lot of contradictions in the book. For instance, while in the beginning Huntington asserts that the Western World (which he means Western Catholicism) will remain all powerful in the 21st Century, he later argues that the Western World started to lose its power in contrast to the rise of Islam and Asia.
Thirdly, Huntington's emphasis on the role of religion in the post-Cold War period results in his denouncing organizations such as NATO. He makes the unfortunate mistake of tacitly saying that Turkey should not be in NATO. Nevertheless, Huntington here forgets the fact of Turkey being the second largest power within NATO after the United States, and that it is one of the most important allies of the USA.
And last, but not least, Huntington coins a term called "torn" countries to expalin the situations of Turkey, Russia, Mexico and Australia. For him,torn countries are the ones that are in terms of identity crisis. For me, however, he coins such a term to try to overcome these anomalies in his theory. Because, Turkey for example is an anomaly for Huntington's theory because although it is a state whose population is 98% Muslim, it has much closer and friendly relations with the United States and Western European countries. As Huntington cannot explain this anomaly, he is trying to get out of this problem by identifying Turkey as lacking an identity.
In addition to these, there are quite a lot of other mistakes and generalizations in the book but I leave their interpretations to other readers.
Overall, I find the ideas of Huntington quite interesting as well as dangerous for the post-Cold War world. I find his ideas disturbing and dangerous because although he seems to be challenging the idea of universalism of Christianity and Western values, what he tries to do in the book is to praise these ideas and isolate the people who do not belong to the values of Christianity. The underlying idea of the book as the way I understood is that if you want to be part of the West and modern, and if you wish to be liked by the Western world, then you'll have to be a Christian.
One final thing about the book is that his analysis in the final chapter is far from reality. His conspiracy on the possibility of a 3rd World War is carelessly written without actually putting too much thought on it.
Nevertheless, as I said in the beginning, the book should be read by anyone who has interest in international affairs. The good thing about it is that it really makes you sit down and think about the plausibilites of Huntington's ideas.

This book does for global politics what Thomas Friedman's book The Lexus and The Olive Tree does for global economics. Prof. Huntington is compelling in his premise, well substantiated with facts and examples, that religious civilizations have supplanted governmental ideologies and national boundaries as the basis worldwide for political and economic alliances, enmities and conflicts. Written in the mid-1990s, the book is surprisingly prescient in some of its speculations regarding subsequent recent events. The author explores clearly and in well-organized fashion the demographic and attitudinal factors underlying current world affairs, including much elucidation of events in the Balkans, Asia and the Arab World.In the early going the book the book tends to be a bit academic and jargony, but readers should give it a chance, because once it gets past the basic definitions - which are interesting and important in laying the groundwork for the rest of the book - it gives way to a much more lucid and free-flowing style. Overall, it is very helpful to the reader in understanding the recent, current and future world picture.

Despite its controversial conclusions, this is clearly an important book in that it has so deeply influenced our current administration's foreign policy. So much has been said about its strengths, however, that I would prefer to outline a few weaknesses:
- It reduces the political, religious, economic, historical, linguistic and cultural aspirations of 6+ billion into 7-8 indivisible primary cultures. As such, it doesn't adequately consider intracultural tensions and how much they contribute to realpolitik and the range of foreign policy options available today. One only need consider 'the West' as a united front that speaks with one voice and shares common strategic interests vis-a-vis Iraq to see how shaky this proposition is. Similarly, you will find factions in the Arab and Muslim world, Muslims in North America and Europe, Latin Americans who hardly share "Western" values and much more cultural singularity than Huntington supposes in the Asian world. He actually imagines the Japanese and Korea will readily submit to a rising China, which is hard to imagine given the bitter embers of WWII.
- His contention that Islam is the most bellicose culture of our era is equally tenuous. He says roughly half of the world conflicts in the early '90s involved Muslims, and 3/4 of those involved Muslims clashing with other cultures. He fails to examine how much of this violence is motivated by self-defense, or throwing off the yoke of colonial domination. He estimates Islam's contribution to world violence based on number of conflicts rather than number of deaths, or instances in which Muslims were the aggressor. Much of what he calls "clashes of civilizations" in Central Asia, the Middle East and other regions could just as easily be viewed as wars of independence. Having traveled in Cairo within weeks of 9/11 and felt more safe there than in most American cities, I find the characterization of Muslims (20% of the world's population) as an overly violent people offensive and dangerous as well as grossly inaccurate.
- Huntington maintains America's cultural roots lie only in Europe. He not only ignores the influence of Iroquois political traditions on American ones, but he imagines that a Europe swept away by two authoritarian ideologies in the past century are singularly devoted to individual freedom and pluralism in so far as Americans are because Europe is the supposed birthplace of these ideals. America is much more of a stew than that. He clearly views the world from the dim reality of an increasingly diminishing majority in America. Out-of-touch.
- Finally, although Huntington makes clear the increasing challenges for American national security in the post-Cold War world, he advocates a defensive and reactive posture toward it. Democracy and pluralism may not be embraced in wholly American form in the Islamic world, but he regards America's best course as uniting the West, weakening any potential challenger in the Muslim world and hampering Japan's acquiescence to China as the emergent dominant power in Asia. It's striking that a man who devoted so much of his life to academic pursuits fails to see education and cultural exchange as a supplementary or alternative way of addressing the cultural divide. Hunker down and arm yourself for the inevitable conflict seems to be his advice. Certainly, cultural differences cannot be ignored and Americans should not suppose every other people is yearning to live as we do. But Huntington doesn't examine why past efforts to bridge the gap with the Islamic world, however dismal, have not worked. Right now an education in the West is largely only available to the wealthy elites in the Arab and other Muslim countries. Meanwhile, the youth population is exploding in these countries, and youth that find little economic opportunity and oppressive political conditions are likely to embrace radical religious and anti-Western propaganda. Were the West to deliberately attract & educate the best & brightest minds in the Arab and Muslim world regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, the freedom and economic opportunity we enjoy might well be our best sales tool. Not only should we facilitate greater outreach to the youth in the Muslim world, but we should be promoting Arabic and Islamic studies and exchange programs among American youth. It's so much easier to hate what you don't understand. Think it's too expensive to be a realistic foreign policy imperative? Then consider former Harvard President Derek Bok's admonition, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

Cultural differences are deep and significant and deserve to be respected, but human values and aspirations that transcend culture persist. Huntington misses that.