Book Description
Spectacles and sunglasses are the most popular fashion accessories of our time. This book provides a comprehensive account of the design of spectacles in their many guises and of the historical developments that influenced them. A detailed history of spectacles is presented through a brief synopsis and more than 500 photos. Spectacles and Sunglasses devotes considerable attention to 20th century designs: a period that witnessed the creation of innumerable outlandish and extravagant spectacles. Jackie Kennedy's and Audrey Hepburn's sunglasses; the frames worn by Buddy Holly, Nana Mouskouri and Yves Saint Laurent; and the famous models by Pierre Cardin, Courreges, Ray-Ban and Christian Dior may all be found in this book. A wide range of contemporary innovative designs is also represented.
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Gafas & Gafas De Sol/ Spectacles & Sunglasses
Pepin Press
Manufacturer: Pepin Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Design & Decorative Arts
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General
| Fashion
| Arts & Photography
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General
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ASIN: 9054961228 |
Book Description
Patent Mapping Charts. Assemblies of lenses with bridges or browbars, Insofar As They Have The Same Features As Spectacles; Special supporting arrangement for lens assemblies or monocles; Constructions of non-optical parts; Optical parts; Attaching auxiliary optical parts; Non-optical adjuncts; Attachment thereof; Assembling; Repairing; Cleaning. [More than 3,000 Patents]
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Spectacles and Sunglasses
*
Manufacturer: PEPIN PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K206O8 |
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Real Estate Valuation: Guide to Investment Strategies (Real Estate Practice Library Series)
Terry V. Grissom , and
Julian Diaz
Manufacturer: Wiley Law Pubns
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Investments
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Political Science
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| Comparative Government
| Constitutional History
| Elections
| General
| Government
| History of the State
| Imperialism & Independence
| International Institutions
| International Relations
| Leaders & Leadership
| Levels of Government
| Movements
| Party Politics
| Political Doctrines
| Political History
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| Psychology
| Public Administration
| Public Policy
| Research
| Rhetoric
| Rights
| Systems Of Government
| United States
ASIN: 0471600873 |
Book Description
A Critical Cinema 4 is the fourth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald once again engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the network of interconnections within the community of filmmakers.
A Critical Cinema 4 includes the most extensive interview with the late Stan Brakhage yet published; a conversation with P. Adams Sitney about his arrival on the New York independent film scene; a detailed discussion with Peter Kubelka about the experience of making Our African Journey; a conversation with Jill Godmilow and Harun Farocki on modern political documentary; Jim McBride's first extended published conversation in thirty years; a discussion with Abigail Child about her evolution from television documentarian to master editor; and the first extended interview with Chuck Workman. This volume also contains discussions with Chantal Akerman about her place trilogy; Lawrence Brose on his examination of Oscar Wilde's career; Hungarian Peter Forgács about his transformation of European home movies into video operas; Iranian-born Shirin Neshat on working between two cultures; and Ellen Spiro about exploring America with her video camera and her dog. Each interview is supplemented by an introductory overview of the filmmaker's contributions. A detailed filmography and a selected bibliography complete the volume.
Book Description
A fine selection of the most famous masterpieces of Robert Schumann, composed and arranged for solo piano. Pieces include: The Happy Farmer, Little Song, Romanze, Novelette, Theme With Variations, Theme in Eb Minor, and more.
Book Description
More than 50 million Americans play poker. But poker is much more than a popular game. It is a world unto itself, populated by a multitude of colorful characters -- professionals and amateurs, hustlers and dreamers.
From the rich field of all the writers who have ever loved the game, editor John Stravinsky has gathered thirty-nine best-of-breed short stories, essays, excerpts from novels, and poems: Mark Twain, John Updike, James Thurber, Nelson Algren, Martin Amis, and Billy Collins are among the winning hand of renowned writers in this collection who have mined their personal experiences at the poker table.
Entertaining, enlightening, and essential, Read 'Em and Weep is a stacked deck of pure poker-reading pleasure.
Customer Reviews:
Entertaining.......2007-06-12
You do not have to be a poker aficionado to enjoy this book. It contains 38 short stories, excerpts from books or essays, all of which have poker as a theme or main story element. With authors the likes of Stephen Crane, James Jones, Mark Twain, David Mamet, Bertolt Brecht, Sumerset Maugham, Clark Clifford, Barbara Tuchman and James Thurber you can't go far wrong. The stories range from comic to tragic, with just a little instruction on the finer points of the game thrown in for good measure. You may not love all of the chapters, but I am sure that enough will entertain you to make reading this short book very worthwhile.
And I do not even play poker.......2004-01-26
All of the sudden, books about the inner world of poker seem to be springing up all over the place. My 18yo son and his friends mess around with it for pennies or toothpicks, and I hear them arguing the rules long after I've gone to bed. But now I find myself in the unlikely position of having read three books on the subject, and I'm really getting into it.
Read 'Em and Weep is a collection of essays, short stories, book excerpts and (of all unlikely things) poems dealing with the eternally interesting world of the game. Many of the tales focus on the fast-paced newish game called Hold 'Em. But most of the contributions (from authors such as Mark Twain, Maugham, and Thurber) deal with the traditional more gentlemanly games from a bygone poker era. It's a good melding of the two worlds, past and present.
a good collection of poker stories.......2004-01-19
This is a collection of short stories or snippets of books all about poker there are 39 authors this is taken from those of you who have read other poker memoirs will recognize Anthony Holden,Michael Konik ,A. Alvarez and other notable poker writers.Then there are notable authors like Mark Twain,John Updike,Martin Amis,and many others.
This covers subjects from the wild west river boat gambling to the current modern day of world series of poker.So give this book a try and possibly expose yourself to some different authors or refamilarize yourself with some of the old poker authors.
Book Description
A BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller
Praise for Morningstar
® Guide to Mutual Funds
"The Morningstar
® Guide to Mutual Funds helps cut through the fog with a solid volume of constructive advice."
–John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO, The Vanguard Group
"This book is the culmination of nearly two decades of research, analysis, and good old commonsense wisdom."
–Tyler Mathisen, financial journalist, CNBC
"A generation of investors who took the stock market for granted now know how important it is to understand–and control–their own investments. The Morningstar
® Guide should be their most important resource."
–Terry Savage, Chicago Sun-Times financial columnist and author of The Savage Truth on Money
Customer Reviews:
Learn the Fundamental Principles of Wise Investing.......2005-09-29
Technical analysis may be necessary to wring every last penny out of your investment portfolio, but knowing and implementing the time-tested knowledge of the fundamentals is what guides a new or seasoned investor safely along the path to success. Guide To Mutual Funds 5-Star Strategies for Success is essential to new investors to help them establish their safe place in the investment community. This 'textbook' presents and explains most all of the most important investment tools and concepts to safely invest in bonds, stocks and mutual funds. It explains how to properly gauge and understand risks, the import role of the fund manager, how to build and manage a portfolio of investments, the value of, and how to use Morningstar investment analysis tools, investing in bear and bull markets, the challenges of investing in sector funds, identifying sell flags, and other essential knowledge and wisdom which will build an investor's skill and confidence in investing. I give it five stars!
Hal Dekker
Roseville, CA
MorningStar User Guide.......2004-09-29
I was so excited to find this book, after reading the usual junk, the classics, surfing hundreds of websites -- and yes, leaving lots of money on Brokers Conference Room Tables. {If only I knew then, what I know now.}
It read fast, pulling so many ideas together in a very readable manner, backed up by authors who eat, sleep and process one of the best market data-sources around.
My surprise was that it had elements of an adventure novel, by introducing me to the personalities and investment styles of Fund Managers. Suddenly the market, became real people. Annual Reports become chapters in an ongoing historical novel.
Is it oriented to Morningstar? Sure, but that's not a bad thing for a new investor trying to re-gain control of his or her financial future. It makes a good companion, to the online data.
Good mutual fund book for beginners.......2004-01-17
That is THE book I am looking for!!! It is very easy to read and follow for beginners like me. It provides an overall review about the whole industry, major players, popular funds, and basic strategies. It emphasizes a lot on the importance of diversifying the portofolio and how to do that. The book serves well to prevent beginners from making BIG investment mistakes.
Of course, it is a MORNINGSTAR book. It is all about Morningstar methods and tools. And I discovered that most of advanced tools recommended by authors are NOT free.
Good discussion of Mutual Fund investing from the experts.......2004-01-12
Morningstar is the recognized name in evaluating mutual funds. This book shares some of their insight. The advice is fairly straightforward and not earth-shaking: set your goals, pick an assett allocation in line with your goals and risk tolerance, diversify. From there they go into picking funds addressing such things as evaluating fund manager, looking at costs, judging past performance etc. I found the book helpful, but I am more philosophically aligned with the advice in Bogle's book (Common Sense on Mutual Funds : New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor by John C. Bogle) that emphasizes index funds. I thinking chasing hot funds can almost be as bad as chasing hot stocks. Finally, the book deals strictly with mutual funds. Probably need a second reference to fully deal with you investment life (insurance, etc).
Seriously misleading.......2003-10-31
Morningstar has tremendous market power and reputation, and this book builds off that. But academic work, often published on the Internet and summarized at sites like ABetterWayToInvest, show that Morningstar ratings have no predictive value whatsoever. Doesn't that undermine this sort of book?
Amazon.com
This book, published months after Italian writer Primo Levi's suicide in 1987, is a small but powerful look at Auschwitz, the hell where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. The book was his third on the subject, following Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963). Removed from the experience by time and age, Levi chose to serve more as an observer of the camp than the passionate young man of his previous work. He writes of "useless violence" inflicted by the guards on prisoners and then concludes the book with a discussion of the Germans who have written to him about their complicity in the event. In all, he tries to make sense of something that--as he knew--made no sense at all.
Book Description
Levi wrote of the moral collapse that occurred in Auschwitz and the fallibility of human memory that allows such atrocities to recur. Levi's last book published before his death in 1987.
Customer Reviews:
As important as a book gets.......2007-08-04
It is redundant to praise this book or describe its background, which has been done very well by other reviewers. This was Levi's final wrestling with the implications of what he called the Lager (he didn't use the term 'Holocaust'), not only as he experienced it, but more generally.
Just a few points that may be less obvious. Levi never uses the phrase "survivor guilt," and his choice of terms was never without consideration. Rather, he uses the term, "shame." The chapter that goes by that name is an enormously subtle and evolving one. Levi continues to probe the feeling as he recalls it after "liberation," and there are at least five different concepts of what that "shame" entailed, no one of which did Levi think was definitive. By the way, none of Levi's definitions are the same as the popular notion of "survivor" guilt - that one feels guilty simply for having survived while others did not. The closest he comes is to talk about surviving "in place of another," which is a more complex idea. It refers specifically to the nature of the camps themselves, a horrific "laboratory," as Levi put it, in which selections, influence, luck and more did mean that one's survival always came at someone else's cost. This is a sociological point. It would not the case, for example, for the survivor of a tornado or earthquake.
Second, the "grey zone" is very often misinterpreted to suggest that perpetrators and victims met in some "middle ground" somewhere. Levi is definitive about this. The responsibility of the killers and the victims are in no sense, and in no context, equivalent. But in the squalid and horrific world that was the lager, there was an enormous range of types and characters. Levi is arguing mostly against what he calls "stereotypes" - convenient simplifications.
Finally, it may be of interest that "the drowned and the saved" was intended by Levi to be the title of his first book, If This is a Man (known in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz). His publisher disagreed, although there is a chapter in If This is a Man called Drowned and Saved. Levi's preoccupation with the role in the camp of differences in power, privilege, luck, and alliances-of-convenience runs throughout his work. It is a topic that still deserves much more attention than it has received.
Astonishing and Vivid.......2007-07-12
Primo Levi's final memoir about the Nazi Holocaust is among the most provocative and compelling accounts of the Shoah in the entire literature. Indeed, it is one of the great political memoirs of recent years. Levi was an Italian chemist, anti-Nazi activist, and Jew who was sent to Auschwitz and famously documented the atrocities that he experienced in `Survival at Auschwitz,' one of the first memoirs to be widely read in Germany. This book is a profoundly introspective rumination, not on the particular horrors of the camps, but of their philosophical implications for human beings as a whole. In `The Grey Zone,' Levi explores the moral ambiguity of this moment in history, both in terms of the work of the Kapos and the rare but meaningful resistance from the Germans. Levi is open to the possibility of a moral spectrum, yet he remains unequivocally vociferous in his condemnation of National Socialism, and of the German people's complicity with this movement. There are many striking and haunting moments in `The Drowned and the Saved,' such as Levi's discussion of the Musselman, or the experience of palpable shame on the part of the Jewish victims. This book is a special memoir because Levi refuses to draw the reader via an explicit recollection of the litany of horrors that he experienced, but because he is willing to penetrate into the meaning and truth of the holocaust as human abomination. A true masterpiece, both in approach and in execution.
A must for students of ethics.......2004-09-18
This is a book that causes the reader to reconsider, reflect critically one's own views, marvel at the level of depravity to which humans can steep, and is one which I imagine should be a standard text in ethics courses.
But it also raises questions of memory and the mind"s ability to adjust, amend and retool. Mr Levi must stand as one of that sad century's most astonishing examples of positive human achievement .
Thoughtful, intelligent, meaningful, and universal........2003-01-21
"The Drowned and the Saved" is the final book of Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived the death camp of Auschwitz, and turned to authorship in his later years. This book is a group of a half-dozen related essays, each exploring a specific aspect of Levi's view of the Holocaust's causes and effects.
He begins with the concept of "good faith", wondering whether believing a lie excuses it. He notes that oppressors lie to save themselves from believing they are evil, and victims lie to save themselves from believing they suffer. He explores the moral zone between black and white, noting that anybody can be a tough killer or a foolish victim: we are all tyrants and victims in our own way.
He examines survivor's guilt, and reflects on the roles of luck versus blessing in life, and discusses the ways humans need communication to survive, including the way victims bend language to disguise their intentions, and tyrants twist it to cause confusion among their victims.
He tries to distinguish between rationalized evil and collective madness. He believes the spirit and mind can be injured just as the body can, and wonders how a person's perspective plays a role in their survival and psychological health. He describes the various stereotypes people hold when they imagine the stories of those who lived through WWII, e.g., the romantic hero, the evil Nazi, the prisoner who always plots escape, and so on, but explains why they are rough and inaccurate.
Each chapter is like a conversation with an intelligent and qualified author. It is thoughtful, and a pleasure to read. It reflects on psychological and historical themes which are important not only to our understanding of the Holocaust, but also more generally human nature. (It appears to be a rumination on subjects discussed in his other books, collected and summarized briefly here.) It is for this reason that the book is successful. It considers the Holocaust in particular, but its themes are actually deeper and more universal.
"Letters from Germans", the penultimate chapter, is the book's most powerful, noticeably demonstrating the tension between his memory of that time period, and the memory of various Germans, in their own words. He especially berates those who believe they are doing the right thing by speaking out in shame and guilt over theit past, perhaps attacking them a bit harshly, but certainly with justification. The last chapter, "Conclusion", is its weakest. In the opinion of this reviewer, it over-generalizes, and tries to apply retrospective analysis to the world's future. It also calls for unwarranted conclusions, unrelated to the preceding chapters, and perhaps contradicts itself. Luckily it is brief, and does not detract from the excellence of the prior explorations.
(For example, he says war is unecessary, and mankind can settle all conflicts around a table, but only as long as we are in good faith. He then calls Hitler a buffoon, implying he cannot be taken in good faith. He next says we need not have good faith to negotiate if we are all equally in fear of war, but this sounds like he is saying war is necessary after all, even if only to remind us there are punishments for negotiation in bad faith!)
Despite its conclusion (which many readers will probably enjoy, despite this reviewer's belief it over-reaches), the book is an intelligent and even-handed, but personal assessment of the Holocaust, written in an engaging and intelligent style, with brevity and wit. At 200 pages, it is easy to read. Packed with philosophy and insight, it is worth the investment.
Encourages introspection.......2002-05-03
Primo Levi suggests that perceiving the experiences of others is extremely difficult and grows more so as the distance in time, space, and quality increases. "We are prone to assimilate them to 'related' ones, as if the hunger in Auschwitz were the same as that of someone who has skipped a meal, or as if escape from Treblinka were similar to an esacpe from an ordinary jail."
If you are now living in an affluent democratic society, the book leads you to wonder, "Would I recognize the warning signs? If I were a victim, would I descend into barbarism? If I were not, would I have the courage to speak on their behalf? Would I become a monster?"
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The Drowned and the Saved
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 9992071605 |
Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, James William Gibson shatters the misled assumptions behind both liberal and conservative explanations for America's failure in Vietnam. Gibson shows how American government and military officials developed a disturbingly limited concept of war -- what he calls "technowar" -- in which all efforts were focused on maximizing the enemy's body count, regardless of the means. Consumed by a blind faith in the technology of destruction, American leaders failed to take into account their enemy's highly effective guerrilla tactics. Indeed, technowar proved woefully inapplicable to the actual political and military strategies used by the Vietnamese, and Gibson reveals how U.S. officials consistently falsified military records to preserve the illusion that their approach would prevail. Gibson was one of the first historians to question the fundamental assumptions behind American policy, and The Perfect War is a brilliant reassessment of the war -- now republished with a new introduction by the author.
Customer Reviews:
Why War? Read this Book.......2007-09-15
Will the moron who believes there has ever been a war that wasn't started by self-serving sociopaths, please stand so we can put you somewhere in hopes of keeping you from harming others?
This author and book provides one with all the knowledge needed to understand the sole purpose of the Vietnam War, and the wars before and after it. While this book is a most interesting read, I will guarantee that if you're capable of putting your country before your political party for five seconds, the material in this book will make you want to gag. That is unless you're like me. In that case, it will make you want to kidnap as many of these corporate executives and their [...] boys in Congress as possible, and give them all a sulfuric acid enema. But that's being hypocritical. It's not the corporate executives and politicians who are the source of the problem; it's the hopelessly in debt, unread voters who would crawl through a mile of broken glass and human waste to get their picture taken with one of these sociopaths.
Politicians are a lot like the bears in Yellowstone National Park; they do okay until some idiot comes along and gives one of them a free meal. After that, all you can do is shoot the bear because it's now a danger to society. That would be a perfect solution if they shot the damn fool who caused the problem in the first place.
With the status quo being what it is today, you have to be careful about criticizing our honorable leaders in Washington. Even before my newest book, "Kill Me If You Can", had made its way into Barnes and Noble stores, the Secret Service shows up to question me about saying that Dick Cheney was a sadistic, immoral, subhuman who wasn't worthy of the air that it took to keep him alive. I was surprised when they didn't haul me off to one of Cheney's concentration camps.
Excellent but not a complete overview.......2003-07-16
Gibson does a great job of providing a framework to understand Us policy during the Vietnam War. Many other reviewers have focused on how Gibson discussed the "incomptence" of the military, but they missed the point completely. Gibson's main concern was to show how policy was, and is, guided by an imperial ideology which can be stated as: "The United States has the most desirable social system in the world and it is our right, in fact our duty, to 'encourage' others to adopt it." In Vietnam, as in various other countries, encouragement came at the other end of a bomb.
US policies weren't "incompetent" as much as they were the logical outcome of the imperial premise. From here, you can see how the corporate managerial perspective viewed the war as an assembly line geared towards producing a commodity: body counts.
It would be wrong to view this as an overview of the war however as he spends less time discussing the NLF side of things than the US side. For something more general, I would recommend Marilyn Young's "The Vietnam Wars."
As for those who criticize Gibson for bias, these accusations stem from a pro-US viewpoint, so how are you not biased? In fact by implying that supporting the United States is "normal" and that any other opinion is biased [and wrong], you only prove Gibson's point about the ideological blinkers that help produce horrific wars, like the most recent ones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Writing History With a Bias.......2003-03-10
J.W. Gibson's book has a misleading title; I sought it as a source of the technical aspects of the war in Vietnam, and instead found a polemic. His adulation for Ho Chi Minh and even faint praise for Joseph Stalin give away his bias--the book is clearly an anti-capitalist diatribe, although I certainly recognize the validity of some of his criticism. Having been an Army officer in the conflict (199th Infantry Brigade) I experienced first-hand the problems with morale and a frustrating conflict in which we consistently ceded the offensive to the enemy. But I must take exception to his perpetuation of the myth that we used our soldiers as "bait". He and Stanley Karnow, neither of whom fought in the war, agree that the typical American tactic was to blunder through the jungle until we found the enemy the hard way--by being ambushed. The fact is, rougly 90% of all ambushes (the most common type of combat in an unconventional war) in Vietnam were initiated by American or allied forces.
The concept of limited war is one that the author never seems to grasp. He even manages to write an entire book on it without mentioning George F. Kennan, the architect of this war-without-victory concept. The publishing date of 1986 is telling, as the author's pronouncement that the U.S. military has not learned from its past mistakes in Vietnam would shortly be proved wrong in Kuwait. In his subsequent update, he cites Saddam Hussein's continued tyranny after 1991 as proof of failure, as though this was a military blunder rather than a political decision.
Gibson's obvious affection for "wars of national liberation" carry over to his conclusion in which he seems to employ a fairness doctrine to war. If the other side is not our technological equal, we should not use our superiority to reduce our casualties and shorten the conflict. War is always a catalyst for invention and innovation, and the side that does a better job typically prevails. This did not happen in Vietnam because our electorate grew disillusioned after 14 years of war, and because we have elections every two years that resulted in a government that eventually cut the funding--and it is not possible to wage war without money. The other side did not have elections, but they did have tyrants in charge who were quite willing to expend ten or twenty of their young men for every American KIA. In the end, the war of containment became a war of attrition. This is another concept that seems not to have occurred to Mr. Gibson.
"The Blatent Under Currents".......2002-09-22
This book looks at the Vietnam War in a perspective that can be deeply appreciated by someone who had a four year involvement in it. I couldn't put the book down. Having spent two tours
in-country, being non-military, but supporting the US Army, in both combat and non-combat situations, this book cleared up a lot of "why in the world is this or that happening"? Also, there were several situations that Gibson mentioned that I was a participant in and his writing gives me the notion that he does have some idea of what he speaks.
I do not believe he was leaning to the communist efforts, this writing was about our side. I also know that everyone there was not a dope smoking idiot, but the way MANAGEMENT handled most situations, made a sane person wonder what in the heck were THEY thinking and whos side were THEY on? I have never seen such waste of assets and personnel!
I believe everyone who was there would have a better understanding of all of the goofyness that went on, and there was plenty of it, if they would read this book.
Hysterical in its Biases.......2000-08-22
It requires little imagination to describe U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as both misguided and mismanaged. As the politicians who got America bogged down in someone else's civil war have much to answer for, so too do those senior military officers who ran the war; the scorched-earth, search-and-destroy strategy that MACV opted for was not only wrongheaded, unworkable, and doomed to fail, it was also immoral.All this James Gibson tells us in THE PERFECT WAR. The problem is that he adds more heat than light to the discussion so overt are his biases against the U.S. military and in favor of the National Liberation Front. The same ground is covered much more intelligently in Neil Sheehan's A BRIGHT SHINING LIE. Gibson takes the officer corps to task for the poor quality of leadership displayed during the war by the many field-grade and general officers who "led" their units from a helicopter seat and who displayed more concern over their efficiency reports than their troops. Fair enough. It is true that there was not an overabundance of heroic leadership at the battalion, brigade, and division level in Vietnam. It is also true, as Gibson argues, that the war produced a lot of senior officers who should be embarrassed to wear the Silver Stars and Distinguished Flying Crosses they were awarded.Still, for all the helicopter-seat heroes in the war, there were still plenty of field-grade officers who led on the ground, with their troops, in the style of the battalion and regimental commanders of WWII. Gibson should have given these men their due. He does not. A much more incisive, well-rounded discussion of the quality of combat leadership in Vietnam is to be found in ABOUT FACE by David Hackworth.Gibson's sources are a major problem. He does not appear to have done a lot of original research, but rather quotes from previously-published books and magazine articles. Worse, he relies heavily on three books (NAM by Mark Baker, CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS by Mark Lane, and SPOILS OF WAR by Charles Levy) which, once published, were thoroughly discredited by journalists, historians, and veterans who pointed out the fabrications, distortions, and exaggerated accounts contained in them. It is distressing to see the bogus accounts from these three books repeatedly popping up in THE PERFECT WAR. Gibson seemed prepared to believe the worst about everyone who served in Vietnam, from private to general. The US Army, as described in THE PERFECT WAR, seemed to do nothing but smoke dope, kill civilians, frag its officers, and lose battles.The communists, on the other hand, are idealized in THE PERFECT WAR for their patriotism, determination, and bravery. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army had an abundance of all three virtures. It was, in fact, their patriotism, determination, and bravery which won the war, not (as the right-wing in this country would have it) the machinations of a treasonous press, a cowardly congress, and anti-war protesters. For all that, though, the communists were capable of great cruelty in fighting their war, from the murder of government officials and their families, the massacre in Hue (which Gibson downplays), to the systematic abuse and torture of American POWs in places like the Hanoi Hilton. Gibson seems unable to come to terms with the dark side of the communist war effort.
Book Description
The most comprehensive one-volume edition of Burke's writings on politics, history, and culture.
The intellectual wellspring of modern political conservatism, Edmund Burke is also considered a significant figure in aesthetic theory and cultural studies. As a member of the House of Commons during the late eighteenth century, Burke shook Parliament with his powerful defense of the American Revolution and the rights of persecuted Catholics in England and Ireland; his indictment of the English rape of the Indian subcontinent; and, most famously, his denouncement of English Jacobin sympathizers during the French Revolution.
The Portable Edmund Burke is the fullest one-volume survey of Burke's thought, with sections devoted to his writings on history and culture, politics and society, the American Revolution, Ireland, colonialism and India, and the French Revolution. This volume also includes excerpts from his letters and an informative Introduction surveying Burke's life, ideas, and his reception and influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Customer Reviews:
Amputated rather than edited..........2006-05-11
Burke's most important work "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is reduced from nearly 200 pages to 60 pages in this volume. Yet nowhere in the book does the editor describe what he selected or what he dropped, or the basis for his decisions.
Comparing my copy of "Reflections.." to this chopped version I found that Kramnick had dropped passages that were highly insightful.
When I discovered this, I could no longer be confident that the other works were not similarly mangled. I will now search for an anthology of works that is more respectful of the originals (or at least one where the editor is more open about his approach).
Thematic is best.......2002-01-24
Presenting Edmund Burke thematically is perhaps the only way to really approach Burke, as Conor Cruise O'Brien or Russell Kirk (Burke's best biographers) would probably agree. So unlike `On Empire, Liberty, and Reform,' which is chronological, the portable Edmund Burke instead tackles Burke under the themes of America, Ireland, India, and the French Revolution, and a couple other sub-themes, with invaluable commentary. By the end of the book, Burke is better enveloped here than in most biographies, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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Accretion-powered Compact Binaries
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Astronomy
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Astrophysics & Space Science
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Star-Gazing
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ASIN: 0521545757 |
Book Description
This book is a comprehensive survey of the current research in the field of cataclysmic variables and low-mass X-ray binaries. These compact binaries contain a Roche-lobe filling low-mass star and an accreting white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. In the turbulent process of accretion, a broad and highly variable spectrum of radiation is produced. The interpretation of the behaviour of these binaries is the present work of hundreds of astronomers, many of whom contributed to this volume. Among the topics covered here are observations and theories of low-mass neutron star and black hole binaries, magnetic and non-magnetic white dwarf binaries, transient X-ray sources, novae, and binary pulsars, as well as theories of the evolution of these binaries. The book is based on material presented at the 11th North American Workshop on Cataclysmic Variables and Low Mass X-ray Binaries held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 1989. Each contribution contains sufficient in-depth information to be of use to the specialist, while the breadth of subjects covered will ensure a wide audience among advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
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- Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding
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- Guide to Women's Art Organizations and Directory for the Arts: Multi-Arts Centers, Organizations, Galleries, Groups, Activities, Networks, Publications, Archives, Slide Registries
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Books Index
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