Customer Reviews:
Clear-eyed and honest examination of an icon.......2003-09-19
First of all, this book is NOT a biography of Diana, nor does it pretend to be. The cover states clearly that it is about "the love-hate relationship between Diana and the Media." Therefore anyone demeaning it because the cover isn't "pretty" or because it may be factually inaccurate by moments about incidents surrounding her death and funeral are completely missing the point. This book is not, strictly speaking, about the events of Diana's life but about how they were interpreted. And Mr. Levine shares some very unconventional, intelligent opinions on that subject. Some of it I disagree with (the life and continuing media fascination in Jacqueline Onassis disputes his assertion that the public loves celebrities for their accessibility; Jackie O was the most remote of celebrities and in her case it was her very unknowability that still intrigues us). But on one very important point, I agree with Mr. Levine whole-heartedly. In purely feminist terms, Diana was a heroine, not a victim. She was NOT a victim of the media or, ultimately, the Royal Family. She used the media and survived the Royal Family. And the reason the public adored her is that she went through the same stages every woman does, just on a grander scale and with better clothes. Diana was disappointed by love, longed for direction and meaning in life, loved her children, and was insecure about her looks. And before our eyes, she grew up to be a symbol of grace and generosity. She was transformed by her pain and hardship and she was victorious against the power elite -- and she used the press to win. Diana's memory deserves to be celebrated, not tsk-tsked over as though she had been some poor, helpless little thing. Diana accomplished so much with her own charm, energy and ingenuity. Ultimately, she was the victim of a drunk driver, and that could happen to any of us.
Excellent.......1999-09-03
An excellent book. Complements Claridge's "Blair'sBritain" as a description of The Great Madness that overtook England in September 1997.
this is a magnificent book -- explains media hype very well.......1999-04-07
This is one of the best books I have ever read about the relationship between the media and a celebrity..I believe the critics of the book have missed the point entirely. The book is not about Diana as much as it is about her relationship with the media. You can take Diana's name out of the book and insert another celebrity's name. You would come up with a similiar tome. This is such a good book I have recommended it to my former professors at Wake Forest University in the communications department. Good job, Mr. Levine!
This is a very disappointing book........1999-03-28
I would never have purchased this book except for the fact that I collect books on Diana. As I look through my collection, I believe, this book possesses the ugliest cover of all my books on Diana which is enough to turn one off.
As I compare some of the facts mentioned to the same facts in my other books on Diana, there appears to be many inconsistencies in dates, times, and places. The inaccurarcies makes one wonder if there is any truth in Diana's symbiosis with the media.
This is a book one needs to purchase only if one collects books on Diana; ...
Too much speculation; not enough fact.......1998-12-31
I had high hopes for this book, but it was ultimately disappointing. And no, I do not worship at the altar of Diana. As a matter of fact, I found the book to be more sympathetic to her than I thought it would be. Most of this 350 page snoozer is the author's own speculation and theory about why the media and the public were so enamoured of Diana. He manages to get some facts wrong, notably that Queen Elizabeth bowed her head 'when Diana's cortege drove away from Westminster Abbey'. Everyone knows that the queen bowed her head as the cortege was approaching Westminster Abbey. The author literally doesn't know if Diana was coming or going! I realize this sounds petty, but if Levine can't even get this detail correct, how much can I buy into anything else he says? ...
Book Description
This book is a tribute to those men who have battled it out with guts and style, often against the odds, to make their names in boxing history.
Customer Reviews:
Amazed.......2001-12-30
I was truley shocke by how good this book is. I am very critical of boxing writing and i was mre than pleased.
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The New Breed: Actors Coming of Age (Owl Books)
Karen Hardy Bystedt , and
Kevin J. Koffler
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co (P)
ProductGroup: Book
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We have made music
Theodore M Finney
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
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Customer Reviews:
Ridiculously difficult, and not in a good way........2007-05-05
Don't waste your time buying this book. It's nowhere near as good as the Brown Belt first version. You should be able to make a logical inference (based upon the numbers already in the squares) what numbers belong where, but that's not possible with this one. You have to basically play out different scenarios (such as "ok, if the two was here, how would they play out?").
If you want that in a Black Belt level, great. For Brown Belt, that's ridiculous. Don't waste your money. I told a friend this in advance of her getting the book, and now she wishes she had listened to me. Don't say I didn't warn you.
More challenging than the First Degree Black Belt book.......2006-07-07
This was the first sudoku book I bought after doing numerous puzzles from newspapers and online. This book lasted me a good 6 months, and was an excellent time killer on bus cummutes to work, during lunch breaks, during a hospital stay, while waiting for food in restaurant, and anywhere else the sudoku mood struck me.
The puzzles can not simply be solved by inspection. You must fill in all of the cells with number possibilities. Some of the puzzles can easily be solved by single candidate from there, while others require you to use candidate reduction strategies.
A good book to start with for anyone serious about getting into sudokus.
Customer Reviews:
Good if you want to go in details of ADX and RSI.......2007-08-16
it will be useful if you want to go into details and step by step development of indicators developed by Wilder.
However, the book does not add much to the experienced analysts.
New Concepts explains it perfectly.......2007-03-16
I bought this book mostly for the Directional Movement System. I have been trying to figure out the best way to use this system for some time, and could not get a handle on how to effectively trade with it. I found the explanation of the way the system is constructed to be very helpful. There is not a lot of text explaining how to use the different systems. but,if you understand the concept of what is being measured and how the indicator got there, the rules of applying the system is quite easy. Only time will tell if I am on the right track, but today I feel more confident when making a decision on when to take a position.
The absolute classic of modern technical analysis!!!.......2004-07-10
Anyone that would ever give a negative rating for this classic of trading literature, doesn't have the slightest clue as to what they have just read. This is "THE" single most innovative trading text to hit the public's bookshelves in the last 30 years. This book single-handedly revolutionized the technical analysis of financial markets. I am almost speechless that someone could write a negative review of this book....
A classic.......2003-07-06
You'd have to appreciate that nearly every method or tool in this book is almost common knowledge. RSI, ADX, DMI, Parabolic, volatility breakouts, pivot point reversals and so forth are all commonly used nowadays. However, back in 1978 when it was hand calculated and charted.. Wilder probably had no idea how revolutionary his work has become.
An original work of enduring value from a true innovator.......2002-12-01
Parabolic SAR, Relative Strength Index, Directional Movement Index (ADX) -- developing even just one of these would constitute an important contribution to technical analysis. Yet all of these popularly followed indicators and more were the work of this one man and were first popularized in this single 1978 classic.
But this book merits more than mere admiration. For traders looking for carefully presented formulas, clear discussions of their logic, and helpful discussion of indicators' interpretation straight from the horse's mouth, this book is a great asset.
I would acknowledge that for discretionary traders who do little if any backtesting or who pay no more than scant attention to indicators other than price, volume, and maybe some moving averages, this book probably won't hit your hot button.
But as a systems trader, I'm especially appreciative, since nowhere have I found a better or more authoritative discussion of ADX and ADXR, two especially potent indicators whose multi-stage calculations haven't been consistently represented in various secondary sources I've examined.
Finally, for traders who tend to enjoy tinkering with the development of their own novel indicators, Wilder's discussions of his conceptual starting points in developing each of his indicators will probably prove very stimulating.
Amazon.com
"He's big Suzuki, I'm little Suzuki."
In the literary world, Shunryu Suzuki has always played second fiddle to D.T. Suzuki. With David Chadwick's biography of this extraordinary man, Shunryu Suzuki will take his rightful place as one of the progenitors of American Buddhism. Chadwick, a long-time student of Suzuki's, takes us back to Suzuki's childhood, his entry into monastic life at age 13, subsequent trials with his ornery master and in the notoriously strict Eiheiji Monastery, as well as life as a houseboy with a British tutor to the Chinese emperor, marital tragedies, and the political minefield of World War II while he served as abbot of his own temple. The overarching theme of Suzuki's teaching is practice--in a community setting--and when he takes over a temple of aging Japanese Americans in San Francisco, his practice begins to attract younger Americans. The second half of Crooked Cucumber relates the phenomenal growth of the San Francisco Zen Center and becomes a biography of the growing community and its members, inasmuch as the center was Suzuki's life. A monk who was thought to be as useless as a crooked cucumber, under the pen of Chadwick turns out to be a brilliant, witty, tireless patriarch of American Zen. --Brian Bruya
Book Description
Shunryu Suzuki is known to countless readers as the author of the modern spiritual classic
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This most influential teacher comes vividly to life in
Crooked Cucumber, the first full biography of any Zen master to be published in the West. To make up his intimate and engrossing narrative, David Chadwick draws on Suzuki's own words and the memories of his students, friends, and family. Interspersed with previously unpublished passages from Suzuki's talks,
Crooked Cucumber evokes a down-to-earth life of the spirit. Along with Suzuki we can find a way to "practice with mountains, trees, and stones and to find ourselves in this big world."
Customer Reviews:
This is what zen does to you.......2007-06-28
This is a very good book. You can read "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind" and find out what Shunryu Suzuki says. More importantly, you can read this and see how Shunryu lived his life - an even better example. Simply and accepting (well most of the time except when he threw the odd wobbly). The book shows that there is nothing to zen, and then of course, there is everything.
It could benefit with an index
must read for zen in U.S........2007-04-17
If you are interested in the story of Zen in America, you must read this book. Paints a vivid portrait of one of the premier teachers, giving a "behind the scenes" view of what a spiritual teacher's life is like, without the mythologizing you often find. A good read, too. The story of his life in Japan draws you right in, and the descriptions of San Francisco in the sixties bring it to life, although the forward momentum of the narrative begins to bog down into various random anecdotes from his students.
For the continuation of the story after Suzuki's death, you should follow up with "Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Fransciso Zen Center" .
--Alan Zundel, the HeartAwake Center
Absolute pleasure!.......2006-09-29
I came to this book with some reservations, having been told that it was a largely flattering and hagiographic "authorized" biography by one of the subject's most avid students. I expected a saccharine-sweet, whitewashed vanilla ride...and was very pleasantly DISAPPOINTED, lol!
While the author makes no secret of his own profound respect and admiration for Suzuki, he does not omit many ambiguous and less flattering details and events in the subject's life and character. So while the portrait of Suzuki that emerges is largely positive, it is not without some shadows and warts as well, i.e. it is not a two-dimensional characterization by any means. We get a balanced insight into Suzuki the "Zen master" (=highly skilled teacher of Zen) as well as Suzuki the perfectly imperfect human being.
What sets this book firmly in the top echelon of biographies is Chadwick's fluid and graceful storytelling, and the skillful interweaving of Suzuki's own writings and talks into the narrative. In some ways it reads almost like a novel, with the vivid and often lyrical descriptions and re-creations...Chadwick's prose certainly does not have the tedious smell of your typical academic writing. Every few pages there are italicized excerpts from the teacher's books or recorded talks, and they are for the most part very well chosen, with the events that are subsequently described complementing and/or exemplifying those thoughts perfectly. In this way, when you read "Crooked Cucumber" you really get to enjoy two books in one: a very enjoyable biography about a very interesting and irresistible man, and that man's own unique interpretation and practice of Zen philosophy.
It's been a very long time since I've been as engrossed by a biography as I was by this one...maybe we could get David O. Russell (director of the ingenious and deeply Buddhist "I Heart Huckabees") to make a film out of it!
Chadwick's Book is a Testiment to a Great Teacher.......2006-05-29
This is really the only way to get the skinny on Shunryu Suzuki in a short amount of time. David was kind enough to allow me an interview regarding this (then) recently published book for my last (online) edition of Royal Vagrant, back in February of 2001. In addition to the information he graciously shared with me, I really enjoyed the book a great deal as readable biography and a useful guide to ordination and what to look for in a Zen/Ch'an teacher.
"Crooked Cucumber" is what Suzuki's own Zen master called a naughty Suzuki as a boy. Suzuki was a little bit lazy and devious and the name is an endearing trademark for the man's affable appreciation for the natural bent of a person's character, especially in Americanized Zen practice (and it MUST become somewhat "Americanized", is what he would have said, to become authentic practice for Americans).
Chadwick is a talented author and fuly deserves to be remembered as the man who captured Suzuki's personality and life down on paper.
A very funny, very modest man who embodied wisdom.......2006-05-17
Shunryu Suzuki was once asked to summarize Buddhism in a sentence. The audience laughed at the impossibility of that challenge. But the Zen master had a ready answer. "Easy," he said. "Everything changes."
Easy was the way he was. Or seemed to be. He didn't tell neophytes they needed to learn much before setting out on the Zen path. "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities," he explained. "In the expert's mind, there are few." And, later, he was equally committed to the importance of whatever you were feeling, in the moment you were feeling it. There were no hard and fast truths. For him, the secret of Zen was: "Not always so." Which is just another way to say "Everything changes."
You could almost say he didn't care about Zen. Sitting in the lotus position and watching your thoughts --- nice, but not crucial. Ditto walking meditation. "The most important thing is to be able to enjoy your life without being fooled by things," he said.
Spoken like a very American Zen master. In fact, Suzuki lived in Japan most of his life. He came to San Francisco in 1959 and died there in 1971. Twelve years in America, that's all. But in those few years, he basically established Zen practice in this country.
But forget the practice. Consider the life. There are very, very few biographies of Zen masters, mostly because that's the way they like it --- their practice is specific, geared to the student, as impermanent as smoke. Their lives erase themselves.
David Chadwick, a longtime student of Suzuki's, thought of writing this biography. He went to ask the widow's permission. Her advice: "Tell many funny stories." Chadwick followed instructions. "Crooked Cucumber" is funny often, and where it is not, the writing is playful and light. Even if you don't care much about Zen, this book is a pleasure to read.
And it's a great story. Suzuki began Zen training when he was 11. For all his gifts, his first master saw an inauspicious future for him. He nicknamed him "Crooked Cucumber" because a bent cucumber was useless --- Suzuki would become a teacher with no good disciples. But by 24, he had his own temple. He learned to run it like a small business at the same time as he taught the dharma. "If you have a flexible attitude, you can help people quite easily," he concluded.
He needed a flexible attitude in San Francisco. When he arrived, Beatniks were hopped up about what they thought was Zen. A few years later, hippies were dropping LSD and hallucinating the Buddha. Through it all, Suzuki played the role of a simple monk with a sincere commitment. He barely taught. He didn't have to --- he embodied the teaching.
When he had to, he became a giant. A beloved student died. He delivered a measured eulogy for her --- and then, Chadwick writes, he "let out a mighty roar of grief that echoed through the cavernous auditorium." Chadwick's account of Suzuki's final illness is equally powerful. "I have cancer," Suzuki told his students. "This cancer is my friend, and my practice will be to take care of this sickness."
The scene in which, near death, Suzuki inaugurates his successor is a tour de force. As is his death. These are heavy moments. But necessary ones. "The point is to attain complete composure," he once said. Well, he knew exactly what he was talking about.
The lovely thing about this book is that it's dotted with wry epigrams which, after your initial laughter, you might underline and consider. "In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves." "Once you say 'sex,' everything is sex." To a carpenter who seemed to have achieved self-realization: "Yes, you could call that enlightenment --- and how's your work coming?" To a vegan: "You have to kill vegetables too."
We find ourselves surrounded by fire-and-brimstone preachers. There's a reason they exist. But it's a great help to know that holy men can also be funny and wry and human. Shunryu Suzuki was just a man and, as he liked to say, not a very good one at that. Maybe so. But you can, after reading this book, easily see him as a Buddha.
Book Description
SAM ADAMS LOVED intelligence work, and that enthusiasm shines throughout this memoir of his years with the Central Intelligence Agency. His career was dominated by an epic struggle over Vietnam -- over military attempts to hide the true size of the enemy forces there, and over the integrity of the intelligence process. Adams's insistence on telling the truth caused an ungodly ruckus in both Washington and Saigon at the time, and years later, after the CIA had threatened to fire him (on thirteen occasions!) and he had quit the agency in disgust, Adams brought his story back up to the surface more loudly than ever in a CBS television documentary which eventually resulted in a notorious trial on libel charges brought by General William Westmoreland.
After leaving the CIA, Adams sat down to write an account of his life at the agency. There is nothing else quite like the story he tells. "More than a rehash of yesteryear's bureaucratic battles," said Library Journal, "and more even than delicious inside gossip, Adams paints a fascinating and personalized picture of the backroom, political wartime CIA."
"A stunning account," wrote Mike Wallace, "by a man of impeccable integrity, of the corruption of U.S. military intelligence in Vietnam."
Customer Reviews:
It's All About Integrity.......2007-04-16
Can you imagine how difficult it is for an Intelligence Professional to maintain his or her integrity? At every juncture, the suits, the E-Ring Horse-Holders, do their best to discredit your advice. No matter that you and your associates down at the worker-bee level are correct and have provided irrefutable proof of your analysis.
No, the suits will always fight to bring you down. Remember: They are political and you are not.
When the Analyst loses Integrity and Goes Political, then the process of honest intelligence production ceases. The War of Numbers shows so many who took the dishonest road.
This book precisely demonstrates how, even while being pummeled by the suits, Mr Adams remains true to the Intelligence Analysis Profession.
RIP Sam, we miss you and need you.
Essential reading for every intelligence professional.......2004-12-15
This book is one of the most illuminating "lessons learned" biographical studies that is absolutely essential in the current conflict we face in Iraq and the war on terrorism.
Failure at the Highest Levels.......2004-08-29
The world of real intelligence gathering and analyzation is still somewhat of a mystery to the general public. Thousands of movies and books have been made and written concerning this eminently interesting field, but they are often grandising or unrealistic. War of Numbers presents the Cold War CIA as it was and the intelligence community as it is. While it is much less glamorous than the popular culture would have us believe, it has its own intricacies that far outweigh anything Hollywood could muster in terms of interest. Sam Adams lived and breathed analysis as a young CIA officer fresh out of Harvard and thrown into the high intensity world of the cold war spy battle. He was your classic early 60's spook, a man of high prestige and old money with a dynamite education. Unleashed on communist insurrections around the world, Adams and men like him were to bring an enlightened face to a fierce struggle in the third world. Adams took to the task well, providing balanced opinions and using old fashioned organizational skills to detail various liberation groups around the world. However, this good work and the sterling career it gave rise to quickly ran into the mass of national miscalculation known as the Vietnam War.
Adams started out as a low level analyst, searching through a morass of long forgotten reports concerning the minutiae of the revolt in the Congo. However, his work gained attention at the highest level because of its specificity and detail. One of the best parts of this book is Adam's amazing specificity concerning the very detailed processes through which raw intelligence data would go through. Although CIA specialists were often as clueless on low level situations as their civilian bosses, they managed, through hours and hours in the archives, to piece together some sort of cogent observation. If you want to know the nuts and bolts behind intelligence, this is an amazing eye opener. Adams slowly climbs the ladder of the agency, until he latches on a "hot" area of national security study, the Viet Cong insurgency in Vietnam. To the shock of Adams, the information on the VC was woefully inadequate, especially in comparison to the massive role the group would have on American policy for the next decade. Adams follows his own curiosity, a valuable freedom allowed to him by a relatively effective intelligence agency. This freedom would slip away with the war years, as politics and military prognostication would end any hope Adams and people like him had of accurate conflict understanding.
Adams travels to Vietnam, and rapidly begins to realize the extent of the rebellion. He began to understand that the VC was a multi-tiered national force that far exceeded the number estimates set down by the US military and the government of South Vietnam. Much of the book is the battle Adams fights over the force estimates that the US government, estimates that he finds to be woefully inadequate. He goes over, in painful detail, the lengths that the military command, under the direct supervision of General Westmoreland's intelligence section, would go to in order to "fit" the VC estimates into political convenient numbers. To do this, the command would just edit out vast strata of VC units, such as support troops and militia formations. This was maddening to Adams and other in the CIA, who fought their hearts out to get past the official red tape. This struggle eventually cost many of them their careers, as memos got squashed and into the hands of the wrong people. It was political manipulation of intelligence in its most grotesque form, and Adams details it in all its painful reality.
War on Numbers is a very ground level account of how the American public along with large swaths of the government was misled during the Vietnam War. It is so valuable because it points out the both the successes and failures of the CIA at the time, a duality often ignored in the oppressively negative accounts we are usually treated to. It is a shame that Mr. Adams died, as parts of his unfinished work would have given a much better overall view of the situation. The only failing of the book is its incessant attention to detail, which, unless one is a student of some interest in the subject fails to really captivate. Also, I wanted to learn more about Adam's himself, it's almost like the book is an autobiography without him really being in it. You can tell the book is incomplete, but what it does deliver it does so very well. A must read for anyone interested in intelligence and its place in the Vietnam conflict.
One For Intelligence Analysts.......2002-04-27
War of Numbers is an essential book for intelligence analysts as well as students of the Vietnam War. Adams provides key insight to strategic policy failure. In order to fully appreciate Adam's contribution to the intelligence history of Vietnam, it is important to understand that wars are fought by nations in the pursuit of interests and that for Americans, the decision to go to war should address seven considerations: Problem Identification, Interests Assessment, Objective Identification (including End State Assessment), Strategic Self Appraisal, National Power Assessments of The Enemy, Strategy Development, and the Identification of Gaps between Policy and Means.
Adam's book addresses errors in the National Power Assessment phase which had a negative cascading effect in subsequent decision making. Flawed enemy strength calculations contributed to flawed strategy development which contributed to a gap between policy and means. When Adams identified the flaw, the Johnson Administration was too heavily committed to a war of attrition to tolerate public exposure of the gaps between policy and means. Strategically, telling the truth about the numbers of enemy forces would have required larger commitments of U.S. forces increasing the strain on public support for the war. The strength of Johnson's political will and McNamara's quantitative analysis approach to war deeply affected the way the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, counted the enemy (called, Order of Battle).
MACV kept three sets of books; The first set of OB was the official version sent to Washington. The second set belonged to the OB Analysts themselves, and the third set was a blend of the first two. The first set was an undercount to keep official Washington placated; the second set was the honest count but did not go anywhere, and the third set went to Westmoreland who kept it close hold.
Adams contribution to the intelligence discipline is his description of how he found the flaw in OB accounting and the political correctness that resisted him within the intelligence community. The key to his breakthrough was to have actually gone to Vietnam, worked the Order of Battle issues on the ground, understand the enemy from "the enemy's" perspective and then double check how U.S. reporting of enemy strength matched that of how the enemy was reporting his own strength. This is when Adams discovered that MACV was undercounting troop strength. He performed a validity and reliability check on MACV and found their procedures and results wanting. The technique he used is described in detail and serves as a lesson learned for today's OB analysts.
The second lesson is how Adams' persistence caused a rift between the CIA and MACV over the integrity of the OB counting. The CIA is evenhandedly portrayed in the book. Individual analysts who looked at the numbers invariably sided with Adams; those in responsive political positions and vulnerable to the political influence of the Johnson-McNamara Administration behave in the subtle manner normally associated with behind the scene politics. Adams illustrates how assessments were watered down, reports delayed, egos clashed in the briefing rooms, and all of the suppressive efforts were brought to bear to keep him muffled and how he countered them. Basically, his operating principle was that the truth should be allowed to surface and he describes how he created those opportunities; back channel copies of reports; boot leg copies of reports, analyst to analyst contacts (CIA to DIA, for example), as well as maintaining contact with the honest brokers at MACV.
This is an important book for students of Intelligence Analysis. It serves as a guide on how to double check the validity and reliability of Order of Battle data; it gives insight to how politics heavily filtered ground truth under the Johnson Administration, and it lets the world see that the CIA wasn't evil incarnate. Like every other agency in Washington, it simply surrendered to political pressure from the White House.
Intelligence with integrity!.......1999-06-22
Adams' book is not so much a book about Vietnam as a chronical of what happens when intelligence units and agencies report what the commanders WANT to hear. The CIA and J2 of MACV in Adams' book become pawns in the politics of Vietnam. They ignored facts and basic tenents of intelligence reporting. The agencies feared reaction to the facts and its possible effect on public sentiment to US involvement. Because of that they purposely, according to Adams, reported and knowingly maintained false information.
Even more disturbing are Adams' insights into the CIA of the middle and late Sixties. Though deeply entrenched in war in Vietnam, they seemed to take an overall cavalier approach to the mission. Adams notes after Tet-1968 there were "considerably less than 6" CIA agent handlers in Vietnam who spoke vietnamese. These same case officers received a grand total of 2 hours orientation on Vietnam and their enemy prior to assignment.
This book is a MUST read for intelligence personnel, policy makers and anyone who wants to learn how, the hard way, not to run an intelligence organization.
Book Description
The "Asian values" argument within the international human rights debate holds that not all Asian states should be expected to protect human rights to the same degree. This position of "cultural relativism," often used by authoritarian governments in Asia to counter charges of human rights violations, has long been dismissed by Western and Asian human rights advocates as a weak excuse. This book moves beyond the politicized rhetoric that has dogged the international debate on human rights to identify the more persuasive contributions by East Asian intellectuals. The editors of this book argue that critical intellectuals in East Asia have begun to chart a middle ground between the extreme, uncompromising ends of this argument, making particular headway in the areas of group rights and economic, social, and cultural (ethnic minority) rights. The chapters form a collective intellectual inquiry into the following four areas: critical perspectives on the "Asian values" debate; theoretical proposals for an improved international human rights regime with greater input from East Asians; the resources within East Asian cultural traditions that can help promote human rights in the region; and key human rights issues facing East Asia as a result of rapid economic growth in the region.
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East Asian Challenge for Human Rights.(Review) (book reviews) : An article from: Contemporary Southeast Asia
Asad Latif
Manufacturer: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)
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This digital document is an article from Contemporary Southeast Asia, published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) on December 1, 1999. The length of the article is 1230 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: East Asian Challenge for Human Rights.(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Asad Latif
Publication:
Contemporary Southeast Asia (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 1999
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)
Volume: 21
Issue: 3
Page: 475
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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- Losing Paradise: The Growing Threat to Animals Our Environme
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Losing Paradise: The Growing Threat to Our Animals, Our Environment, and Ourselves
Paul G. Irwin
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ASIN: 0757000037 |
Customer Reviews:
Losing Paradise: The Growing Threat to Animals Our Environme.......2001-01-26
This is a recent publication by Paul Erwin, President and CEO of the Nation's largest animal protection organization, the Humane Society of the United States, with seven million members. Mr. Irwin has written a landmark book for the layman and clearly presents irrefutable evidence that humankind is on a reckless collision course with the Earth. He presents an alarming and compelling look at how critical the situation is today for our resources, our endangered wildlife, and for human life itself. Never in the history of our planet is it more important for the information in this book to reach millions of readers. It would behoove all of humanity, from housewives to board members of mega international corporations, to heed these warnings.
In Losing Paradise the author paints a shocking picture of the degree to which greed and recklessness have already devastated this planet. My feeling while reading this book was that it is becoming not so much a struggle to save paradise, but to salvage the wasteland we have created of that paradise. As a single example, the clearcutting of ancient forests all over the world is threatening to wipe out future medicines before scientists are given the opportunity to harvest the plant specimens. These magnificent rainforests are being destroyed with total abandon along with possible cures for cancer or other incurable diseases of mankind.
However, the author also offers the hope of solutions and simple and effective steps that can and must be taken if life as we know it can continue on this planet.
I would strongly urge anyone interested in the environment, in the future, and in the future for their children and their progeny to read this compelling book on the dire threats to our earth and all living things on it.
Books:
- The Puppet Emperor: The Life of Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China
- The Queen Mother Remembered
- The rebel prince,: Or, Lessons from the career of the young man Absalom
- The Religious Life of Richard III: Piety & Prayer in the North of England (Sutton History Paperbacks)
- The Tarnished Crown: Princess Diana and the House of Windsor
- Two Years In The Forbidden City
- Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula
- Woolley of Ur: The Life of Sir Leonard Woolley
- Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser's Early Life, 18591888
- A Conspiracy of Indifference: The Raoul Wallenberg Story
Books Index
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