Butterworths Ireland Tax Treaties

Book Description

Even monsters get old, and old monsters need a place to while away their twilight years. But when word comes that Castle Frankenstein is to be razed to build condominiums, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Wolf-Man, the Mummy, and other favorites must break out of the old monsters' home for one last quest!

Grumpy Old Monsters #1, November 2003 SIGNED

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Grumpy Old Monsters #1, November 2003 SIGNED
Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
Manufacturer: IDW
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Comic
ASIN: B000V758M2

Product Description

First issue of the series, SIGNED by Kevin J. Anderson on the front cover.

Grumpy Old Monsters (Original Miniseries)

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Grumpy Old Monsters (Original Miniseries)
Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
Manufacturer: IDW
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Comic
ASIN: B000L6LABG

Product Description

These are the individual issues that comprise the miniseries, not the trade paperback collection.

Book Description

How to use humor for unlimited success, better health and staying sane when the world gets a little crazy. An inspiring and entertaining resource on how humor can enhance self-image, heal the body, mind and spirit, improve the quality of our relationships with friends, loved ones and business colleagues. Alligators provides medical and anecdotal evidence showing why laughter is not only the best medicine, it the best antidote to overcome personal turmoil.

Customer Reviews:

when you up to your eyeballs.......2001-06-12

Honestly, I'm a little surprised at the other 5 star reviews. This book spends way too much time making a case for why laughter is important and what it could do if you incorporate more of it into your life. OK we get the picture now give some techniques, stories and tell some jokes. I was half way through the book and realized that it was like one big motivational informercial. Yes, the whole book was an introduction in my opinion and never seems to progress. Simply put, based on the other reviews I expected a lot more chafe than wheat.

Another winner from Larry Wilde.......2001-05-16

Larry Wilde has a knack for mixing successful coping strategies with side-splitting humor. In this book, the two go hand-in-hand. The jokes and funny stories are right on the money, and are used to illustrate the author's program for tackling even the toughest situations life can dish out. A book you can return to again and again.

If life is getting you down, read this book!!.......2001-02-16

This was a very good book, when I was reading this book, I just kept saying to myself, "You know your right Larry." You will love it if you buy it.

Bye, bye, blues!.......1999-04-10

If Larry Wilde keeps this up he's going to put the blues singers out of business. With "Alligators," he's found the silver bullet, the panacea, the cure-all for the heebie-jeebies, the collywobbles and the jeepers-creepers. Laced with analytical excursions into exorcism, this is a funny book. Take it seriously!

Every CO, should have this book next to training manuals!!!!.......1999-03-31

Whether your Company is large or small, this book by the multi-talanted Larry Wilde shold be required reading for ALL your employees-not just management. I will always use it as the tool it was meant to be. KEEP LAUGHING!!!!!!

When You're Up To Your Eyeballs in Alligators

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When You're Up To Your Eyeballs in Alligators
Wilde
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0945040032

Book Description

Peter Valenti presents an objective evaluation of Flynn's impact on both American popular culture and the development of motion pictures. The book begins with a brief biography of the actor, followed by a complete history of his screen, radio, and television career, an annotated guide to popular and scholarly materials on Flynn, and a bibliography of his own writings and the publications in which they appeared. Valenti ends with a series of personal interviews held with Flynn at various points in his often infamous career.

Customer Reviews:

A BIOBIBLIOGRAPHY BY PETER VALENTI.......2000-07-07

This is a superb comprehensive publication, an a-z of many facts about Flynn- a who's who of many articles written about one of Hollywood's most charismatic stars. The book demonstrates the time and research the author conducted for the book.

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Errol Flynn: A Bio-Bibliography
Peter Valenti
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTJ7TW

Errol Flynn: A Bio-Bibliography (Popular Culture Bio-Bibliographies)

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Errol Flynn: A Bio-Bibliography (Popular Culture Bio-Bibliographies)
Errol] Valenti, Peter [Flynn
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MLG17S

Book Description

Known for its libertarian mix of investigative reporting, trend-setting essays, and caustic wit, Reason magazine has received kudos from both Rush Limbaugh and the president of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen. In this anthology of some of its best articles, hot-button topics such as biotechnology, the coming war on fatty foods, gay marriage, legalization of drugs, and the war on terrorism are addressed by contributors including maverick journalist Christopher Hitchens, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, and 20/20 coanchor John Stossel.

Customer Reviews:

Great Collection of Rational Articles.......2005-02-23

I should probably disclose at the outset that I received a copy of _Choice_ gratis, presumably because of my weblog. However, I've been a Reason subscriber for several years and I am generally favorably disposed to a magazine whose tag line is free minds and free markets.

_Choice_ collects some of the best articles from Reason from recent years and packages them with a pair of introductions from Drew Carey and Chris Hitchens. The editors did a great job of collecting articles, as this collection gathers a number of favorites I recalled from my own subscription alongside older articles I was quite pleased to have the chance to read. The philosophy of each article is generally consistent in favoring a more libertarian view of government, laying out the case in generally calm and reasoned tones that pursue argument rather than simple shouting. The various authors have their own roads to this goal, making the book a quick read even at 300+ pages.

_Choice_ is a great read regardless of political persuasion because the articles do a good job of following the facts to a conclusion rather than cherry-picking facts to support a conclusion. Liberals and conservatives will each find things to support and decry here, and they will all be challenged. _Choice_ also includes a number of interviews with luminaries like Norman Borlaug and Milton Friedman (and even Drew Carey).

If you're looking for something to support your point of view, _Choice_ may not be for you. But if you're looking for a collection of articles that will challenge you, this is the place to start.

Giving the (Often) Voiceless a Voice!.......2004-11-08

Being a libertarian, I am often in a position of feeling quite equally distant from both the 'right' and the 'left.' The 'right' seeems to champion free-market principles and less government, but will defend regulation at the drop of a hat when freedom produces results it feels are immoral. By comparison, the 'left' champions such freedoms as that of speech and press and the rights of criminal defendants to due process, but argues for government incursion into most every area of the free market. What is a poor libertarian (believing in all of these freedoms at once) to do?

The answer: we turn to magazines like "Reason." This book consists of a good number of articles that Reason has published in recent years in defense of all that is liberty. As with any collection of disperate articles written over a span of many years, some articles are better than others (and, yes, I skipped a few of the worse ones). All in all, though, this book deserves four stars for writing forcefully and soundly on issues that concern the libertarian position (a position sorely lacking from dialogue dominated by the orthodox "left" and "right").

The book starts off with a bang - an article called "In Praise of Vulgarity" which argues that the role of entertainers pushing the envelope has done more than anything to break the traditionalistic strangle-hold on the culture(s) of the middle east. From there, we move to articles which argue that the commercialization of culture is a good thing, that anti-immigration policies hurt all involved, that the drug war is a cure worse than the disease, etc.

Perhaps most engaging, though, were the various interviews contained in these pages. Reason has interviewed the likes of John Stossel, Christopher Hitchens, Milton Friedman, Dave Barry, and even a few key characters involved in the war on drugs who now oppose that effort. So engaging were these interviews that I began wishing either that this volume had, or a future one will, focus EXCLUSIVELY on interviews done by the magazine.

The only other observation I had was that at least to me, that the articles seemed to decline in quality the later their placement in the book. Most of my favorite articles (described tow paragraphs up) appeared within the first 150 pages. The second half of the book contains such duds as an examination of the QWERTY keyboard (and its relation to market principles), a profile of an early 19th century "exploitation" film to do with sex, and some other seemingly trivial essays. Other than that, the book is still quite solid.

Book Description

Six festive, fancifully shaped Easter "posters" perfect to hang in playroom or schoolroom windows and walls. Among the subjects: a just-hatched chick emerging from its shell, a basket full of old-fashioned Easter treats, and a bunny and a duck marching under a placard proclaiming "Happy Easter." Each printed on both sides.

Book Description

Firefox Hacks is ideal for power users who want to take full advantage of Firefox from Mozilla, the next-generation web browser that is rapidly subverting Internet Explorer's once-dominant audience. It's also the first book that specifically dedicates itself to this technology. Firefox is winning such widespread approval for a number of reasons, including the fact that it lets users browse faster and more efficiently. Perhaps its most appealing strength, though, is its increased security something that is covered in great detail in Firefox Hacks. Clearly the web browser of the future, Firefox includes most of the features that browser users are familiar with, along with several new features, such as a bookmarks toolbar and tabbed pages that allow users to quickly switch among several web sites. Firefox Hacks offers all the valuable tips and tools you need to maximize the effectiveness of this hot web application. It's all covered, including how to customize its deployment, appearance, features, and functionality. You'll even learn how to install, use, and alter extensions and plug-ins. Aimed at clever people who may or may not be capable of basic programming tasks, this convenient resource describes 100 techniques for 100 strategies that effectively exploit Firefox. Or, put another way, readers of every stripe will find all the user-friendly tips, tools, and tricks they need to make a productive switch to Firefox. With Firefox Hacks, a superior and safer browsing experience is truly only pages away. The latest in O'Reilly's celebrated Hacks series, Firefox Hacks smartly complements other web-application titles such as Google Hacks and PayPal Hacks.

Customer Reviews:

Something For All Web Surfers; Something For All Firefox Developers.......2006-02-06

I have a little sideline in repairing computers, and one day a customer asked if I could help him recover all his bookmarks from the installed Mozilla version he had on his old hard drive and move them to the one on his new hard drive. Hack 25 in this book, "Migrate Firefox Profiles", told me what to do since Firefox is based on the Mozilla code base. Over several more days, I referred to other hacks in this book to guide the customer with greater skill. This book made me look like a greater expert than I really am -- which pleases me.

This is just one of several times I have quickly reached for Firefox Hacks in order to rescue either a customer or myself. It is very common for customers to want to migrate their browser data. Some consider it important enough to pay for my help to get that job done. Browsers are the most important unit of software on the internet. Buying this book is a good investment in working with Firefox as a tool.

For myself, I'm interested in the fonts I can use (Hacks 30, "Insall Fonts and Character Support", and 61, "Make MathML Content"), reviewing the basics (Hacks 1-10) and installation (Hacks 22 through 32.) I want to play with Scalable Vector Graphics which are now natively supported in Firefox 1.5. I never tire of rendering the cubic spline tiger on Croczilla: [...]

If you want to develop with Firefox (and Nigel McFarlane has written a related book on Mozilla development). check out the getting-started Hack 93, "Make Firefox Software". Enjoy the thrill of compiling your own flavor of Firefox.

My point is that Firefox Hacks has something for everyone. If you are just starting with web browing, look at Hacks 1 through 10. I learned something from most of these -- and I thought I was an expert web surfer. If you want to do deep development, refer to the "Work More Closely With Firefox" hacks in Chapter 9. Yes, I have compiled the Mozilla browser many times. If you just want to be able to play around, pick any hack in this book, read it closely, and then implement it for yourself. Go do it -- you won't be sorry.

I like McFarlane's way of describing each hack in detail rather than throwing code at you and using it to take up column-inches and pages of book space without telling you what that code really does and how to make it work. McFarlane has a gift for explaining exceedingly complex material in an easily digestible way. Every reader of this book will find at least a few hacks to zero in on and study closely. You will find that you have the careful explanation you need to make the hack understandable and workable, without being smothered with useless detail.

McFarlane cross-references and supports his hacks with other hacks and web page links for those who want to learn more. It is McFarlane's special strength that he can simplify the complex issues that come with web browsing and point you in the right direction, while actually getting you interested in some arcane bit of Firefox.

McFarlane has done an outstanding job of crafting this book. He is one of the best technical writers of our time and I am hopeful he will publish new books as well as update his existing work.

To wring the most out of Firefox as your web browser of choice, get Firefox Hacks.

Good bok for developers and admins alike.......2005-09-27

Firefox Hacks is a great collection of information about the Mozilla Firefox browser. While almost anyone who has used Firefox would learn a great deal from reading this book, developers, admins, and advanced power users would benefit most from reading this. The book starts out nicely by going under the hood to look at internal settings, then turns to presentation aids and then to developer tools. I wish I'd had the book several months ago when I was doing more development! From code development the book moves into altering the browser look and feel, and finally into extension development. Although I may never do so, it's nice getting a guided look into areas I don't see on a day to day basis.

If you want more details on Firefox than what you can find online, or just want a good reference as a jumping off point, this is definitely one of the books to have.

Good book!.......2005-09-23

"Firefox Hacks" includes a wealth of under the covers
information on the number two most used browser. This
book goes beyond the average browser user that just
uses a browser for browsing. The book covers
everything from securing Firefox to deploying Firefox
across an enterprise to using Firefox for debugging
websites. McFarlane goes into enough detail and
explanation in each of his tips so that the reader can
at least get a good understanding of the whys and
hows. I would recommend this book to anyone doing any
development using Firefox or developing for Firefox to
get into the details behind the browser.

Good book for all levels of users.......2005-08-15

Firefox has been around for several years and most of the hacks in the book are well documented on the web, but O'Reilly and Nigel McFarlane have brought you a book that brings the structure of the program and the usefulness of the hacks into one place.

The power of the "hacks" series is that you can benefit from this book even if you don't have time to read through the whole thing. If you picked up the book to help you with re-branding Firefox, then you can go just to that section. Maybe you are needing Firefox to be a test bed for standards compatibility of a particular web project you are working on, then just read the sections of the book which apply. On the other hand, if you don't know what Firefox is capable of then you need simply to browse through the whole book to see what a powerful program Firefox is.

The book covers a very wide variety of hacks. Many have to do with extensions that can be added onto Firefox. An extension can be considered as a pre-built hack with a nice installer. It is fitting then that many of these packaged hacks are covered in the book.

Outside of just general use of the book for learning what Firefox is capable of, the book has great appeal for web developers. With the extensions available to developers to help in their work, there are quite a few development tools built into Firefox. Not the least of which is its standards compatibility. To know if something is well written one simply needs to view it in Firefox to see how a standards compliant browser renders the underlying code.

The author used several phrases and vocabulary that would not be considered standard English. This is something that a company like O'Reilly, catering to their particular audience, might allow to become lax. Well written and edited books are hard to come by and often go unnoticed. It would have been better had the publisher spent a little more time on the editing of this work. It would be a shame that someone might be turned away from this book and its great content because of poor editing.

With hacks ranging in difficulty from easy to advanced, this 377 page guide will get just about anyone hacking Firefox.

I wish to offer condolences to the family of the author as he has since passed away.

completely discombobulated.......2005-07-25

I don't know where to begin, I get a headache everytime I pick up this book. It is clear that the author knows what he is talking about, but where this book falls short is the layout. This might have been a good book *if* and only if McFarlane didn't have to conform to the "Hacks" series format. It really ruins the book, most of the hacks aren't even useful for an end user and are meant for developers. These might be useful if you understand what RFC 822 means, but if you do, then why on earth do you need to buy a book that explains things you already know? Alot of the "hacks" don't even stand by themselves, this book constantly references other "hacks" making it a chore to read. Like I said, if the author was free to create his own format(not conform to "hacks" series) it might have been laid out well.

Someone must explain to me why, in a chapter entitled "Installation", why does it then go into describing the files and folders that exist only once Firefox is installed???? No where in the chapter does it mention the config.ini or install.ini. Which *ahem* are rumored to be used in the installation process. It might've been helpful *coughcough* if it detailed the options for the firefox-installer or setup.exe." It could explain what preferences might be set by the installation process, then have a seperate chapter devoted to preferences. The chapter should've been called "Preferences."

I don't understand the security chapter at all, why is it giving you ways to make Firefox *less* secure???? I suppose you could do them if you were accessing a local webpage, but how many of us do that on a regular basis, and for what purpose? Why would you turn off a security switch that has no performance hit what-so-ever? I suppose you could give a look through them and then use the exact opposite settings it defines, but most of those are already the default settings.

I could go on, but I have other things to do. If you must read this book there's an online version somewhere.

Customer Reviews:

a published review.......1999-02-05

Reviews of JOHN F. MOFFTTT and SANTIAGO SEBASTIAN: O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Published review, in Latin-American Indian Literatures Journal: "The book merits wide circulation. The impressive scholarship embraces both pictorial and written sources, and the lengthy quotations in English translation from the early explorers and chroniclers are helpful."

Another published review by DANIEL K. RICHTER (Dickinson College), in American Historical Review, December 1998.

This book by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián appears, at first glance, to be a blast from the historiographical past. Readers of such standard works as Robert Berkhofer, Jr.'s The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1979) and Olive Patricia Dickason's The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (1984) will find much that is familiar. Early modern Europeans invented perniciously enduring stereotypes about Indians, images rooted almost entirely in their own fantasies and fears rather than in empirical data. Those familiar with such more recent, theoretically sophisticated studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991), Anthony Pagden's European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (1992), or Gordon M. Sayre's Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) will be disappointed in a book that openly disavows "the imposition of the kind of theoretical constructs that so bedevil current, postmodernist academic writing" (p. 3). Nonetheless, this product of a long collaboration between Moffitt and the late Sebastián has at least three great strengths. First, as art historians, the authors bring to visual materials an attention to detail seldom available to more text-oriented scholars. Second, as specialists in Renaissance art, they take medieval and classical influences on those materials seriously as systems of belief rather than mere artistic conventions. These first two strengths especially come together in their analysis of the meaning of the term India to fifteenth-century Europeans. When Christopher Columbus reported that he had found "Paradise-on-Earth" on "the Indian Islands, Located Beyond the Ganges River, Which Have Just Been Newly Rediscovered," Moffitt and Sebastián argue, he was not merely compounding a geographic error with rhetorical exaggeration. Instead, "as employed by Columbus, the term precisely meant a specific place described in the Book of Genesis as having been initially inhabited by Adam and Eve," a place Columbus and contemporary artists and map-makers sincerely believed still existed at the extreme tip of the Indian subcontinent (p. 16). This framework of ideas about an Indian Eden provides a compelling context for the many descriptions of "Indians" as pre- or post-lapsarian inhabitants of an early paradise. It also helps to explain why explorers, map-makers, and illustrators peopled the Americas with every lurid humanoid type found in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (13561357) and other Indian subcontinent travel fantasies. The third strength of Moffitt and Sebastián is their effort to reconstruct the ways in which early modern viewers actually experienced images of alleged Native Americans. They are particularly effective in contextualizing dozens of woodcut and copperplate illustrations that previous historians have considered in isolation from the books in which they first appeared. When placed against the texts-and in light of the fact that European illustrators nearly always worked solely from written descriptions rather than illustrations from life-it becomes clear that the visual images were entirely products of European imaginations rather than American experience. Illustrators appear to have made almost no attempt to render details about Native American appearance and behavior contained in explorers's written accounts with any accuracy. Instead, they reproduced stock images of "savages," "wild men," "Amazons," and "cannibals" familiar from books written well before 1492. Few publications went as far as a 1554 edition of Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias y Nuevo Mundo mas la conquista del Peru y de Mexico that recycled a set of illustrations originally drawn for a 1520 edition of Livy's history of Rome. Yet most had little more relevance to the subjects they purported to illustrate. The same disconnection from American reality apparent in negative stereotypes also applied in more positive, and presumably accurate, contexts. The famous illustrations of Theodore de Bry-most of which took as their originals the watercolors that Englishman John White painted at Roanoke in 1585-were, Moffitt and Sebastián argue, part of a concerted effort by Philip lI's Dutch Protestant opponents to promulgate the "Black Legend" of Spanish cruelty to Native Americans. In this politicized context, de Bry's images, far from attempting to convey accurate information about Native Americans, added to "the Noble and Ignoble Indian tropes" a new, third stereotype: "the figure of the 'doomed Indian'" (p. 303).

Unique approach to the historical significance of "Indians".......1998-09-27

Abstract: in Historian; a Journal of History, Winter 1998, Colin G. Calloway reviews "O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian" by John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian. Full Text: 0 Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian. By John F. Moffitt and Santiago (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 399. $55.0.) The authors of this book, both art historians, take a rather well-worn subject but examine it from a different perspective and with more attention to detail than have other studies of the images of Indians that were generated by the Columbian encounter and subsequent contacts. That Columbus mistakenly called the native inhabitants of the Americas "Indians" will come as no surprise to anyone. That Europeans created stereotypes of Indian people out of their own preconceptions, on the basis of limited contacts, and for their own purposes, will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with the work of Roy Harvey Pearce, Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Olive Dickason, and others. John Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian go beyond previous studies and, in a close critical reading of pre-colonial art and literature, they search out the origins of the baggage of imagery, attitudes, and assumptions that Europeans brought to their encounters with Native Americans. Focusing primarily on Spanish contacts with native peoples in the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, South America, Moffitt and Sebastian show how Renaissance-era Europeans not only evaluated Indians "according to certain culturally enshrined patterns that seemed most natural or logical to them," but actually reinvented them (p. 4). The authors explain how the scriptural precedent of the Edenic earthly paradise and the equally ancient concept of the noble savage influenced European perceptions and inventions of the "New World" and its people. Moffitt and Sebastian assess the influence of classical models, medieval literary conventions, and previous encounters with other non-European peoples, and they critically analyze depictions of imagined Indians in Renaissance graphic art. Examining how the Indian Eden, which was created by European imagination, was destroyed by European conquest, the authors dissect the "Black Legend" of Spanish atrocities that was established by Bartolomé de Las Casas and perpetuated by Protestant writers and printers. They show how this legend affected the evolving European image of Native Americans and how it continues to distort understanding of Spain's role in the colonization of America, but they perhaps dismiss it too easily as "largely without foundation" (290). Laden with literary and artistic allusions and block quotations, O Brave New People is written in a formal, scholarly--and, as the authors acknowledge, "often rhetorical"--style that will lose some of the readers for whom it is intended (336). Some others will be turned off as they quickly realize that the book has little to do with historical Indian people. It is a detailed examination of the origins and development of the mind-set of a particular group of Renaissance Europeans. Unfortunately, that mind-set has had an enduring legacy. Colin G. Calloway (Dartmouth)

O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian.(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Utopian Studies

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O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian.(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Utopian Studies
Peter Sands
Manufacturer: Society for Utopian Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Utopian Studies, published by Society for Utopian Studies on March 22, 1998. The length of the article is 916 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: O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian.(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Peter Sands
Publication: Utopian Studies (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1998
Publisher: Society for Utopian Studies
Page: 294(1)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Customer Reviews:

Islamic genesis of Rom slavery.......2004-04-26

I looked for this book for years before recently finding an excellent copy of the second, paperback edition. Alas, it proves every bit as heart-rending as I'd expected. Dr. Hancock has written an important and necessary account of the largely untold story of oppression against the Romani people, which deserves much wider distribution.

The book touches on the genocide committed against the Rom in the Holocaust, when an estimated 500,000 Romani people were murdered.

But my chief interest concerned the derivation of the Rom arrival as slaves in Europe. I had known for many years that the Rom originated in India, had been enslaved for 500 years in Europe and were emancipated only in the first half of the 19th century. But what was the genesis of this massive oppression, first documented in Moldavia in 1333 under Rudolph IV and Stephan Dusan, and relieved only following the 1826 Russian invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia? This was a mystery prior readings did not address.

In truth, the source of Rom enslavement was not so hard to determine. Therefore it seems surprising that, as best I can tell, only the late K.S. Lal ever examined or even touched on the obvious source of the Roma presence in Europe: the Islamic jihad conquests that swept all the way to India beginning in the 8th century. But indeed, as Lal notes in The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (pp. 112-113), it was the invaders' practice during their 500 year reign of devastation to "capture defenseless [Hindu] people and make them slaves for service and sale."

Thus with the arrival of Mahmud of Ghazni these hapless souls were sold as slaves to Transoxnia and the Arab empire and transported to Iran, Armenia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Britain and even to the Americas. As Hancock further highlights in this superb study, the first documented mention of Rom slaves in Europe roughly paralleled the dates of the Islamic assaults on Europe, which carried with them the devastation, slaughter and institutional discrimination established against non-Muslims earlier in all other parts of the Islamic empire.

The Balkan economy flourished during the Middle Ages, Hancock observes, as Muslims conquered territory after territory, subjugated people after people and cut off European access to the East. As Muslim Tatar and Seljuk armies swept west through the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, the Balkans offered an alternative route to the Holy Land. Hungary and Wallachia also profited by military traffic during the 200-year Crusader retaliations that followed 500 years of Islamic jihad wars on Christendom.

Hancock postulates that Islamic assaults on Europe carried both refugees from Muslim conquests of India and Eurasia, warriors retreating from jihadi advance--and finally slaves impressed into the service of Muslim invaders. The Domba Romani people express various linguistic attributes of the Sudra caste, suggesting that they included both infidels enslaved after primary Muslim massacres in India, and Rajasthani-speaking Rajput cavalry who in the 10th century moved west into Iran and fled further and further to escape the advancing Islamic encroachment into Armenia.

The 19th century Dutch historian De Goeje, Hancock reports, suggested that the European Rom descended from 27,000 Zott captured in 855 and forcibly transported to Syria. But the Indic Jakati language is fairly remote from Romani. Hancock prefers the thesis of Soulis--namely that the Romani appeared in Byzantine lands following "the Seljuk raids in Armenia where the Gypsies...had stayed for a long time, as the great number of Armenian loan-words in their vocabulary testifies."

This seems most likely, he adds, since the late 11th century jihad caused mass migration of Armenians too, into what became Little Armenia in Sicilia. The westward flow of refugees was almost certainly one cause of Romani migration, along with the Islamic assault on Anatolia.

As noted above, Hancock's thesis makes tremendous sense when matched with the conclusions of the late Hindu scholar of Islam, K.S. Lal. While some Rom people may have fled the Islamic conquest and massacres in India in the 8th and 9th centuries, a far greater number were undoubtedly transported by Muslims as slaves, since enslavement in India was massive.

For the Romani people, the result of all these Islamic wars was double irony and oppression. As Hancock observes, Christians in the Byzantine Empire regarded them as Muslims. Muslims in the East and later Europe regarded them as Christians.

While Christians indisputably oppressed the Rom, however, Hancock describes laws that governed their treatment and status as slaves--which decidedly resemble laws of Islamic Sharia. For example, Romani slaves were debased creatures, just as dhimmis in Islamic lands obtained no rights whatever so as to feel themselves debased and beneath their Muslim rulers. Similarly, as in the Sharia, owners of Rom slaves had no legal right to murder them, yet commonly did so all the same, and no master was ever prosecuted for such a crime. The women were just as often violated as concubines.

This book provides a remarkable window onto the genesis of 500 years of Rom enslavement, and the oppression that consequently to this day follows these impoverished, abused and unfairly stereotyped and maligned people.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Book Description

The new mind science revolution sweeping the world is providing astonishing new insights into almost every aspect of our daily lives. But where did it all come from? One answer, as Allan Hobson now demonstrates in his elegant masterpiece 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, is the simple act of waking up and thinking about our dreams.

Freud ushered in the modern era of neuroscience when he set out on his great Project for a Scientific Psychology in an effort to bring science to the world of our imaginations. One of the first sites of his investigation was the interpretation of dreams. Freud believed dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But modern neuroscience, including Hobson's own research, has shown this understanding of the brain to be wrong. As Hobson lucidly explains, the bizarre nature of our dreams has nothing to do with repressed emotion as Freud taught; it results from the way the brain is physically built. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes. Here is an amazingly clear window on how thoughts are actually created from our memories of experiences.

Each chapter of this book begins with notes describing a dream taken after Dr. Hobson awoke from it. Dr. Hobson discusses how the dreams can be interpreted given the circumstances of his waking life. Each chapter then shows how that interpretation fits into the physical structure of the brain—for instance, why movements our bodies make and movements we see in our mind's eye are so much a part of how we think.

Allan Hobson and other brain researchers have, over the last several decades, been constructing a new neurocognitive model of the mind. With the unique perspective of one the revolution's leading researchers, this superb book delivers a fresh, vivid, and compellingly personal overview of how that new science of the mind is being built.

Customer Reviews:

An Interesting Way to View the New Theories.......2004-10-27

When a true genius like Frued comes along and establishes a science like he did, the rest of the scientific community takes a long time to catch up and then to move on. By the end of Freud's life in 1939, the first cracks in his theories were beginning to be made by the neurologists. Since then, the neurologists have continue to develop their theories to meet every increasing evidence on how the brain works.

In this book, Dr. Hobson writes abou thirteen dreams that he had over several years. For each dream he analysizes it not from the standpoint Freud would use, but from the standpoint of modern neurological science - i.e. how much wine did he have to drink that suppressed REM sleep leaving him REM deprived.

This book presents an interesting view of the modern developments in dream analysis based on current techology.

Book Description

For more than twenty years, Australia's forests have been the subject of angry controversy. Industry groups, timber towns, professional foresters, trade unions, economists, developers and environmentalists have all voiced different proposals, based on mutually exclusive values. The major forest contests-the Gordon and the Daintree, wilderness and World Heritage, rainforests and woodchipping, pulp mills and pine plantations-have aroused intense passions and influenced elections. But this book is more than a survey of recent events. It reviews forest management from Aboriginal times, demonstrating that both the forests themselves, and our conceptions of them, are socially constructed. Dr Dargavel weaves together the story of industrial development and forest use with the slow acceptance of the case for forest conservancy. He shows how various 'resource regimes' evolved, and how they fashioned the forests in different ways-ecologically, spatially and socially. He then describes the challenges to these established patterns since the 1970s-industrial restructuring, woodchip exports, unsustainable harvesting, and the rise of the environmental movement. Fashioning Australia's Forests concludes with a chapter on the prospects for the forests, their industries and workers, in a highly uncertain future. Australians have to choose: to be pushed along a 'low road' of apathetic submission to market forces, ignorance, and continuing acrimony between environmentalists and developers; or to take a long, hard 'high road' towards sustainable development in which both social and environmental needs are taken seriously.

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