History Books

The Cheese and the Worms has got to be the most ridiculously over-rated academic work of history of the past 3 decades. The author's central argument of the existence of an essentially unchanged Indo-European folk culture that spans both millenia and continents is both completely lacking in evidence and, from a theoretical view, patently ridiculous.

You can't simply sit down and find vague similarities between what a 16th century miller says and what some guy 2000 years earlier said in India and then, without any evidence or even a compelling argument of how the expressed ideas would have been transmitted, claim that this is proof positive that a substrata of Indo-European popular culture formed the predominant mentalite of most of the population of Europe throughout the latter ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. That's nonsense.

Besides the obvious paucity of evidence, the author has a seriously deficient understanding of how popular culture works. Popular culture, whether modern or ancient, is simply NOT static over millenia of time and over thousands of miles of geography. Did premodern popular culture evolve more slowly than culture today? Yes, it probably did, and it also long retained certain features (particularly features tied to technology constraints and the natural world) -- but it did change. In fact, careful historical analysis of popular culture during the early modern period, based on extensive use of archival material, has shown that pre-modern popular culture actually seems to evolve quite a bit more quickly than was previously thought. The notion of an unchanging rural European culture, developed by late 19th century intellectuals, simply doesn't hold up when confronted with the actual evidence. Economic patterns change, elements of elite culture sift down and are adopted/incorporated by the populace, different foods are introduced, marriage and family patterns shift, devotional practices evolve, and so on -- and here I am talking only of diachronic issues, let alone geographic diversity.

One cannot simply do as Ginzburg has done and find some aspect of early modern European popular culture and then, with no evidence whatsoever to support one's supposition, assume that this feature extends indefinately into the medieval past. When thinking about history, it is always of great importance never to assume that trends move in a straight progression -- they don't, they go up and down and this way and that. Heresy is a great example. There is always a certain amount of popular heresy present in medieval Europe, but the nature of the beliefs, the organization of the heretics, their geographic foci, etc. all changes over time.

The Cheese and the Worms was a success because it fit the Baby Boom generation of academics anti-hierarchical ideology, not because it was good scholarship. There was an element of that generation that wanted to believe that the 'true' popular culture of Europe had nothing to do with the church or literature or anything else. Instead, they wanted to believe that the 'true' culture consisted of some eternal Indo-European folkloric belief system and that peasants merely gave superficial lip service to the 'impositions' of the elites (Christian faith in particular). The Cheese and the Worms told them what they already wanted to believe, so they believed it.

If you want a book on medieval popular culture that A) was written by someone with both intelligence and common sense and B) actually has genuine evidence for what the author claims (imagine that!), read Medieval Popular Culture, by Aron Gurevich. Giovanni and Lusanna by Gene Brucker is also a good, light little book that provides a window into the culture of Renaissance townsfolk in Italy.

Don't waste your time with Ginzburg. He's not an historian -- he's an idealogue.

Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the story of one Menocchio, a peasant from northern Italy who was put on trial (and eventually burned at the stake) for heresy by the Italian inquisition in the 16th century. He puts forwards parts of the transcription of the trial, and we realize that Menocchio has some quite heterodox (and not totally consistent) views on theology and cosmology, suggesting a number of eclectic sources for his ideas. For example, he viewed the Earth as a sort of giant cheese and the angels as worms coming out of the cheese (hence the book's title). How an Italian peasant, without presumably much access to books, would get such views, Ginzburg asks. He traces the bookshelves of Menocchio, but he is unable to come up with a clear answer. For example, even though his cosmology seems to have been influenced by a reading of the Koran, that was not among the books he possessed. Ginzburg finally suggests that Menocchio was a recipient of an ancient oral tradition, perhaps going back to the prechristian past, that was not totally suppressed by the church in rural areas. The book deals with an interesting subject, but is unfortunately hampered by Ginzburg's deliberately obscure writing style. He is out to show himself a postmodern writer, but a more conventional storytelling would have been better.

Researching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed.
Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired some ideas from Anabaptist radicals who had been active in the Friuli. Other ideas seem to have come from an eclectic, though limited, array of books. As Ginzburg points out, this is an example of the impact of printing. It brought such books as Mandeville's travels and possibly even the Koran into the hands of a lowly miller. Most controversially, Ginzburg argues that many of Menocchio's ideas result from or were influenced by a common European peasant world view whose nature has been largely lost to us. This is an interesting hypothesis which Ginzburg defends very well but it can only be a hypothesis. Neither Ginzburg nor anyone else has the data to evaluate this idea properly. It may be simply that Menocchio was a village crank; an intelligent man with relatively unique ideas.
Regardless of the final interpretation, this well written book provides an interesting view of life in Counter-Reformation Italy.

It is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future.

Borne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" is most fascinating when we ask the question: Was this an isolated phenonmenon or was this a reflection of many people's views? The answer, I suppose, lies with Menocchio, but there is still much to be gleaned from this book.

OK, Fine. I later find this product cheaper IN Denmark.

Everything else went fine and smoothly...

Gaddis offers a concise, readable, and well-documented history of the Cold War. What he does not offer us is a "new" history, as the title promises. This book helped fill in some blanks about the most dangerous period of our history, but I didn't set the book down thinking I had a strongly different view on the event then I could have got from other sources.

I liked how the book allowed you to get in the heads of the various U.S. presidents, and see how they thought about the war--sometimes counterintuitively. However, it seemed like there were things left out. Cambodia is mentioned only in passing on the last page, even though communism hit that country harder than any other, arguably.

The book does seem titled to the idea that the U.S. was the morally superior of the two sides, though Gaddis does not shy away from the darker moments of U.S. geopolitics in the Cold War.

Oddly enough, I walked away hoping that there would be more, not less, retrospective analysis. Just how close was the Soviet Union to collapsing before Reagan took office? Just what might have happened if the United States had not "faught" the Cold War and let the Soviet Union expand and collapse on its own? Normally, scholars tend to get too far out on hypotheticals, but here I find myself wishing he would have spent a little more time on them.

I was impressed with the shipping time.
The book was in great condition.
All positive feedback at this point.

Very tighly written book that still manages to produce some fascinating annecdotes (Kruschev and Mao in the pool together) to enliven the narrative. Both myself (a history buff) and my wife (decidedly not a history buff) found it a comprehensive and yet very readiable survey of the Cold War. Its both informative and entertaining. I strongly recommend it.

John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History (2005) is an example of counter post-revisionism. The subtitle to Gaddis's work is misleading; stating his work is a new history carries an implication that there are new sources that change the interpretation of the Cold War. Gaddis restates traditionalist arguments in the wake of post-revisionism. Gaddis clearly reveals his bias in the preface, "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it." Central to Gaddis's argument is the perception Stalin wanted to dominate Europe. The domination of Europe would appease Stalin's need for self-security, which Gaddis argues was more important to Stalin than Marxism-Leninism. He argues Stalin's megalomania and determination to secure his own position placed the United States on the defensive, and created "Machiavellians" of U.S. political leaders, which undermined the democratic traditions and morality leading to operations such as the Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Gaddis justifies the actions of the U.S. by juxtaposing them with the overtly aggressive nature of the Soviet Union. The Cold War is a successor to traditionalists, and a counter to revisionists and post-revisionists who are apt to view the Cold War without the lens of early U.S. foreign policy, and more inclined to support their work with new archival material in Russian and English. Gaddis regurgitates Cold War biases that have been disproved by new sources in the former Soviet Union. Tony Judt best sums up Gaddis's treatment of the Cold War: "Gaddis's version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for 'a fireside fairytale with a happy ending'" (Reappraisals, 381).

I was disappointed. I am a big fan of the author, having enjoyed a number of his other works - especially "DNMA History" and "DNMA Civil War" and "DNMA Bible" over the years. This work, as other reviewers have noted, is odd. A collection of unrelated stories, disturbingly bloody at times, it is littered with dates and facts that distract from the tale, and the writing is not nearly as clear or engaging as the author's other works. While some of the stories are interesting, I found most to be either already known to me, or no different from hundreds of other interesting and important odd stories relating to America's history.

If you're into history, this book will open your eyes to what the time was like during early America. Very enlightning and interesting.

The book was a very good read & our book club members really enjoyed learning about America's unknown hidden history.

This book is very detailed, and not in a good way. You lose the thread of the story for all of the tiny bits and pieces. It's also very bloody, disturbingly so. I got through the first third and couldn't finish it.

As a non-Amercan and having to teach American History to a group of international students, I found this book just what I needed to get them all interested. I learnt a lot and thouroughly enjoyed the read.

Every once in awhile a book comes along that affects me in a profound way. This is such a book. I laughed, I cried and I got angry. The characters came alive for me, proud of their heritage, with their self-identifying clothing brands, hairstyle and tattoo dot on the wrist, branding them forever as a "Southie"
Amidst the poverty, the drugs, the fights, and the untimely deaths, there was still a sense of community. In a world where most of us hardly know our neighbors, Southie was a tribe of white Irish warriors where every outsider was perceived, and rightly so, as the enemy. It was never dull in Southie, for life was lived on the edge. As Ma laments years later after moving to the mountains of Colorado, "people here just don't know how to have fun". What a family, what a life, set in the background of an era that is now over and gone, there will never again be "no place like Southie".

i could not stand this book and did not finish it. it was poorly written and has probably gotten its good reviews from people who feel sorry for their poverty, but it is neither touching nor sympathetic. if chapters on hiding the boyfriends and the big color television from the government welfare worker appeal to you, you are in luck.

I usually try to read all books that I get a hold of that are memoir..but this one I read about 1/4 of it--maybe a little more and I just couldn't keep going. I put it away for awhile and got it out again and tried again--I started from the beginning but I didn't even get a 1/4 of it read before shutting it for good. I don't recommend this book to anyone. :(

The past few years there has been a bright spotlight shone upon the South Boston social and political climates that have forever given Southie the reputation of being a sort of rough and tumble sort of place. With movies such as The Departed glorifying and demonstrating to the rest of the world what exactly Southie was all about, the resurgence to try and understand what living in South Boston must have been like is perhaps stronger now than ever before.

Though a textbook format could certainly provide readers with a sociological and psychological look at the factors that went into making South Boston perhaps one of the most volatile sections of the country, not everyone is always looking for the highfalutin academic approach to gain a glimpse into a society. Rather, what is too often not focused on is the personal stories of the area.

Thanks to the work of Michael Patrick MacDonald, readers from across the globe can read a much more personal take on life in the South Boston projects, streets, hospitals and morgues. In 2000, MacDonald and Ballantine Books release All Souls: A Family Story from Southie . MacDonald, who grew up in the projects located in Old Colony in South Boston tells an amazing family story that is so far reaching that each page seems almost as unbelievable as the next.

The MacDonald family, although perhaps never willing to admit it back in the day, did not have it easy. Though they may have been masked in their zeal for their homeland, South Boston, the realities that existed were perhaps only realized once a look back at Southie was taken by those members of the family that were fortunate enough to get out.

The book tells remarkable story after story in which the trials and tribulations of the MacDonald family and the life and events taking place in the world around them in Southie. The family is perhaps the ideal capture of a family that has been through so much yet continues to remain strong. Certainly the societal factors so prevalent in South Boston such as drugs, poverty and Whitey Bulger affected this family as it did so many in Southie. However, the remarkable part is that the author faced with the tragedy of having to bury sibling after sibling and seeing both his family and friends suffer so much is capable of releasing such a well thought out and brilliant book.

What remains true not just for the MacDonald family but also so many that grew up in South Boston during the mid to late 1900's is that despite all of the social evils taking place around them perhaps the unifying factor of being from Southie was all they needed to remain strong. When others might have crumbled or lost all hope, Southie residents and the MacDonald's in particular were able to time and time again pull themselves out of the gutter and move on in life.

The book is written in a very methodical and organized way. The stories tell a sort of time-line approach to the life of MacDonald and how it interrelated to not just his family members but also the issues that Southie will forever be remembered for: the busing riots, the drug trade of the Irish underground and the fist fights on street corners that turned into an almost daily occurrence.

What MacDonald does well in this book is not just tell a story, but rather allows the reader into the lives of those around him. Through an almost genealogical lens, MacDonald brings the reader into his family in a way that at times makes the reader forget that they have no idea of this family prior to turning to page one.

All Souls is the perfect read for someone that is both familiar with Southie either because of geographic or historical relevance or for someone who has no idea about what South Boston and its residents were faced with. The book is an amazing account of what is right about South Boston when so much has been wrong about South Boston. Even when faced with amazing extenuating circumstances, what held South Boston together was families like the MacDonald's.

Though certainly sullied by a few bad apples, the bunch is never ruined.


Recommended:
Yes

MacDonald characterizes himself as cursed with an "Irish whisper." That is, unable to keep the secrets he's entrusted with under wraps, blaring out what he should have kept hidden. This memoir of the 1970s through the 1990s, when Whitey Bulger's thugs replaced the anti-busing protests for media attention in South Boston, moves efficiently, with modest attention to Michael Patrick's own coming-of-age as contrasted with a fearsome family scenario of ten siblings, four of whom meet violent ends and three of whom die tragically. The one who survives might as well have died earlier; she survives a coma only to emerge a psychological and physical wreck. While this story often blurs the schooling, or lack of, that the author gained as he grew up in the midst of the anti-busing boycotts, and while you gain a stronger sense of the other members of his family rather than himself, this may be redressed in the new sequel, "Easter Rising." You get a less distinctive depiction of himself compared to his larger-than-life Ma and assorted brothers. Yet, the author appears here to deliberately focus upon his family and the violent milieu that boasts of its solidarity yet which poisons its very cohesion by such corruption on a moral level and a sociological scale. MacDonald redeems himself and his neighborhood as he grows up not only in body but in spirit, managing a buy-back gun program and learning to trust (a few perhaps) police.

The same department who sought to imprison his brother, at thirteen, as Boston's youngest suspect: such maturity for the narrator emerges gradually and realistically. His story of how he survived Old Colony, absent of maudlin sentimentality or contrived cutesy anecdotes, reflects what in his acknowledgements appended he calls "every painful and personally redemptive sentence." (265) MacDonald manages to tell a story that could have been akin to the film "The Departed" or the HBO "Brotherhood," yet avoids ethnic cliche and predictably pat endings. The drama of abiding by the neighborhood code that forbids snitching but vowing to break that same omerta by seeking the culprits behind two of his brothers' deaths and the imprisonment of a third adds natural tension to this narrative. Yet, MacDonald sidesteps special pleading.

Many of the memories he shares deserve repeating. For this review, three quick examples. First: the author accounts for the absence of a regular man in Ma's life as she cares for eight kids. "A man would only be abusive, tear at Ma's self-worth, and limit her mobility in life. Welfare could do all that 'and' pay for the groceries." (33). Her third (named) partner and second husband, Bob King, gets hit over the head by Ma with the wine bottle that made him drunk. When he comes to, she accuses him or stealing the "Christmas money" and he's sent off down Jamaica Ave. for the last time. Staggering down the street, to staunch his bleeding head, he holds what Michael Patrick fetched on his mother's orders: a Kotex pad.

Ma herself gets shot randomly, through the living room window, by a teen high on Whitey's cocaine, just before the episode of "Dallas" comes on that she and all of America had been waiting for: "Who Shot J.R.?" Whether evoking the terror of his brother Davey's schizophrenia at Mass Mental, the fear of rats and roaches that infest the projects, the rage of the busing protests, the desperate schemes of his Ma to stay ahead of the authorities, or the conniving that infects both cops and criminals with the same lack of morality, MacDonald holds a calm eye for the telling detail and a cool pen to record what transpired. I look forward to his sequel, "Easter Rising." He keeps to the unadorned, if often witty, accounts of "street justice" that complicate his series of vivid incidents, recalled conversations, and local lore that add up to a poignant, yet honest, depiction of what it was to grow up in what was Southie, before gentrification, integration, and disintegration.

good times, not difficult or even too graphic. just good information for even more good times ;)

A great book on Shibari. Well illustrated and photographed. The knots are delightful and fun to tie on my special someone.

Most people I have talked to all say why buy the book when you can watch all the videos on youtube? Well number reason I would say buy it. It shows all the actual knots! Not just the whole thing. It goes step by step showing you the basics knots used in most all bondages. Good detail. It helped me out on the ones I was having troubles with on the videos. If you are a big fan of there videos you really should buy the book. Not only to help them out but its a must read for the extras you will never see in the book. I will buy book 2 when released.

Clear instructions, many step-by-step photos, several very pretty designs. For the price, I would say the best rope bondage book on the market for beginners.

For the more 'advanced' rope people out there, it might not be enough for you, but still well worth the money (especially if you get it on sale).

I've long been a fan of the Two Knotty Boys style and was excited to have purchased this book when it came out. It is very easy to understand and follow the instructions and photos. Some feel the black/white photos should have been colour, but I don't believe that it would have made much of a difference. All of the photos are clear and easy to see what is going on. The ties are fun and beautiful, which is my type of rope art. I personally believe this is one of my essential quick reference books in my (rope) collection.

I bought this as a gift for a family member who is a devotee of "Fast Food Nation."

I read this first when I was a teenager, at the urging of my father.

This book never disappoints, and is as fresh today as it was when it was published.

Always a muckraker, Sinclair delivers.

It is helpful to have the book in its uncensored version.

But the ending is absurd considering that the "capitalist industrialists" are in fact socialists themselves (Carnegie, Morgan, Rothschild, Roosevelt, etc.) and that dehumanizing factories were not built until the era of socialist control over politics, economics, education, etc. (easily the Gilded Age but honestly back to the French Revolution).

Traditional, conservative economies had citizens who provided for themselves from the land or in the towns from an established craft whereas the machine-driven modern economy not only employs fewer individuals in any real meaningful labor but also deprives most people of the means for taking care of their families (landless wage slaves who know nothing of traditional life).

Haven't had a chance to read much of the book, but what I have read indicated the writer (Upton Sinclair) was truly a man with a attitude towards the society in which he lived. Don't think he liked his life. Realistic and hard hitting...yet those were the times in which he lived.

I was very surprised to find myself enjoying this book. I was nervous that the language would be dated to a point of difficulty, or that it would be slower than a snail. But this is far from the truth. The writing is easy to follow and the characters very believable. Given that Sinclair based this novel on events and people he actually witnessed in the meat packing industry of Chicago more than 100 years ago, it only makes sense that the characters seem real. And just when you think this can't possibly get worse....yeah, it just did.

The only reason why I didn't give this novel 5 stars was how the story falls flat towards the end when Sinclair lapses into a Socialist manifesto. I didn't feel that it was being preachy, but rather the Socialist information was meant to be just that: information. Perhaps it could be argued that it is propaganda, given that this was originally written for a Socialist paper, and then put together as a novel to reach "the masses". Regardless, this can be overlooked because overall the story moves along nicely.

I found it very interesting, on the other hand, that Sinclair's writing had some racist leanings. For instance, his description of the southern black men that were recruited to work as scabs and his mention of big black men with daggers in their shoes standing next to young white women during the rowdy prize-fighting made me raise an eyebrow given the author's Socialist leanings. Perhaps I misunderstand what socialism is, but don't they support equality in society?

I do recommend that you read this book. It is a timeless piece of literature, and a reminder that these industries have not changed that much in our country. There are likely families living the modern day version of this.

Living in a right-to-work state, you forget why we have unions. As a teenager, I read this book for school and fell in love with it. My parents and family were all union backers (teachers, firefighters, etc.), but I did not understand why we had unions. Then I read this book and ever since I have paid my union dues. Sinclair is an outstanding writer and I think everyone should read this book to understand where we have been and where we are now in labor. So read this book and cherish the life we have today.

I have never written a review on a book before. But this book has me feeling so enlightened I felt I needed to share. I've never had a book make me think and rethink everything I've ever learned about history. THis book is a MUST READ for everyone, not just in America, but the entire world. Marrs sites authors, controversial and not, leaving his personal opinion on the backburner. This book pulls together our present view of history and religion, states it as we know it, then proves through historical texts, that it's all wrong. I've gone to read some of his sited authors to try and prove to myself that everything Marrs presents is false (although some of it made so much sense to me) but have found that I can't disprove any of it. I've always been someone who found gaps in the history books and religious texts, I've always thought that there was something "missed" ,if you will, in all of my studies of history and religion (and I've done my share of research on these subjects). Marrs completely put it all into perspective for me and now I know I'm not so alone in the things I've always felt. Knowledge is power and I definitely feel enlightened. WOW.

Lots of stage props, also lots of facts and substance. An inquisitive analysis of powerful secret societies and tycoons in commerce, finance, banking and politics that rule our world. The book is build upon a pyramid of events caused by makers and breakers. Its historical value is to be debated. Its socio-political importance is major. Great book by all means. The author knows his craft and researches his field.

I'm in the process of finishing up this book, but it has blown my mind even more than Richard C. Hoagland's Dark Mission. This book is fantastic and I have the Terror Conspiracy en route! A must-read!

I love this type of book, however 90% of it is stolen from other conspiracy theory books and most of those theories have been flat out proven to be false. There was little to no actual investigation here. No new material, nothing to make my purchase worth while. First book in my life I threw in the trash where it belongs!

This book covers the groups who run the international shadow government:
The New World Order, The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), The Trilateral Commission, The Bilderbergers, The Illuminati, and Freemasonry.

You can learn a lot about man's search for GOD from the beginning. 14,000 years ago.

/

"A History of God" by Karen Armstrong

The omissions and distortions of this author's other work, "The Battle for God" made me skeptical of this book also. If Karen Armstrong titles a book "A History of God," you can be sure that GOD, in any normative manner of understanding, is not going to be the subject of her book.

From the very beginning, the author begins to play fast and loose with both facts and language. For example, on page xx of the INTRODUCTION, despite the coy proclamation of the title, the author announces:

"This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change."---page xx, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong

One has to watch carefully for such contradictions with Armstrong. When she makes an assertion, you can almost invariably depend upon it to have either of two failings.

(1) The author will usually not support any claims with facts, evidence, or even a rationalism. The author simply declares a thing to be SO, because the author writes that it is SO. [CARTESIAN AFFLICTION]

(2) The author uses language in contradictory contexts. Subjective terminology is presented as though it were Objective evidence.

For example, what does the author mean by the following statement?

"Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about "God," seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity."---page xviii, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by author Karen Armstrong

What is the meaning by the term "HISTORICAL FIGURE"; and indeed, what is the rational distinction between a:
"HISTORICAL FIGURE" and a "PURELY HISTORICAL FIGURE"?

This is nonsense verbiage at its best. It doesn't mean anything.

What is the meaning of the terms: "LATE ANTIQUITY" or even, "EMBEDDED IN LATE ANTIQUITY". Armstrong's book is rife with such irrational sentences.

The nonsensicality is not apparent on a page here or there, willy-nilly. Such irrationalisms appear on nearly every page. For example:

"As I grew up, I realized that there was more to religion than fear."---page xvii, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by author Karen Armstrong

This is the kind of redundancy, which, if produced in another context, such as an athletic event like baseball, would read something like:

AS I GREW UP, I REALIZED THAT THERE WAS MORE TO BASEBALL, THAN GETTING RIPPED OFF AT THE TICKET OFFICE!

With Armstrong however, the reader is in for the ultimate course in rocket surgery. There's more.

"My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines."---page xix, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by Author Karen Armstrong

Perhaps the author could find a more private and therapeutic medium to admit ideological development ended at childhood.

"Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals."--page xix, "A History of God" by author Karen Armstrong

The proposition, by reason, that an "ANIMAL" is "SPIRITUAL" is a contradiction in terms. It also serves as evidence for the Error of Eclecticism. The author has a confused understanding of the principle of the GENUS, and is guilty of combining Religious assumptions and Science assumptions regarding the Natural Order which are both inimical and contradictory.

Then there are the quantum leaps, in which the author begins writing of herself as a PLURALITY. For example:

"Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that once were provided by the more conventional religions."--page xix, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by author Karen Armstrong

This is about as FLUFFY and meaningless as language can get. It utterly begs questions. For example:

(1) Who is identified by the PLURAL possessive pronoun "OUR"?

(2) What is the meaning of the phrase, "ETHICAL SECULAR IDEAL"? What exactly is it, and where can it be studied?

(3) What indeed are the "DISCIPLINES OF MIND AND HEART? Where are these DISCIPLINES objectively identified?

(4) In the context of the author's "ETHICAL SECULAR IDEAL" what are the "MEANS OF FINDING FAITH" and how are the MEANS objectively identified?

(5) In regard to the terminology in (4), the author indicates the existence of something referred to as "THE ULTIMATE MEANING OF HUMAN LIFE" but the author fails to objectively identify what that is, or where it is identified and studied.

(6) If the author is a member of a LESS "conventional religion," does good scholarship not require that the subject be clarified? Of course it does; but Karen Armstrong reveals nothing of this.

You see, Armstrong writes long about the most mundane issues of religion, and yet it obviously is not in the author's interest to bring objective clarity to her own assumptions; for if she did, it would be seen to indicate a most egregious irrationality.

The author has an almost overwhelming ability to generate a never-ending stream of nonsense verbiage. Here's an example:

"We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound."---page xxi, INTRODUCTION, "A History of God" by author Karen Armstrong

Armstrong never indicates where we are to find a "SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND" idea for God; but then, Armstrong never seems clear about the inablity of SCIENCE to identify the boundaries of God, the subject of which Armstrong herself identified on page xx of the INTRODUCTION as..."beyond time and change".

So this entire book is like the Three Card Monte card game, in which the assumptions of Science, Religion, and Philosophy are all constantly shuffled in context, masquerading as some kind of HYPER-INTELLECTUALITY, which for the lack of any distinct sensibility or underpinning, runs rampant through the alleyways of confused ideation.

_______________________________________________________

*CONCLUSION*

Armstrong fails in the field of scholarship on several identifiable issues:

(1) Failure to define her subject. No clear delineation is offered to distinguish between GOD and RELIGION.

(2) Failure to establish specific SCOPE & BOUNDARY of her subject.

(3) Failure to explain CONFUSING the classification order of GENUS. The author defines man as a "spiritual animal" which is a confusion of the orders of METAPHYSICS and the NATURAL SCIENCES

(4) Failure to qualify shifts in writing in the First Person Singular to writing Third Person Plural; e.g. shifting from writing "I" to writing "WE" and "OUR" without qualification or specification.

(5) Failure to elevate her core assumptions beyond the CARTESIAN AFFLICTION.
[ It-Is-So-Because-I-Say-It-Is-So.] This is the common error in New Age authorship, and Armstrong provides a plethora of conclusions that are reached only by way of SELF-AUTHENTICATION.




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please contact me if you really want a page by page breakdown, Karen just is not educated enough to write this book. She comes off as a disgruntled Nun which she actually is. every other page represents a outdated theory, popular when she wrote the book as the mainstream concensus. Also the entire thing is a work of Teleological tunnel vision and is ridden with anachronism. If you wish to learn more about religion consult authors like Pagels and Pelikan, doctors and eminant scholars in their fields. please do not hesitate to contact for additional information, aim = hendrixangus. I do not give this book a one lightly!

What I love and respect about the author, is how she is open minded and honest enough to challenge the reader to think outside their comfort zone and all they have been taught to believe based on faith and not a serious study of history and how religion whatever the belief system, is something that has evolved and changed over the centuries.

She challenges the reader to study and dissect myth from fact. To stop and ponder why we as humans have been given a brain, as well as how over the centuries, a select few have known human weaknesses and the whole herd mentality, and thus, have sought to demean certain groups while building up or making special, other groups.

And how many if not most of the conflicts the world have seen, have been based on made up myths concerning people of other races and regions. Or as Darwin would note, the survival of the fittest or in the case of religions, the religions with the most charismatic leaders. Right or wrong.

The utter, seemingly perpetual redundancy of this book is enough to make me nauseous. The fact that she can't explicate a single religious or philosophical subject without concluding that its proponents originally saw it merely as some "expression of his or her inner notions of God and self" makes this waste of perfectly good paper virtually unreadable. But that she completely destroys Plato (!!!) for the sake of her own little "inner self" fancy is enough to convince me that she has no business even talking about philosophical, historical, or theological subjects. I read this book with an open mind, thinking it would be a postmodern revisionistic history, but history nonetheless. No. It's not. It's her own pathetic, unrefined reflection posing as a well researched deconstructive analysis. If you're a religious skeptic or atheist, you should be let down by this book. If you're a philosopher you should feel extremely irritated. If you're a historian, you should raise an eyebrow and scratch your head. If you're a theologian, you should say "WHAT?!". If you're a mystic, you should be really confused. If you're a Christian thinking that this book will undo your faith...you probably don't even know what you believe or why you believe it.

I am well pleased with the book I purchased, as well as convenience
in ordering. This is not my first purchase, and have been very
pleased with other items I bought.

If you are looking for a good book on leadership and you need to decide on the myriad of books available on the subject, go with this one. Drawing on experiences from Washington's life, Brookhiser gives valuable insights to how Washington handled the many challenges he faced and then explains how we can use those techniques in our lives.

We often forget just how great our Founding Fathers were and how much they gambled to start the United States. The Revolution was no sure thing and the people who were the driving forces behind it could have paid with their lives. Washington is an example to all us today of, among other things, perseverance and guts. Despite great odds, numerous failures and never ending problems, Washington never gave up and was rewarded with success. Brookhiser should help end the fallacies that the Revolution was easy, eveybody got along and nobody played politics. Brookhise helps show that the qualities that make people great never change.

If you enjoy history and personal examples of success and failure in leadership styles this is the book to read. The book is not a boring biography on George Washington but a living story full of events researched from historical letters, records, etc. and recorded in well organized flow by the writer.

The Big Idea of this book is that Corporate America can learn a lot about leadership from George, the CEO of two startups:The Revolution and the first administration. And we can. What comes through, again and again, is that Washington put the enterprise ahead of his own needs. He subordinated his ego to what was effective.When some officers were plotting against him ,trying to get Congress to oust him, he remained calm, thought through what to do(he named the game to one in a short note), and it got resolved. He could easily have lashed out, but he did not: he restrained the desire because it would not have moved the ball forward. He never made enemies, taking the long view, knowing that today's enemy is tomorrow's friend. Sort of a cousin to Seinfeld's "friendemy." Good section on how he, as did President Kennedy, asked of others what they could do for their country, telling them at times of crisis, "My brave fellows", meaning "My fellows, be brave" trying to pull the best out of them, knowing he could not do it alone. Though a man of few words, he knew how to use them, and the writing on his address at Newburgh where he snuffed out an impending revolt of unpaid officers has the book's best writing. The idea tails off at the end, with a pointless side trip on "Sex...and Drugs" but still a worthwhile read.

Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" characterized by Adolf Eichmann is a chilling look into how evil can be systematized, how it can be seemingly bureaucratic, and how normal people can be turned into monsters through law.

This is a great book for anyone interested in World War 2, the Holocaust, political philosophy, or getting really really depressed.

this book arrived from amazon in excellent condition and very quickly, especially relative to other books purchased at the same time through independent sellers.

A previous reviewer claims that Arendt's book shows the ambivalence of human nature, proving that in effect anybody could have done what Eichmann did. In fact, this is exactly the cynical point of view that Arendt opposes in this, and her other writings. Her argument here is a revision of her earlier position on 'radical evil' advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a position which Heidegger claimed to find 'incomprehensible.' She argues here that banality and "sheer thoughtlessness" (akin to Heidegger's reflections on boredom) are in fact the root of Evil. To put it better, evil continues precisely because of its inherent rootlessness, its constitutive disregard of the world. Thus, the detachment of claims such as "Anybody could have done what Eichmann did" distort her intention. Evil, she insists, is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, but instead arises from an unwillingness to understand.

I am delighted to see this classic back in print. Jewish author Hannah Arendt has provided a wealth of timeless information that goes far beyond the trial of the German war criminal Adolf Eichmann. This review is based on the original (1964) edition.

Arendt (p. 39) gives the readers a taste of the scale of the Kristallnacht (November 1938): 7,500 Jewish shop windows broken, all synagogues burned, and 20,000 Jewish men incarcerated in concentration camps. In common with many others who wrote during the first two decades after WWII, Arendt (p. 5, 11-12) addresses the issue of Jewish passivity in the face of death during the later roundups and transports to the death camps.

Arendt briefly discusses the fate of Jews of some individual European nations. She mentions the conniving of the Bulgarians (with, of course, the implied freedom to do so) performed in order to avoid sending their Jews to the death camps, and the fact that Finland, Germany's ally, was never seriously pressured to turn over her 2,000 Jews to be murdered (p. 170). Clearly, the latter part of the oft-repeated statement, "Not all of the victims of the Nazis were Jews, but all Jews were victims of the Nazis" is incorrect.

Throughout this work, Arendt gives various biographical details of Adolf Eichmann. For example, she mentions that he was a Gottglaubiger (p. 27), a Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and which Eichmann maintained right up to the very moment of his hanging, having refused the solace and Bible reading of a Protestant minister (p. 252).

Arendt briefly discusses Hitler's flouting of the Versailles treaty and his rise to power. While Jan T. Gross has asserted that there were Poles who praised Hitler in the 1930's, Arendt makes it clear that this was far from limited to Poland during that time: "...Hitler was admired everywhere as a great national statesman." (p. 37).

While most recent Holocaust materials focus on the real or imagined collaboration of locals in the sending of Jews to their deaths, Arendt is unsparing in her criticism of Jewish collaborators in this regard: "Without Jewish help in administrative and police work--the final roundup of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police--there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower. (p. 117). She adds that, because of this collaboration, only a few thousand Germans, most of whom furthermore only did office work, were able to send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths (p. 117). Finally, Arendt concludes that: "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils..." (p. 125).

Arendt (p. 42, 118, etc.) elaborates on the actions of a Jew, Rudolf Kastner (Kasztner). He made a deal with Eichmann in which 1,684 Jews were allowed to go to Palestine in exchange for Kastner's silence before and during which 476,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Jan Tomasz Gross, who has gotten a great deal of publicity for his books (NEIGHBORS and FEAR), has stated that the 2-3 million Poles who died in the hands of the Germans were largely the collateral victims of military action. Arendt knows better: "...Eichmann knew that right behind the front lines all Russian functionaries ("Communists"), all Polish members of the professional classes, and all native Jews were being killed in mass shootings." (p. 95). "At no point, however, either in the proceedings or the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups--the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies--might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered." (pp. 275-276). Arendt realizes the alternative future: "The measures against Eastern Jews were not only the result of anti-Semitism, they were part and parcel of an all-embracing demographic policy, in the course of which, had the Germans won the war, the Poles would have suffered the same fate as the Jews--genocide. This is no mere conjecture: the Poles in Germany were already being forced to wear a distinguishing badge in which the "P" replaced the Jewish star, and this, which we have seen, was always the first measure to be taken by the police in instituting the process of destruction)." (pp. 217-218).

Arendt praises the Danes for saving Jews during WWII and then, without mentioning the incomparably more difficult conditions under which Polish rescuers of Jews labored, nevertheless gives the Poles their due. After listing some individual examples of Polish assistance to Jews, Arendt adds the following: "One witness claimed that the Polish underground had supplied many Jews with weapons and had saved thousands of Jewish children by placing them with Polish families. The risks were prohibitive; there was the story of an entire Polish family who had been executed in the most brutal manner because they had adopted a six-year-old Jewish girl." (p. 231).

"It was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period," political theorist Hannah Arendt observes of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics behind the mass deportations of Jews and other so-called asocials to ghettos and extermination camps during the 2nd World War. The face of evil, she suggests through her portrayal of the high-ranking SS bureaucrat at his trial in Jerusalem, is not necessarily that of a radically perverse pathological mastermind, but instead and more frightening still, can come in the form of a banal and unimpressive caricature of normalcy.

In his testimony, Eichmann characterizes himself as a blameless cog who was only following orders, and even goes on to cite instances where he tried to help certain Jews who were friends of his escape their inevitable fate. His tone is that of one regaling a run-of-the-mill human sympathy story of hard luck, and his telling is rife with contradiction, blanks in memory, and ridiculous cliché. According to Arendt, this "created considerable difficulty during the trial - less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him, and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar - which he obviously was not."

Also relevant for its criticism of the shaky legal foundation upon which the trial was conducted (Eichmann was illegally abducted in Argentina, then was brought to Israel and prosecuted there using an outdated framework that was unable to properly address the problem of genocide as specifically carried out by the Nazis).

This book is very smart, very elegantly written. The questions it raises about ethics and preconceived notions of good and evil are universal and remain relevant to the times. If it were a person, I'd sleep with it on the first date.