Philosophy Books

This book was delivered in excellent conditions, it was a brand new book and it arrived faster than I expected!

A previous reviewer asked what Thoreau might think of how society has developed commercially since he wrote this book. I have to also wonder what he would think of the ridiculous (in my opinion) and jingoistic cover of this current edition? The person who chose the cover design should have read the book. The cover is offensive, given the ideas the book contains. Penguin should be ashamed.

This is a classic novel. It's value as literature speaks for itself.
I received the product in the condition advertised, in two days.
I am completely satisfied with the purchase and service.

Thoreau is more than simply a writer who produced a great American classic. He exemplified the idea which perhaps as much as any other has come to be at the heart of the American creed. "If a man does not keep pace to his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Throreau when he went into the woods of Walden Pond on July 4, 1845 , a journey in solitude which would last just two years and two months, was the archetypal American individualist. He was the man 'doing his own thing' living in accordance with what only he could know was right for himself. This idea of 'radical individualism' has become part of the American common faith. Its abuses are legion and may be disastrous, but it also has brought about not simply 'better mousetraps' but a whole vast world of innovations and innovators, the like of which Mankind has never known before.

Thoreau as he writes in his introduction went to the woods to explore not simply the natural world, the outdoors he so much loved. He went to the woods to truly go more deeply into and know himself. As he says in his introduction:

" I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me."

Thoreau in that enigmatic, epigrammatic aphoristic style, he shared with his great mentor and fellow pioneering poet- philosopher, Emerson connects the world within with the world without , connects the Concord woods with the Cosmos . He creates a work in 'Walden' of singular beauty and of its own special economy and principles in thought.

Thoreau was too an abolitionist, an opponent of the Mexican war, a civil disobedient who refused to pay the poll tax-, a pioneer
whose followers would include Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

But in his close looking at the world of nature and the world of himself he was first a great explorer of life and reality going out alone in his own way- however geographically close he may have been to home.

His words and his wisdom waken us even today to the hope of new and better worlds i.e. he also embodied the spirit of a great American optimism.

The great individual teaches us even in dark hours to find new worlds in ourselves outside our own darknesses. " There are new worlds yet to be born" he writes, " The sun is but a morning star"

Walden itself is a book that will make you re-examine every aspect of your life. I recommend buying another version. The writer of the introduction to this version is clearly not a fan of Thoreau. He certainly did not experience the spiritual somersault that 80% of the population would experience with this masterpiece, and so is ill-suited to comment on it. The quotations from other authors at the end of the book seem to have been chosen to undermine Thoreau, and the review questions are at best patronizing and at worst insulting.

In addition the type and pages are too small. You will want a larger volume with room for underlining and note-taking when you read this Walden.

Perhaps the greatest validation I could afford this book is its applicability to my own life.

I read parts of this book when I was younger. It was somewhat interesting then in a very abstract way of "Oh, look at how all the stories are similar. Cool."

Since that time, however, having nothing to do with Campbell, I have followed my highest intuitive guidance (or, my bliss, as Campbell would say) through hell and high water. I have reached the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. Confused why my life was so miserable all the while the mystical forces guiding me were more prevalent than ever, I was struck by the notion that I was being stripped of my ego.

A few days later I was in a bookstore and, without any thought of a connection, began flipping through this book. I could not copy passages fast enough. I was reading - in Campbell's writing and in the ancient stories throughout time - the experience through which I have been traveling.

In following my highest intuitive guidance (aka bliss), I have inadvertently lived the hero's journey: removed from the comforts of my life, put through tests where the realm between the physical and the metaphysical shattered with forces helpful and hurtful engaging almost simultaneously, been stripped of my ego, been given vast insights to help save our civilization, and am now reaching the phase of return.

Whatever the critiques of this book are with regard to outdated psychological theories and science, this book reveals the ancient wisdoms of humanity available to all if they all simply follow their bliss. Those who critique it on technicalities have simply not experienced the transcendence necessary to read this book and the stories of history as an inadvertent autobiography.

Perhaps most compelling about this book is I have to remind myself it was written in 1949. The language and style are so timeless.

For those burdened by the many stories and complexities within, I would suggest that there are two ways of reading this book:

1. Academically, whereby you study the stories and their relation to the overall theme.

2. Stylistically, whereby you skim through the stories and focus on Campbell's analytical writing. In just doing that, you will be able to find the main thrust of the journey's key points without getting lost in how ancient cultures understood this same journey for themselves.

I read this book as a recommendation from a friend, supposedly I wasn't going to be able to put it down. While I didn't find the book as difficult to read as some, the writing style is still dry and somewhat unapproachable. I was also told that the underlying ideology of the book was distinctly non-western in tone and content. However, when you scutinize the basic logic of the philosophy that he derives from the observation that many myths are similar in cross-culturally relevant ways, one sees that his concept is essentially Christian in nature.

Campbell asserts, toward the end of the text, that mankind is unified not only to the rest of humanity but to the whole of reality. Somehow he concludes that because many stories originating from many disperate cultures are basically similar man must not be the summation of his parts or the combination of his actions, body, thoughts and deeds. In fact all of the characteristics and actions of man are mere accidents and it is simply the foible of turning away from our underlying unified "essence" toward the dividing ego that causes all of the suffering in the world.

Supposedly this is a non-christian concept, however, if we replace essence with God we see that these two supposedly different ideas are nearly identical. Basic theology asserts that God is one, much like the oneness of Campbell's unifying essence. God is also the ground from which all being arises, much like the fundemental essence of reality to which man and all things are connected, and from which all things are derived. Also, in Christianity man causes suffering in his life by turning from God toward himself, seeking to worship the value of ego over the value of man's connectedness to God. How does this differ from the assertion by Campbell that man cuses much of his own strife by turning away from the fundamental "essence" of all reality toward the purely, transitory, non-eternal, accidental ego which is supposedly only an illusion of who each one of us truly is.

Ultimately it's deep philosophy for a thirteen year old who thinks it's neat to wonder about the coyote eating the rabbit and the coyote dying and decomposing and a plant eating the coyote and then a rabbit eating the plant. Aside from that it's a pretty decent, though biased introduction to world mythology, espesially if you're lazy (like me) and don't intend to actually read most of the myths and stories mentioned in the book.

This work is Campbell's most famous and has been the source most quoted as being the inspiration for "The Hero's Journey" as outlined in many Hollywood screenplays. Most notably George Lucas' Star Wars Saga. While many may find the work to be more scholarly in its approach and not as easily accessable as some of the books written about Campbell's ideas, it is a necessary part of the student of mythology's library. Some may find it easier to get acquainted with the teacher's work through other volumes of his collected works, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces may be an easier read after one is already abreast of Campbell's modus operendi. A casual reader may find that the scholar's approach to be a bit hard to get through, although this only serves to prove the point that Campbell's scope of knowledge and research was vast. And yet this is an essential component to illustrating his theme, in that it ties all the disparate cultures under one mythic banner. Campbell found that all the heroes in all cultures, despite what costumes they wore, or weapons they carried, all followed one hero thread that cut across all cultures and nationalities. His work serves to remind the tellers of tales that despite all that makes us different, we are all the same in the most important way. We are all human. To students of mythology this is a must read!

There's nothing I can say about Campbell that hasn't been written already. I used this masterpiece of his work to write my Master's Thesis and got nominated for a creative thesis award. Thank you, Joseph Campbell, may your soul rest in peace!

Ok, this is the big one! Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" is a revolution in the field of Anthropology of Religion. His lucid study of Mythology has literally changed the way the world views ITSELF. Ok I'm sorry I don't want to overstate things, but I don't think I am. If you read this book and actually understand what he is saying you wont be the same.

Campbell has found the creative archtypes found throughout history in the mythologies of all cultures. There is an excellent blend of classical psychology as well as Occidental and Oriental Mythology references.

If you have never read Joseph Campbell and you love Mythology BUY THIS BOOK! Buy the POWER OF MYTH and watch the video with Bill Moyers.

Joseph Campbell is the best.

Excellent condition.Excellent translation of Bakhtin whose writing is a Russian take on phenomenology. In the Dialogic Imagination he considers ficition writing--I enjoyed discovering his analysis of the "road" or journey.

Bakhtin is quite a character, and much more accessible as a writer than the reviewer below might suggest in this volume. He has been regarded as the most important theorist of the novel, perhaps ever. But when he celebrates "the novel," it is not always obvious if he's discussing actual novels, an idea ubernovel, or a quality that is novel. I prefer the latter interpretation, but all three are possible.

The crown jewel of this collection of essays is the third one, on the crhonotope. Here, Bakhtin inquires into what amounts to genres of being in narrative space and time. The vampire's lair, the old western saloon, the medieval castle... These chronotopes circulate around in our heads, and can get dangerous if you try to actualize them in the wrong way. Bakhtin himself experienced the horrors of the Stalinist version of the Worker's Paradise chronotope. Enter "the novel", the potential for nongeneric being, open-ended action. That's freedom, no?

Meanwhile, it's great fun to inquire into how the chronotopes in your neighborhood operate, and perhaps to unpack them. Ideals in the U.S. about how a "perfect American" may move and have his/her being might be a good place to start, assuming introspection is not yet so unpatriotic as to become illegal yet...

Bakhtin arguably at his best. Sure the final essay in the volume is not an easy read, but if you think Bakhtin is hard to read try Heidegger when he grooves along with his own lingo. Bakhtin's key idea of contextual language and the many voicedness of novels against the backdrop of an author's voice and that of his times is prehaps the sum total of what the novel as a genre is. In fact, the novel is not quite a genre but an ongoing process that escapes ossification as it changes with the times. Wonderfully done.

I was introduced the Bakhtin, by way of this book, in my grad literary theory course. I found him at the time to be a long-winded individual who took 200 pages to say what could have been said in 50. How wrong I was.

I've since become very enamored of Bakhtin's ideas and I think now that this collection was a wonderful place to start. Yes, Bakhtin is demanding but once you step up to the challenge you will find yourself rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.

The key to this whole collection is the final essay, Discourse in the Novel. This is perhaps his most influential work and it contains some very interesting ideas about the novel, the definition of language and how labguages interact with one another. I would not recommend that a newcomer to Bakhtin start here. If you pick up this volume start with the first essay, Epic and Novel, and go from there. The writing gets progressively more dense and the ideas build on each other so you'll be quite lost (like I was) if you try to tackle Discourse first.

This book consists of four essays of Bakhtin's "Middle Period", two short and two longer works which have been arranged, according to complexity, with the most accessible essay first and the most difficult last. Cooincidentally, this is also the reverse order in which they were written. None of these essays were avaiable in English before the present translation/compilation by Emerson and Holquist, and judging from its many reprintings (the 10th by 1996), quotations and misquotations, and various interpretations, it is the most influential of Bakhtin's works.

Some brief notes on the four Essays:

1. "Epic and Novel" dated 1941 - A rather straightforward comparison of the Novel and the Epic. Its aim is to show the distinctiveness of the Novel. This can be seen as a transitional essay between the Chronotope Essay and the Bildungsroman Fragment. It is well organized and introduces several characteristics unique to the novel such as three-dimensionality, imagery and openendedness.

2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" dated 1940 - This is in essence a brief history of the novel according to Bakhtin. It concentrates on style, theory and as the title states, discourse, beginning with Greek works and going to the Renaissance. Conceptually this is strikingly similar to Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis". This essay is incomplete.

3. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" dated 1937-38 - Another long (175 page) discussion on the distinctiveness of the novel. The concept of the Chronotope is introduced simply as "time space" and the essay seeks to show its use from the Greek Romance to the novel of the 19th Century. Bakhtin inserts here also a discussion of the "Rabelaisian Chrontope", the role of the clown, etc. Special emphasis is also given to the Blidungsroman. This essay, it seems to me, is essentially, Bakhtin's own favorite Reading list in which he experiments with his own concept of Chronotope, skillfully fitting it to each work. Despite its digressions it is basically a chronological presentation.

4. "Discourse in the Novel" dated 1934-35 - Another lengthy essay which is in essence Bakhtin's discussion of his philosophy of language. This essay also seems to be unfinished. It consists of five distinct parts in which Bakhtin experiments with different approaches to discourse in the novel. As is often the case with Bakhtin, this essay is also open-ended.

I find this compliation of four essays to be most stimulating. It seems to be well translated and edited. Ample footnotes assist the reader with Bakhtin's many, sometimes obscure, literary references. In my opinion, particularly the last two essays, constitute Baktin's most important work on the novel. Those expecting distinct conclusions and theories will be disappointed, because this is not the aim here at all. Bakhtin instead provides many different starting points from which to continue the study of the novel. This is, for example, what makes the chronotope indefinable, because it is constantly changing. I highly recommend this surprisingly accessible book. I believe that it is, along with "Speech Genres and other late Essays" Bakhtin's most important work on the novel.

This book contains the "inner chapters," not the entire Chuang Tzu, but generally considered the essential and least corrupt chapters. It's one of my favorite books, and after reading Watson's translation I'm unable to read anyone else's - it's wonderful (and there are quite a few weak versions, and weaker paraphrases). Of the Chinese classics I've read this is not only the most subtle and profound, it's sometimes absolutely hilarious. His parodies of Confucianism are a riot, his magical unrealism is timeless, his man dreaming he's a butterfly - or is it the other way around? - the useless tree that's preserved itself so long by being useless, not like all those fructiferous trees .... It's a rare combination of inane silliness with serious reflections on human nature, existence, nature and metaphysics (if that's the right term).

My impression upon first reading this work is that the material could be differently, and perhaps better, translated.

This is a very different book than the Lao Tzu. It's written in a much less poetic style, but I find Chuang Tzu more readable for that reason. The style is more conversational, and well rendered into contemporary English by Burton Watson.

These inner chapters contain only the core of a much longer work. Over the 2200 years since its writing, many accretions had crept into the work, including commentaries and addenda by other authors. Watson strips those away and leaves only the central and most vivid writings. Some of those may already be familiar to today's reader. For example, this book originates the man dreaming to be a butterfly dreaming to be a man. Chuang Tzu offers many more of these anecdotes, too long to be analogies but too short for fables. He also calls on the history and mythology of his time - not always distinct from each other - and creates mythology of his own, whether he meant to or not.

That mythology lived on in Chinese alchemy, when Chuang Tzu's magical sages were taken as literal beings. Chuang Tzu lived on, too, in Taoism's eventual alignment with Buddhism. His cryptic, non sequitur style of answer seems to foreshadow the koans of the distinctly Chinese and Japanese schools of Buddhism.

This is a wonderful complement to the Lao Tzu. If that book is the art of enlightenment, then this is more like the practical craft. I recommend it highly to any student of eastern classics.

I must add that Chuang Tzu is an older romanization of "Zhuangzi" - different renderings of one name. It is easy to become confused and think that the two were different writers. It is especially confusing since Watson published this same material many years later under the "Zhuangzi" spelling (ISBN 0231129599). While I have the highest respect Burton's scholarship, I think that this difference-without-a-difference should be made more explicit.

//wiredweird

The Chuang Tzu (rendered Zhuangzi in pinyin, which is becoming the standard transliteration these days) is second only to Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching in its popularity and veneration in the Taoist world. If you've not heard of or read this book before, you're in for a real treat! The first time I read the Inner Chapters of the Chuang Tzu was like a revelation--the thoughts and ideas expressed in these passages still resonate today for their acuity, humor, satire, stabbing profundity, and life-changing potential. Indeed, after better understanding the thought this book expresses, I felt like so many loose ideas and insights I'd gleaned from other philosophy, literature, music, and poetry had been tied up together and formulated into a concise and elegant package that is urgently relevant to every day life--pretty amazing for a text that is well over 2000 years old!


I recently completed reading the last of three complete translations of the Chuang Tzu, and I decided to wait until I read all of them before reviewing any of the three. Since this text is written in ancient Chinese, a language that was reserved for the intellectual and cultural elite two thousand years ago and has been considered effectively "dead" (like Latin) for quite a while, even understanding what the author(s) were trying to say is difficult, let alone translating the words from Chinese to English. So I figured reading a few different translations is probably the best way to get a broad and deep understanding of the text, and the cumulative effect would make up for each translation's weaknesses. This proved a good strategy--the other translations I chose were Victor Mair's Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu and A.C. Graham's The Inner Chapters. All three were rewarding and worthwhile reads (I mean, it IS the Chuang Tzu!), but I still come back to Burton Watson's The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu as my favorite. I won't go into depth about what the Chuang Tzu says, since the writing in the text is so eloquent and vivid that any description won't do it justice, and because I would probably ramble on forever about either the academic issues and questions regarding the text's authorship, historicity, and philosophy, or about how mind-blowingly intellectually stimulating it is!

After reading three different translations of the Chuang Tzu, I have to say that this Basic Writings translated by Watson is the best place for the uninitiated to start--it contains nearly all the best ideas and passages from the text (which has many interpolations from other, later authors that are often not as interesting and never as well-written as the ideas expressed in the Inner Chapters). Graham's translation is very academically rigorous, but makes Chuang Tzu's already distant culture and time period even more distant for new readers by means of very technical terminology and commentary. Mair's translation is good but doesn't flow as well as Watson's, and it's also much longer since it contains the entire Chuang Tzu. Watson's Complete Works is great, but this Basic Writings is much cheaper and more concise an introduction--once you read it and get hooked on the surprisingly fresh insights of these ancient thinkers, perhaps you'll delve into some other illuminating translations--until then, I have to say that this should be required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or Eastern classics.

Anyone who may be coming to Chuang Tzu for the first time is in for a treat. Although Chuang Tzu is sometimes described as the most brilliant of all Chinese philosophers, what we find in him isn't what we normally understand by 'Philosophy' and isn't technical at all.

His appeal is not so much to the intellect as to the imagination, and he chose as a vehicle for his philosophical insights, not tedious and lengthy abstract treatises, but brief and witty anecdotes and dialogues and tales. His humor, sophistication, literary genius, and philosophical insights found their perfect expression in his brilliant fragments, and once having read them you never forget them.

Not much is known about Chuang Tzu, other than that he seems to have lived around the time of King Hui of Liang (370-319 B.C.). The received text of his book, which is sometimes referred to as 'the Chuang Tzu' (CT), is made up of thirty-three Chapters. Most scholars seem to feel that the CT is a composite text, and that only the first seven - the Inner Chapters - plus a few bits from the others are Chuang Tzu's own work, the remainder being by others.

Among the better known of his translators, all of them excellent, are Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, and A. C. Graham, though only the latter two translated the complete text. An abridged version of Watson's complete translation has now been made available for those who want to confine themselves mainly to the Inner Chapters.

Watson has always struck me as an eminently civilized scholar and as a brilliant translator. Unlike certain others, he wears his scholarship lightly, and doesn't overburden the text with extraneous matter. His many translations from Ancient Chinese Literature are of uniformly high quality, and are well worth having as they are books one often wants to returns to.

The present book won't, as I've said, give you the whole of Watson's Chuang Tzu. For that you'll have to find a copy of his 'Complete Works of Chuang Tzu.' But it will give you most of what is generally agreed to be Chuang Tzu, and everyone should read it. If you're not a Chuang Tzu enthusiast before you start, I can guarantee that you'll be one before you finish.

Not only do the footnotes provide the author's interpretations of the theoretical orientations and selected articles, but the footnotes are sexist. Why mention only Benedict's sexual experiences in the field and not Malinowski's? The whole point of an introductory text is to get students thinking about the theoretical traditions of anthropology and develop their own interpretations of the paradigms, not be lead into thinking or conceptualizing in the authors' ways. Awful text; I will never use it to teach my students.

How many times have you heard someone say "This is the best theory book ever!" Well, this time it is ture. This is one of the best, well rounded books I have read in a while. They give clear explanations of the theories, and then give you examples of the literature to apply it to. Their footnotes also help clarify points in the examples. I would recommend this to any serious anthropology major, or anyone interested in anthropology.

I bought this for my Theory in Anthropology class. It gives a good background of the theory of major contributors to cultural anthropological theory.

I bought this book as a textbook for a class of Anthropolocial Theory and Method. Except for the sociobiology section and Darwin, we read the majority of this work in class. I give this collection of original writings five stars because the commentary seems appropriate, as do the readings. I am greatful that McGee and Warms (over the objection of reviewers) inserted the E. O. Wilson material (sociobiology). I am also greatful that McGee and Warms pointed out the current attitudes toward: 1) Ruth Benedict Fulton and 2) Margaret Mead's Samoan work. I, in short, believe McGee and Warms give fair analysis. My perspective is as a graduate student in anthropology with an undergraduate degree in biology.

I can compare ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY to another compendium of original writings--Bohannan and Glazer's text which is no longer in print, High Points in Anthropology.

Bohannan and Glazer have no index!!! McGee and Warms have a 17-page index that is helpful.

The major change I would make to this book is probably a change that needs to be made to anthropological knowledge in general--I do not believe anthropologists (including McGee and Warms) understand evolution. Otherwise, there would be some additional commentary about "lineal evolution."

I used this text for an anthropological theories course in undergraduate work. It's a pretty decent collection of work from major figures in anthropology.

Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Boas, etc, etc. There is also a lot of work done to try and tie a common thread through as much material as possible. Contextualization of how a theory came to be, and what it might imply are pretty well done. Chances are, you're buying this book for a class, rather than pleasure, and though this can be kind of dry, it's fairly well done. Some selections are puzzling in terms of what they illustrate for that author, but by and large it shouldn't kill you to read this book.

There are footnotes, too. These seem like a blessing to begin with, especially if you don't have much of a foothold in the material, there is a lot that you are caught up on quickly, and it can be very helpful. On the flipside, the editors can be very heavy-handed in guiding the reading, and can be sometimes inane in their commentary. This is the major failing of the book, it's more to read, and the later in the book you get, the less useful it is.

The title for my review is something I read in the review sections. I am an American, don't speak or write Japanese or Chinese...like most practicing Americans. This means that we for the most part have to trust what the writers of a way purportedly beyond words and letters have to say on reams and reams of paper. PK had the advantage over us in that he had a facility for language and set his life up to pursue his Zen. I like this book. Frankly it is a morass out there. PK always goes back to the fundamental of sitting. If one is not sitting...the slow going is even slower! I recommend this book for anyone that is seeking to learn...because there is much to unlearn eh?

I recommend this book because I believe that when pushed people can make up their own perceptions of what a special book like this has to offer. My only criticism of it would be the anecdotal descriptions of people reaching kensho and the bells and whistles and weeping that goes with it...kensho has certain hallmarks but the reader must come to it in their own way...and these war stories do much to create preconceived notions of what one's practice can entail.

That being said...of all the books (and there are myriad) this one has a good feel to it and its simple focus on the fundamentals without jargon is forever needed. When one looks through the book notice the pictures of PK and his Roshi's. The eyes and the face say a great deal...and the images speak volumes of what practice meant to them.

Before you buy the latest thirty dollar rehash of what some whipper snapper has to say about Zen...Give this book a read.

An interesting contrast to the more traditional Soto style (with its emphasis on just sitting and not forcing) although the approach in this book does incorporate most of the commonly used methods of practice. I enjoyed this read because it gave perspective to the type of practice that "feels" right for me, I now know this even more so having read of the approachs taken by this author. Even if you may not agree with the approach to Zen practice outlined in this book, it is still a must read, it will re-affirm your perspective or provide new insights, either way it should be read and forgotten.

There are many paths to enlightenment, and this may be one for some... but not for everybody. Zazen is a highly codified form of meditation. It feels like a rigourous martial training, reminiscent of karate or kendo. Except that you are aiming for spirituality. This is a double-edged sword. For those who have doubts... the book will provide an interesting cultural read, but there are many paths, even among Buddhist followers.

Pros: self contained meditation manual, complete with personal lectures from Japanese masters, struggles of other followers and pictures of seating positions. A welcome contribution to the literature.

Con: zazen only, at times critical of other Buddhist paths. Ignores the fact that the journey to spirituality is ultimately personal.

I commented several months ago on a post made by Mike-in-the-Middle, asking for more resources to help a beginner (me) without easy access to a roshi who could offer clarity on Zen/Buddhist ideas. I have since received several emails which offered more resources for me to check out, and I'd like to share these resources with you.

Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. This one is obviously of a secular bent, and I've been reading it off and on since I purchased it. It's a bit. . . scholarly, with some big 50-cent words, if you know what I mean. You definitely need a quiet place to be able to focus on his intellectual renderings, but if you can get into it, it's very insightful. Although it's "intellectual" and contains "big words," it doesn't contain a lot of the mysterious and otherworldly terminology of other such books written by Zen/Buddhist disciples. The book shows how you can practice the tenets of Buddhism without necessarily buying into all the religious aspects.

The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga: Paths to a Mature Happiness by Marvin Levine. This is the book I am currently reading. Mr. Levine makes a good comparison between the tenets of Buddhism (and yoga) and those of Western Psychology, both of which seek to put the person in touch with his/her true self. He also gives advice, gleaned from his own life and journey, about how to incorporate the ideas into your life. This book is VERY readable; Mr. Levine goes out of his way to make this book accessible to the lay person. I'm enjoying this one very much. (It doesn't have to be QUITE so quiet at my house in order for me to get into it. =)

Also recommended to me, but which I haven't yet checked out, are the following books:

Here is a short email I received.
"Saw a comment you left on a review of 3 Pillars of Zen mentioning you were looking for a good place to start. For me, the perfect start was "Buddhism Plain and Simple" by Steve Hagen. It's short, inexpensive and simple. Then I went to his website and downloaded all his free audio talks to listen to on my commute, and now i feel i can approach more advanced zen books quite comfortably (but start with the book before the audio stuff).

Another book recommended was Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck.

I hope these books will help some of you on your journey.

=)
Laurie
(Lovejoy444 at a o l dot com)

Do not expect to read this as a "Zen for Dummies". Unfortunately trying to learn Zen from a book is a little bit like teaching someone who has been born blind to "imagine" various colors such as red, blue or green. Zen has to be experienced to be understood. Having said that, however, this book is probably the next best thing.

"Archaeology Of Knowledge" finds Foucault at his barest, trying to build up his own theory. Like others have said, it is fascinating to see how much he tries to encompass and how extremely difficult his own enterprise is. Foucault spends many pages trying to explain to us what he means by "discoursive formation", "object formation", "formation of concepts", etc., and the place where his own theory stands vis-à-vis a so-called "history of ideas". You can learn lots from this book, because, like myself, sometimes you get lost in Foucault's magistral writing, his fabulous way of weaving history and thus cannot clearly follow his own particular method of research. If you want to see some of his (earlier, almost stricly discourse-oriented) key concepts clarified, reading this book will prove very fruitful. As always, you're left with a lot of questions and with a distinctive feeling of "now what?". But then again, that's what's so utterly beautiful and engaging about Foucault... he forces you to think for yourself and provides you of the right tools to do it.
I read the spanish translation of this book so I can't comment on the english one, but the contents of this book are priceless.

Viewed against the background of Foucault's other books, *The Archaeology of Knowledge* is a curious work. In it, Foucault not only explicates the results of his early books on madness, medicine, and the history of the human sciences: he also offers programmatic statements that link up his methods with the main stream of 20th-century French historical researches. The *episteme* linking seemingly disparate fields of inquiry is here explicitly presented against the background of Ferdinand Braudel's *duree*, and other famed devices for recontextualizing historical facts. For Foucault is intent on demonstrating his method without reference to (*against*) the philosophical luminaries that had until then monopolized such meta-theory.

The uninformed, and perhaps some of the informed, may be surprised to find Foucault actually considering the fact itself: hardly a promising beginning for showing how everything seemingly natural about social life hinges on systems of power. But it is precisely the historical fact that Foucault is concerned with, the dry, value-free content of the "archive": he is interested in the conditions of the possibility of grasping the events of the world in the manner of the historian, and proceeds to elaborate a system for comparing and construing such data without reference to processes of consciousness or any other valorizing quantity from outside history.

He proceeds to do this by elaborating a pragmatics of discourse quite unlike linguistics of the Saussurean (or Gricean) variety, studying how contexts of information combine to produce a happening intelligible as an event, not only as a linguistic counter or evidence of an intention. His analysis strongly resembles that of the celebrated Thomas Kuhn, who in truth aimed not to relativize science but to explain its true "background" in actual scientific practice. Drawing many examples from (and correcting naivete in) his books *History of Madness*, *Birth of the Clinic* and *The Order of Things*, Foucault attempts to show how an intellectual history can carefully collate and juxtapose historical information without imposing an idealizing "mentality" on the originators of a discourse.

Recapping as it does his work of the Sixties, fans of Foucault's analyses in *Discipline and Punish* and *The History of Sexuality* may expect this book represents only "transitional" views of Foucault's, later discarded in favor of a full-blooded Nietzschean pursuit of power relations. But "genealogical" theories are not ignored here, particularly in Foucault's inaugural address for the College de France, "The Order of Discourse", generously included at the end of this volume. It is true that Foucault's theory does not represent the program of a "history of truth" elaborated in "Truth and Juridical Forms", early lectures on the history of the penal system included in volume 3 of the New Press's *Essential Works*. But by the same token those interested in the French social theorists who preceded Foucault will find that Foucault's engagement with their problems, especially those of his teacher Althusser, is here much more explicit than elsewhere.

In conclusion, this book is unlikely to grab you unless you have already made a significant investment in Foucault, or "contemporary" history more generally. But for anyone who has indeed spent some time thinking about such things, this book is an anodyne statement of important and influential views about history and how it is done.

Foucault is not a light read - you will spend several hours just trying to interpret this text. His wording is unusual and complicated, and sentences can run on for almost a paragraph. Sometimes you'll just want to tear your hair out.

Nonetheless, this book is important. The theories Foucault presents in this book, while nearly impossible to cite correcly, do reappear in many modern texts, especially ones about modern literature or the academy. My suggestion is you read it with the assistence of others, preferably including someone with more academic experience (i.e. a professor.)

Do not be fooled by those who dismiss this as a mere curiousity in Foucault's oeuvre. This difficult work is absolutely essential for understanding his central concept of 'discourse'. All of his works are better understood after a careful reading of this difficult work; this is true even for the later 'geneaological' works.

The Conclusion of this book (Chapter V) is perhaps the most interesting. Foucault appears to be corresponding with an undisclosed someone, wether with himself as a self critique, or with a critic. I won't put asside the possibility he is coversing with someone from the Tavistock Inst.; as Tavistock Publications Lim. was the first place of translation for this text. If he had not suceeded, in his archaeology of knowledge, an undermining of structuralism, with the thesis on human discourse, then perhaps it is because of a lack of conviction on part of this "someone" or on part of himself.

Understanding the implication of Foucault's thought process from a first read requires a refflective reader and in many ways requires a far-reaching mind from the start. This work is composed of a terminal plethora of architectures and teleological plethoras of exemplifications from science and history. Economics, stats, documents, records, and items from all discourses are examined and presented as artifacts of discursive knowledge. The Archeaology itself is the thematic for the Archive, and the archive is the preservatory of knowledge, that such discursive knowledge is preserved is archaeology. Foucault's task then is to undermine the archives of knowledge and present that knowledge back upon the structural framework of rational discourse. With observational power and radical ability, Foucault goes beyond the framework and invisibly subordinates it's needs to be observed and it's intention to be ritcheous (ritcheous in all that it accounts for, and ritcheous of the observer.) From the most primordial archean, to the revival of the primal archaic state, to the archaology of all knowledge, Foucault shows that in a way discourses built upon historical facts are like artifacts themselves. Here in the conclusion we see that the problematic of language (langue) as the derivational principal of discourses, cannot be made paletable (literaly!)

And so the audition fails because language or the "langue" is not sufficiently constructed for what it represents in discursive practice. At the zenith of the teleological project, when temporal conceptualization extinguishes itself from being quantified into being qualified, at the last quarter of the era, perhaps this work will be gleamed from the resevoire and conrgessively discussed.

For lovers of Ishmael, this novel falls short of the power of the earlier Daniel Quinn piece. I agree with the critique of the American education system, but his "take your kids to work" concept is naive. It's worth reading, but don't expect it to change the way you look at the world the way Ishmael did.

I really liked this as a follow-up to Ishmael. I actually read it right after, not realizing that the Story of B was in between. But it works out even if you read it in that order.

The writing isn't the best, but the message is far too important to quibble over talent, in my opinion. Everyone should read this book, even if you end up disagreeing with it.

The book came in a timely mannner in excellent condition. I thought both the purchase price and shipping costs were reasonable and definitely better than the college bookstore's pricing.

although quinn once again is tackling ideas that are taken for granted in society, in My Ishmael he shows what we can actually do to help save the world(from oursleves that is). The new tribal revolution is simply a paradigm shift about how the benefits of a business are to flow throughout its members-equally instead of unequally.

tribalism is the social organization which has proved to be most effective through human development by trial and error. inside My Ishmael Quinn unlocks the tribal treasury which all who embrace tribalism. do it. tribalism can essential take us from being an individual based society to a group of real communities.

An outstanding account of how power came to the hands of a few!

This is a remarkable translation both for its rigor in keeping to the original Classical Chinese text and for the beauty of its prose. I definitely recommend this one for anyone's first taste of the Tao Te Ching.

The publisher and ISBN number for this book are listed incorrectly. I have sent Amazon several messages attempting to get this corrected but to no avail! My translation of the Daodejing is now published by Hackett Publishing Company. The ISBN number is 0872207021. The previous publisher has no legal right to sell copies of my book. Please see the Hackett web page to order this volume.

This is probably the best and most accessible translation of the Daodejing available. It stays true to the original Chinese text, but is also sensitive to its poetic form. Hall and Ames' text is also excellent, but not useful for those who have only a casual interest in the Daodejing. Highly recommend.

Also, beware of copies of the Daodejing which purport to be "translations" when they are nothing more than re-imaginings (e.g. Ursula le Guin's, Witter Bynner and Stephen Mitchell's). These people openly state they do not know Classical Chinese and this is evident in their translations.

This volume is lovely, and the translation is excellent. I recommend this for both lay and academic readers.