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Really Helped Me Focus & Move Forward In My Life & Career
This book is a user-friendly, step-by-step guide to the power of deep relaxation through the daily practice of 'quantum focusing' - a kind of self-hypnosis which frees the mind to shift perceptions.The practice helped me to overcome fears of success and psychic pain as well as alleviate my fears before surgery and minimalize any post-operative stress.I recommended the book to athletes who want to improve their game and actors to strengthen their craft. ... Read more

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Change Wars is the third book in the Leading Edge™ series. The Leading Edge series unites education authorities from around the globe and asks them to confront the important issues that affect teachers and administrators the issues that profoundly impact student success. The experts contributing to this anthology do not prescribe one method to transact change. They embrace the mission, trusting that teachers and administrators the true change leaders will venture to the Leading Edge to embrace the challenges and opportunities that will guarantee the success of their students.

In today's era of educational change where reforms proliferate, initiatives abound, legal responsibilities are constantly expanding, and both teachers and leaders complain constantly of overload, the challenge is no longer just how to implement particular changes, but how to choose between changes, prioritize them, and create coherence among all of them. This is a challenge for the teacher in the classroom, the principal in the office, and for policymakers in government. How do we do the right things well, not get distracted by the wrong things, involve and include everyone who is affected, keep the momentum and the impact going, and prevent burnout by ensuring the change agenda is manageable and coherent?

The 13 contributors to Change Wars tackle these difficult questions by offering their own theories-in-action of educational change the changes they want, why they want them, and how they believe they can be brought about and sustained so readers can reflect on change in their own situations and perhaps find areas of broad agreement. Change Wars provides a comprehensive view of the challenges of education reform from system, district, and classroom standpoints and examines the many perspectives of effective reform and implementation. Change Wars contains more theory than On Common Ground and Ahead of the Curve. The contributors are largely researchers and not practitioners. The majority of the contributors focus on system change from a broader perspective than the classroom level. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

(Almost) Everything you wanted to know about change in schools
Change Wars Hargreaves & Fullan (Eds.)

Change in schools is not something that is done well. In the past schools were seen as conservative institutions, and change has been resisted by the inmates. All of that changed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s as it was realised that the ubiquitous school systems were failing to accommodate changing demands made by society and its politicians. Change in schools became a highway littered with half baked, failed ideas, and so, the array of brilliant writers assembled by Hargreaves and Fullan provides a huge injection of optimism and hope. It is rare to get a book packed with cutting edge thought about change in schools, and written by such a stellar array of authors. While all of the chapters are interesting, I will briefly comment on the chapters that have been written by authors who are household names:
1. Andy Hargreaves: The fourth way of change. Andy Hargreaves provides a potted history of change since the 1970s (three ways). He then introduces a fourth way of change based on five pillars (an inspiring and inclusive vision; public engagement; no achievement without investment; corporate educational responsibility; and students as partners for change). The four catalysts of cohesion are particularly relevant.
2. Linda Darling-Hammond: Teaching and the change wars. Darling-Hammond sees four competing theories of change (bureaucratic, professional, market approach, and democratic approach).The author argues for systems of support for high quality teaching and learning .
3. Sir Michael Barber: System effectiveness to system improvement. Importantly, Barber noted that in the 1990s the focus of change moved from school effectiveness to school improvement (how to achieve effectiveness). In a strategic sense he has noted the current emphasis is on how systems become effective. In Table 1, the phases of development, provide a very useful tool that can be applied in schools.
4. James Spillane: Emerging practice. A world authority on distributed leadership, noted that a distributed perspective provides a conceptual framework between designed and lived organisations.
5. Richard Elmore: Institutions, improvement and practice. Elmore is a highly credible practitioner and his work for the Albert Shanker Institute recognises his standing with school-based leaders. Elmore recognises that improvement cannot occur without some conflict as the school culture changes.
6. Douglas Reeves: Level-Five Networks. Reeves argues that networks are a balance for hierarchies. Significantly, this article sets out a developmental model of five levels of effective networks: Level 1= contrived; level 2= spontaneous; level 3= co-opted; level 4= nurtured; and level 5= value-driven networks.
7. Ben Levin: Reform without (much) rancour. Ben Levin, like Michael Barber, is interesting because he moved between the public service and academia. Acknowledging the need to recognise the importance of politics in educational change, Levin suggested that there are four key elements to successful change.
8. Michael Fullan: Have theory will travel. In this article Fullan proposes a Theory of Action for System Change, which supports Barber's approach.
This handsome book is a valuable resource in any professional library but it is more than that. Importantly, this book allows school-based staff to effectively run professional learning for school leaders and aspirant school leaders. The publisher (Solution Tree) provides a study guide that is very useful for supporting and directing collegial discussion: Click: Free Resource-study guide-http://www.solution-tree.com/Public/Media.aspx?ShowDetail=true&ProductID=BKF254
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In August of 2007, Denmark's renowned Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presented Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004, the first major retrospective devoted to Avedon's work since his death in 2004. (With stops in Milan, Paris, Berlin and, Amsterdam, the highly-anticipated exhibition concludes in at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in October of 2009.) This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper, and includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from across the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits, and spanning from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star, Bjork. It also contains a small number of color images--including one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, "Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent" (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer the most sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's work to date. All color separations byRobert Hennessey. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A glorious collection of 20th Century portraits
This book has a permanent spot on my coffee table. From Avadon's early fashion photography in 1950s Paris to his mature work in the American West, this book is a joy and inspiration.

Great Masterpiece
Excelent review of one of the most talented photographers in the 20th century. A book that must be in any personal library of any professional or amateur photographer.

ID photo collection..?!
..in the beginning, I think this is the best collection of Richard Avedon's artwork, but it's not. I would say this book is just a collection of kind of collection of photos for Identity card, over 60%. Be honest, I have over 80 photo books from different photographers, but obviously this is not my favor.

Spectacular
Richard Avedon is undeniably one of the most influential fashion and portrait photographers in history. This is a great collection of some of his best work. A great book to own.

Avedon's People
According to photographer Anthony Snowdon, a viewer, when looking at a picture, should not be able to tell who the photographer was. That may be true about his own photographs; he was wrong, however, when it comes to the work of Richard Avedon. Many of his photographs are instantly recognizable as uniquely his or the shots of someone imitating him. Mr. Avedon gave the world the portrait where the subject, often powerful and famous-- although that is not the case in his series "In The American West" when he shot unknowns-- is photographed looking straight into the camera without flattering lighting or camera angles before a white background. These models rarely smile although Janis Joplin and Willem de Kooning are two exceptions.

This latest collection of approximately 200 of Avedon's photographs is the catalogue that accompanies a traveling exhibit of the master photographer, which began at Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and will close in San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. It must have been a difficult assignment to select the images that are reproduced (so beautifully) here. Many of Avedon's most famous photographs are included although there were some that I had never seen before and some I missed seeing. (For example, I would have included the magnificent shot of Tina Turner that usually fills a museum wall when it is exhibited.) The one color photograph by Avedon here is the famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, of Nastssja Kinski and the Serpent (1981). Several fashion shots are included. My favorites are the two of the model Dovima-- with the elephants in 1955 and in front of the pyramids in Eqypt in 1951.

The photograph of Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, naked and embracing, that was-- I believe-- the cover for an issue of "Evergreen" magazine in 1963 made the cut, as did Andy Warhol and members of the Factory (1969). Some of my favorites, although I cannot always say why, are the shot of Bob Dylan taken in 1963 where he looks to be about 13, (I think it is the tilt of his head that intrigues me) W. H. Auden standing in the snow in New York in 1960 and The Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Photography doesn't get better than that shot.

Avedon always said that he just photographed the surface and that the viewer only gets whatever the photographer sees in a brief moment of time. He contended also that the photograph usually tells you more about the photographer than the subject. On the other hand, the writer Albert Camus said that we are all responsible for our faces after the age of forty. Some of these portraits cry out with Camus' message. I would nominate the image of Truman Capote (1974). The word "dissipated" comes to mind immediately. Contrast the Capote photograph with, say, those of the Dalai Lama and Salman Rushdie, from whom a sense of peace emanates. It is poetic justice that the artist Francis Bacon's own face takes on the grotesque shape of many of the faces in his paintings. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (1957), looking into Avedon's lens, would make you believe that the rest of the Royals were right about them, that they were dreadful people.

Accompanying this great photography collection are essays by several writers and art and photography critics assessing Mr. Avedon's contribution to 20th century photography including Helle Crenzien, Geoff Dyer, Judith Thurman, Michael Juul Holm, Rune Gade, Jeffrey Fraenkel and Christoph Ribbat. If you do not read all the essays, do not miss Geoff Dyer's discussion on what has become Avedon's signature, the portraits where the models are in front of a stark white background where the people who posed for him, if not known to the public before they sat for him, were famous thereafter. The people included in In the American West series-- drifters, waitresses, coal miners, truckers-- are every bit as engaging as those of the rich and famous and are now just as immortal. ... Read more

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This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized.

Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British Empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire; how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; and how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends.

Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

art and sociology for the casual art lover and academic alike
Along with contextualizing the art in it's original time Nelson and Zeckhauser take a very interesting field of study off the shelves of academia and frame it in a contemporary light.
They cast the interactions of patron, artist and audience in a broader sociological context that is highly relevant to our modern world.
Along with surveying previous work in the field the authors develop new avenues of theory and inquiry.

The writing is engaging even to a casual art lover like me. Nelson and Zeckhauser's passion and enthusiasm for the material is contagious.
The publishers should put this out in paperback for a wider audience.
Approaches can't-put-it-down territory.
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Richard Meier, one of America's most influential and widely emulated architects, began his career in the early 1960s designing private residential projects, whose elegant modernist style and white facades have become icons of modern architecture. Renowned as the designer of large-scale works around the world, including the Jubilee Church in Rome and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Meier has set an international style all his own based on the purity and power of his unique vision. This beautifully photographed volume is the first to document Meier's complete catalogue of museum and gallery projects, including the seminal High Museum in Atlanta (recently featured on a U.S. postage stamp in a series that includes the Guggenheim Museum and the Chrysler Building), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, the Getty Center, and the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome. Richard Meier Museums presents these and other celebrated projects in stunning full-color interior and exterior photography and extensive drawings and plans to give the fullest understanding of this modernist master's remarkable contribution to the art of museum design. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fantastic Read
Meier is one of the greatest modernist architects of our time and this is a great reference of his work.

CLASSIC MEIER
Richard Meier's work is so gorgeous and this book captures in perfectly, in vivid, crisp images and insightful text.Personally, I love all of Meier's work, but his Museums are where he guilds the lilly, but in a good way, because of the massive budgets, he can indulge, and he does.In the breathtaking Getty, he had a benefactor with unlimited resourses and he created, what most consider his signature building, which is given its due in this book. Meier's work is unique and so clean, he is known of course for his stark white moderne exteriors and generous use of glass and light, and to walk into one of his buildings is exhilarating.He is a singular architect and this book does his work justice.Highly recommended..if you where not a Meier fan before this book, I assure you you will be one after.Uh, whoever gave this review an unhelpful..has obviously never seen this book..or is an idiot with dubious taste. ... Read more

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Was Richard Strauss the most incandescent composer of the twentieth century or merely a bourgeoisie artist and Nazi sympathizer?For the fifty years since his death on September 8, 1949, Richard Strauss has remained dogmatically elusive in the wider body of musical and historical criticism.Lauded as nothing less than the "greatest musical figure" of his time by Canadian musician, Glenn Gould, in 1962, Strauss also has attracted his share of posthumous epithets: in summary, an artist who lived off his own fat during his later years.As recently as 1995, the English critic Rodney Milnes wrote, "the court of posterity is still reserving judgment." In Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, biographer Michael Kennedy demonstrates that the many varying shades of criticism that have painted this figure in the past half century resemble the similar understandings and misunderstandings held by his contemporaries--perceptions that touched almost every aspect of Strauss' life and career. Introducing his detailed work more as a broad explication than a firm answer to the Straussian riddle, Kennedy's scope includes the exuberant, extroverted Strauss of young adulthood as well as the phlegmatic and aloof middle-aged man who resembled a "prosperous bank manager;" the arch-fiend of modernism and the composer who redefined the term; a man who professed to lack all spiritual curiosity and a musician who penned the touching ballet Der Kometentanz; an at times almost humble family man and an artist who claimed to be as interesting as Napoleon and Alexander the Great.Kennedy clearly elucidates his enigmatic subject by building his analysis around the few constants in Strauss' life: his profound admiration for German culture, his dependence on his own family for guidance, and his "Nietzschean total absorption in art."This frame offers everyone from Straussian scholars to general readers an insightful and easy-to-follow biographical narrative. Kennedy also deals at length with Strauss' problematic relationship with Nazi authorities, detailing his incompatible roles as the father-in-law of a Jewish woman and as one of the country's leading composers. Michael Kennedy is the chief music critic of the (London) Sunday Telegraph and the author of many books about music.Amazon.com Review
There are few composers whose critical stock has roller-coastered as dramatically as that of Richard Strauss, both during his lifetime and in the five decades since his death in 1949. Once considered a dangerous firebrand of the avant-garde--his early masterpiece Salome was given the equivalent of an X rating--Strauss remained an exceedingly prolific composer throughout his long career, yet lived to be "written off as an extinct volcano." The painful story of his involvement with the Third Reich further cast a pall over his final years. But in the past two decades, a gradual reassessment has been underway--along with a recuperation of his neglected later works--and the field is ripe for a critically insightful overview of Strauss's achievement.

Such is the goal of Michael Kennedy, a longtime advocate of Strauss, in his new biography, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Kennedy, the Sunday Telegraph's music critic and author of several other musical biographies--including an earlier study of the composer as well as illuminating articles and CD booklets on his music--here undertakes to penetrate the contradictions and see the man whole. Through his impressive access to diaries, letters, and living relatives, he posits an underlying consistency of attitude that made "art the reality in [Strauss's] life." The central enigma about the composer that fascinates Kennedy is the "disparity between man and musician," the paradox that this fundamentally aloof and reserved person, dedicated to bourgeois stability, could produce music of such overpowering passion.

While steering clear of Freudian reductionism, Kennedy reveals the crucial significance of Strauss's mother's nervous instability--she was eventually committed to various sanatoriums--and the centrality of the work ethic inherited from his father. The result was to make music "Strauss's means of escape ... and in much of his music he wore a mask." Yet for all his aloofness, Strauss "let [the mask] slip"--another aspect of the enigma surrounding him--in such compositions as Don Quixote ("the most profound" of his orchestral works) or the pervasively autobiographical Sinfonia Domestica, Intermezzo, and Capriccio, which Kennedy counts as Strauss's greatest achievement for the lyrical stage.

Kennedy is particularly persuasive in his high estimation of the post-Rosenkavalier output and the undiminished quest for artistic innovation that they continued to exemplify--above all in Strauss's development of a fluently conversational style in his operas. Although commentary on individual works involves generally concise summations, many observations sparkle with insight, and Kennedy continually sheds light on neglected gems among Strauss's output. The rapport with Hofmannsthal and his other librettists is admirably clarified, and the remarkably well-read Strauss emerges as a more imposingly intellectual figure, steeped in literature and philosophy, than he is usually depicted. We learn of his obsession with the card game skat and of his disdainful attitude toward the new medium of film. Kennedy similarly demystifies much of the received opinion that has developed around the composer, particularly in his level-headed portrait of his wife, Pauline. The fundamental happiness of their lifelong relationship emerges as a context indispensable to Strauss's creative focus.

Kennedy devotes a significant portion of the book to the composer's position as president of the Reich Music Chamber and subsequent fall from grace both with the Nazis and in world opinion. Here the author aims to offer perspective by carefully detailing the facts and documentary evidence from the time. In his view, Strauss becomes a "tragic figure, symbolising the struggle to preserve beauty and style in Western European culture" against emerging barbarism. Yet, as throughout the book, Kennedy's abiding sympathy with Strauss at times veers close to a kind of special pleading that invites skepticism. For all that, his style is admirably lucid, and his biography largely succeeds in pointing to a greatness that "has not yet been fully understood and discovered." --Thomas May ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A VERY WORTHWHILE BIOGRAPHY OF A PUZZLING COMPOSER
Michael Kennedy has written a very useful and insightful biography of a controversial composer, along with an ingtelligent analysis of his music.Strauss summarized his approach to "program music" (of which he was a foremost developer) by saying, "I am a musician first and last, for whom all 'programs' are merely the stimulus to the creation of new forms, and nothing more."

Kennedy observes that "Religion played no part in his upbringing."By 1892, "he had read Nietzsche's works and had been particularly attracted by 'his polemic against Christianity.'"As Strauss's character Guntram said, "My God speaks to me through myself."It is not surprising, therefore, that Strauss would attempt to set Nietzsche's "Thus Sprach Zarathustra" to music.

Controversial not only for writing operas such as "Salome," "(T)he German press denounced him for conducting two afternoon concerts in a New York department store (in 1904) ... Such conduct was 'a prostitution of art.'Strauss replied that the concerts had been given in artistic conditions and, anyway, it was no disgrace to earn money."Kennedy notes that "Strauss's output, large though it was, diminished between 1916 and about 1940 ... No wonder the world of music regarded him by then as almost a fossil."

Of course, Strauss's most controversial actions concern with the Nazi Party came to power.For example, in 1933 Joseph Goebbels appointed Strauss to the post of President of the State Music Bureau.Kennedy explains this thusly: "It was not only that Strauss believed nothing was more important than art: he simply did not recognize the conflict, a symptom of a blinkered mentality as a court composer.He kept his nose in the score and ignored the raised voices in the next room." But Strauss was not by any stretch an anti-Semite: "He acknowledged the help and inspiration he had received from Jews, adding that his own most malicious enemies had been Aryans."

Kennedy gives a summation: "If his music lacks mystical and spiritual depth---and it does, except for one late work---it has worldly, human rapture and insight, realism, and humor."Kennedy's fine biography is well-worth reading for anyone who wants to know more about the man or his music.

For Strauss enthusiasts
It is an excellent biography of Richard Strauss, well written and employing up-to-date scholarship on the great composer. It portrays not only Strauss' life and historical milieu, but also addresses inaccurate views of his political situation during Hitler's Third Reich, which have unfairly colored his reputation. The book would be an essential tool in fully understanding and appreciating this musical genius.

An eye and ear opener - why did it take this long?
I have grown up reading Michael Kennedy's biographies of such great English composers as Vaughan-Williams and Edward Elgar. So I eagerly picked-up his latest biography of Richard Strauss partly because of what I deemed to be Kennedy's objective approach to his subjects, and also because Strauss seemed to be a deeply held secret not meant to be shared with us ordinary listeners (in other words, there wasn't much else available).

Kennedy seems to have slightly more passion for Strauss it turns out than for RVW or Elgar, or at least enough moxy to blow the cover off some well established sacred cows. I know that I was not expecting to read exactly what I read.

If you are even vaguely interested in the music of Strauss or even if you are simply intereted in the history of Germany from 1900 to 1950, then this is a very interesting read.

Very well done!

The best compact introduction to Richard Strauss
Studies of Richard Strauss have a tendency to hover between enthusiasm and mealy-mouthed criticism. Or else they are so voluminous (multiple volumes) that only the most serious scholar or eager enthusiast can imagine plowing through them.Michael Kennedy's volume has two great strengths that place it at the top of the class when it comes to finding a good introduction to Strauss: It is compact, yet invitingly enthusiastic. Kennedy has the knack of highlighting precisely the unique strengths of each different work. Perhaps this is not so rare when he speaks of the leading masterpieces that others praise as well. But it is his special gift that he makes the reader want to listen to those works that have not been blessed with extreme popularity. All of them offer something that sounds interesting and inviting to the music-lover.Not only is it a superb guide to Richard Strauss; I think this book is a veritable model for the way that the non-technical music lover should be introduced to an important composer. ... Read more

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Awesome Cookbook!!!!
This is a fantastic cookbook with extraoridary pictures for the recipes which made my husband happy as he likes to pick out recipes by looking at the pictures!Easy to follow directions with a well balanced variety of foods for everyday cooking.Excellent addition to anyone's recipe book collection, even non-vegetarians!Did not buy this through Amazon but I would have had I not found an excellent deal on EBay.I can't wait to be able to actually eat at the restaurant where these amazingly delicious recipes originate from! ... Read more

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Richly exploited comic situations, effervescent wit, and intricate plots combine to make Sheridan's work among the best of all English comedy.This edition includes his most famous plays, The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic, as well as two lesser known musical plays, The Duenna and A Trip to Scarborough.A detailed introduction and notes on Sheridan's playhouses and critical inheritance make this an invaluable edition for study and performance alike. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Sheridan, political wit and playwright
Richard Brinsley Sheridan is famous for "The School for Scandal" which in many ways epitomizes the wit and the morals of the 18th century. It looks back toward Restoration Comedy of the century before, but Sheridan's wit is less bitter and more good-humored than his predecessors. Of course Restoration comedy came from men who had survived a bitter Civil War whether or not they had actually been participants. Their cynicism and the deliberate artificiality of say "The Way of the World" along with deliberate cruelty exhibited toward persons whose only vice is to fail being being "witty" makes for uncomfortable reading, the sort of twinge which exists in a lot of 20th century drama, Joe Orton for example.
Sheridan on the other hand likes a joke, likes to ridicule worthy subjects and has a wonderfully light hand with dialogue. He came from a theatrical family and knew in his bones (his first play "The Rivals" was written when he was barely out of his teens!) what would work on the stage.
This is an excellent edition with an informative forward and good notes. The only caveat I have is the cover: why select an actress and a play from a totally different playwright and indeed period? Surely they could have found one of the actresses who actually starred in his plays?

Hilarious!
This edition includes three of Sheridan's most famous works."The Rivals" and "The Critic" are both fine plays, but the best by far is "The School for Scandal", a droll farce which lampoonsgossip-mongers.The high point of the play is the famous "screenscene", in which one character after another takes refuge behind ascreen to eavesdrop.The humor is sharp but never bitter, and thecharacters are wholly believable.It is easy to see why this play is stillbeing performed after two hundred years. ... Read more

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This volume brings together a series of papers that address the topic of reconstructing behavior in the primate fossil record. Here is offered a review of broad issues related to reconstructing various aspects of behavior -- such as diet and social systems -- from very different types of evidence. For example: comparative analysis and adaptation, ontogenetic evidence, paleoenvironmental and paleo-community analysis, experimental functional analysis, and comparative socioecology. Hopefully, the reader will gain a perspective on the various types of evidence that can be brought to bear on reconstructing behavior, the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and, perhaps, new approaches to the topic. Authors review not only the types of evidence that can be used to reconstruct behavior, but also the limitations of the evidence, only emphasizing the weakness of behavioral reconstruction as a basis and inspiration for further research. ... Read more

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"Hidden History is a detective novel as much as a scholarly tour de force.But the murder is not the butler. Neither is the victim a rich old man with many heirs.The victim is man himself, and the role of the assassin is played by numerous scientists." Dr. Michael Rothstein, Politiken Newspaper, Denmark ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

Case well spoken !
A pretty convincing argument for man's origins going back many more thousands,probably millions, of years before what mainstream paleoanthropolgy and the die hard Darwinists have been telling us. The book does get a bit technical and dry at times talking about layers and fossil dating but then it's the tradional scientists they're trying to convince to atleast begin to consider a scenario for man's ancient history that better fits the (overwhelming) evidence. This book should be read by all college anthropology students.

Actual Evidence
Despite the other critical reviews this book does show a vast amount of evidence for his own theory. I interpret the evidence much different than Mr. Cremo. This book is a condensed version of "Forbidden Archaeology". It seems that when someone presents not only an alternate theory but evidence which supports it, darwinists seem to only be able to ridicule it rather than debunk it.

eye opening
science today is too hidebound and doesn't listen to anybody that suggests a different model of history with actual artefacts. i wish they would get their heads out of the sand.

High Hopes... Unfulfilled
The title of the book is misleading. No "hidden history" of mankind is given. What the book consists of is a listing of archeological finds that suggest homo sapiens has been on planet earth for upwards of a million years or more. This view may be correct, but what homo sapiens was doing during all this time, how he lived etc, is hardly speculated on.

Conventional historians have drawn a veil over anything dated before 2,500 BCE when they believe the Sumerian culture - apparently - spontaneosuly generated itself. The challenge is to break down this wall of silence. For my part, this book, while an enjoyable an informative read, doesn't provide an effective way to do that.

Archaeology as a Form of Comedy
Pure drivel. Classic psuedo-science. Only for government conspiracy paranoids and then only for comedy relief. If you like this book I have a real UFO photo I'll sell you cheap. ... Read more

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Voting difficulties hung over America's presidential election in 2000 like a dark cloud. Passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002 sparked further interest in the physical act of casting a vote, leading to a number of technological innovations. Voting Technology is the first book to investigate in a scientific and authoritative manner how voters respond to the new equipment.

An interdisciplinary group, the authors synthesize their work in American politics, campaigns, human and computer interaction, and human factors. They employ their collective expertise in evaluating five commercially available voting systems, each one representing a specific class based on shared design principles, as well as one prototype system not currently available. They evaluate each system according to key criteria such as accuracy, speed, and ease of use. The results reveal the good and bad about the systems, including specific features that contribute to greater clarity as well as those leading to confusion and error.

The concluding chapter of Voting Technology pulls together best practices that will guide voting-system manufacturers, ballot designers, election officials, political analysts, and voters. In a political system based on free and informed exercise of personal choice, the least we can do is make sure those choices are being correctly cast and accurately recorded and counted.

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A biography which includes quotations from Stockhausen's published and unpublished writings, and from interviews with him and those who have been closely associated with him. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A lightweight and unfortunately dated biography, but useful enough
Michael Kurtz's STOCKHAUSEN: A Biography was first published in German in 1988. This English translation by Richard Toop appeared in 1992, and includes a few brief remarks on events which occured between the two editions. The book is emphatically a biography, for while it is understood that one can best describe the composer's life by the works he turns out, there is little heavy analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's music. In fact, it's almost as musicologically lightweight as Toop's biography of Ligeti, though it is illustrated not only with photos but also with many samples from the scores.

After a preface that vaguely descibes the mature Stockhausen's long writing of his opera LICHT (which was finally completed years after this biography appeared), we start with Stockhausen's birth. The history of his family and the interesting landscape of his ancestral lands is presented and, while coverage of Stockhausen's childhood and adolescent is limited, the reader learns how the young man first wrote a variety of literary works before deciding to become a composer.

Most of the book covers the period 1951-1975. We meet first the Darmstadt serialist, and see him become a electronic wizard. Entering the 1960s, Kurtz tracks Stockhausen's impressive world travels, including frequent visits to the U.S. and a highly significant first visit to Asia. The formation of the Stockausen Ensemble and its notable performances in a Lebanon cave and at the Osaka World Fair get detailed examination. Along the way, there are a few references to Stockhausen's personal life, such as his marriage to Doris Stockhausen, followed by his relationship with Mary Bauermeister and eventual parting. Kurtz never outright judges Stockhausen to have become an increasingly eccentric and bizarre figure, but enough details are there that the reader can understand why critics many feel this way.

One major downside of the work is the skimpy coverage of Stockhausen's life after the middle of the 1970s. Granted, Stockhausen had ceased to grant many interviews at this time, and was working with an intimate circle of family and close friends who aren't too talkative, so these decades would be a challenge for a biographer. But there's not even much talk of the musical output. We're repeatedly told that the LICHT cycle is a significant piece of work, but details about the operas complete up until that point are missing.

And while we see Stockhausen's place in the wider Darmstadt circle in the 1950s, there seems little attempt to place him in a larger context afterward. For example, the German composer was not the only one to turn to astral mysticism in 1968, as Per Norgard in Denmark did the same, but there's no such discussion of such trends.Stockhausen's close friendship with Boulez in the 1950s is mentioned, but the reader does not find out how the two men viewed each other in later decades.

If you are looking for serious analysis of Stockhausen's music, Robin Maconie's OTHER PLANETS is the book to get. Kurtz's biography is a good resource for anyone wanting a short overview of this highly influential and eccentric composer's life, in spite of its faults.

FASCINATING TILL LICHT
KURTZ' BIOGRAPHY IS EXCEEDINGLY RECOMMENDABLE FOR BOTH PEOPLE WHO HAVE JUST HEARD ABOUT THIS GREAT COMPOSER AND WANT TO KNOW MORE AND FOR THOSE WHO LOVE HIS MUSIC BUT DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HIS LIFE EXCEPT STRANGEMYTHS (RELIGIOUS GURU WHO COMPOSED MASTERPIECES IN HIS EARLY YEARS BUT WENTMAD AFTER HE HAD COME IN TOUCH WITH EASTERN RELIGIONS). HOWEVER, THE PHOTOSAND KURTZ' MORE THAN JUST ENTERTAINING STYLE (ALTHOUGH PROFESSORS WILL MISSAN ANALYTICAL APPROACH) GIVE A GOOD IDEA OF STOCKHAUSEN'S CHARACTER AND HOWHE WORKS. UNFORTUNATELY, THE BOOK LOSES MUCH OF ITS FASCINATION ANDRICHNESS WHEN IT COMES TO THE "LICHT-OPERN". BUT (AND THIS IS ABIG BUT) IT'S A SHAME THAT THIS BOOK WHICH IS THE ONLY BIOGRAPHY ONSTOCKHAUSEN SO FAR ISN'T AVAILABLE ANY LONGER.

very thorough biography of stockhausen
this book does an excellent job of covering stockhausen's life from birthto present, and probably most importantly how his life experiences affectedand continue to affect his music.very comprehensive, an entertainingread, and very informative. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

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