Woody Allen Books

Guelzo is a distinguished intellectual historian and author of the recent superb biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. The Crisis of the American Republic is enjoyably well-written. Social aspects of the Civil War, such as the roles of women and African-Americans, are thoughtfully considered along with the military history. Guelzo is particularly good on the issues underlying the conflict; the chapter on religious and intellectual history is most enlightening.

Crocodile is a delightfully informative and entertaining non-fiction novel. Tracing back the history of the crocodilian for thousands of years, and returning to describe how humans have effected these wonderful animals, you will not be able to put it down.
From Chapter 1, the reader is taken aboard the H.M.S Beegle, to make first contact with the Australian Salt Water Crocodile, leaping from the water to snap bats from the air. From there on, we learn of the myths and legends surrounding the crocodile, the biological phenomenons of the crocodile, and all sorts of other fascinating information, all wrapped up in around 288 pages.

Though very informative, Crocodile is unique amongst its kind, as it is not just a book of different kinds of crocodilian and their different identifying features. Crocodile is a novel, that goes in-depth to lots of interesting information, historical facts and real life interviews, without ever taking on that common, twenty page, wrote learned, uninformative fact book.

All in all, an astounding book, can't wait for the next one. Hats off to Lynne Kelly!

I bought this book when I had to teach myself how to create basic reports via CR9. It got me through that painlessly, and saved my company the $1,000 they would have had to pay a live instructor for Report Design I.

But remember, it is a starter book for beginners. After about a year of successfully using the knowledge gained from this book, I took the Business Objects Report Design II and III instructor led classes. I learned I made the right decision regarding the Level I class, as this Dummies book covered it well.

I knew a little about the Kumari when I found this title in a mail order catalog. I had to buy it! Who would invent something like this? If you're interested in strange aspects of different cultures, this is the book for you. Very informative and entertaining. Wish I could get it in hardcover.

this is an extensive primer for those wondering about WHAT TO DO about present water crisis. it's going to take the average citizen--educating themselves and others. this is a good place to start. gut-wrenching, exciting, informative.

Allen Robertson and Donald Hutera have created a reference book that is easy to use and succinct in its entries. The thumbnail biographies and company histories are concise and to the point and give a credible account of both classical ballet and modern dance.

As a dance critic I have used this book countless times over the years to insure accurate references to works from the past. If you are a balletomane, or just interested in the history of the art of dance, this book is an absolute must.

I read this book a year ago and found it such a compelling but chilling read. If it were not so painstakingly researched and the history it reports were not so recent and about a time I remember well, it would be possible to read it as a dramatic nail biting political thriller. The characters that as Australians we know so well are depicted so vividly, their actions so self serving and callous. Given the current political climate in Australia and around the world this book should be compulsory reading for all those who wish to not live through another term of the radical right wing conservatives. Frighteningly history is repeating itself with another election soon, the same campaign tactics exploiting the politics of fear and greed are being played out in the Australian media, fueled by now well seasoned politicians and business interests.

In a remarkable and utterly original work of philosophical history, Richard Allen revivifies David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749). Though it includes a detailed and richly annotated chronology, this is not a straight intellectual biography, attentive as it might be to the intricacies of Hartley's Cambridge contacts, or the mundane rituals of his medical practice, or the internal development of the doctrine of association of ideas. Instead Allen brings Hartley's book, a psychological epic with a mystical finale, sympathetically to life in a generous and ambitious historical gesture of mutual recognition. Late 20th-century readers "are in a better position to understand Hartley's work" than were earlier sympathizers like Joseph Priestley and John Stuart Mill; and in turn, Allen argues that "Hartley has something to say to us" about just how rich and strange a full mechanistic psychology might be.

Hartley's daughter Mary reported that her self-deprecating father had decided to write a book "upon the nature of man" as "a very little boy", swinging backwards and forwards upon a gate. Remembering Hartley's early puzzling about "the nature of his own mind", Allen notices the children everywhere in his book. This indissoluble union of neurophysiology, metaphysics, and theology is designed, Allen suggests, to answer one developmental mystery: how does a child learn to love? He zooms in on a few days of Hartley's life in March 1736, five years after his first wife died giving birth to their son David, and just before Mary was born to his second wife Elizabeth. Quoting family papers and unpublished letters, this one biographical chapter achieves three aims. Allen fills in enough detail about sickness, the proximity of death, diet, and the riskiness of sex in Hartley's family to colour our reading of his theorizing on pain, fear, superstition, and the desire for a better life. He hints at the Shandean nature of a real biography of Hartley, in which the hazards of documentary traces would dictate multiple digressions on the promotion of shorthand, on the search for a cure for the kidney or bladder stone (we have Hartley's own agonizingly detailed account of his own suffering), and on the social history of vegetarianism in a culture of consumption. And Allen sketches an alternative psychohistory of his modest and gently humorous subject, which picks up from Hartley's private prayers and diaries the affective depths of the man's ambition, his sensuality, and his capacity for terror.

The Observations on Man, ultimate product of those boyhood meditations, unites physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, religion, and philosophy in a intensely mystical materialism. In Hartley's cosmobiology, all bodies are compounds of porous molecular structures traversed by attractive and repulsive forces. This vision of nested lattices held in dynamic equilibrium in elastic vibrating media drives a neural harmonics of Newtonian inspiration. The natural temper of our nerves is moulded and deformed by the vibrations shimmying down them in the various incidents of life, so that the civilizing process is the training or tidying of our own brains. Coleridge and William James - both ambivalently hooked on Hartley - took Hartley's 'ideas' to be simple and distinct, psychological atoms piled together in what James mocked as "a brickbat plan of construction". Coleridge came to vilify the absence of a true, free, controlling agent in Hartley's system, which seemed thus to make us the victims of a despotism of stimuli, and of "senseless and passive memory". But, Allen convincingly shows, this isn't the way that Hartley resolves the self into the social and the subpersonal. Instead, the heart of Hartley's chemically-inspired associationism is the joint and active fusion of ideas in building repertoires of skilled action. Hartley's psychology begins with dynamic embodied performances, his examples drawn from music or dance or the engaged intimacy of conversation. The stability of ideas isn't a foundation but an achievement, and is often the result of language and practice, not their origin.

...

This is deeply unconventional fare in intellectual history, enough to make the professionals uneasy. In the course of an approving review in the specialist journal Medical History, Roy Porter notes Allen's desire to recover Hartley's work from radical materialists who have "butchered or twisted it in various ways for their own ends". But he complains that the connections which Allen himself makes between Hartley and modern dynamic psychology and physics in the end constitute "yet another mucking around with Hartley for contemporary purposes". Porter is not suggesting that these links "corrupt the interpretations offered in a highly enjoyable book": so his point is that there is something intrinsically problematic in the historical practice of a writer whose "sympathies for Hartley's holistic mysticism sometimes run to the point of endorsement". Fear of Whiggish, present-centred history runs so deep among academic historians of science that it has become somewhat embarrassing to flirt with truth. But no careful contextualist would care as Allen does about the scope and unity and detail of Hartley's vision, pulling together deterministic explanations of dreams of flying and "morbid affections of the memory" with a powerful desire for "self-annihilation". Allen is commendably explicit about his own quest to join an affective psychology with a naturalistic theology, convincing us that Hartley is closer to William Blake than to Mill or James.

...

John Sutton
[extracted from Times Literary Supplement 5162, 8 March 2002]

Everything about "Dawn of the Floating World: Early Ukiyoe Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts" is superb: the quality of the unglazed paper, the beautiful design and color reproductions, and the solid scholarship that accompanies the presentation of rare Japanese prints from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

If you are a collector or student of Edo-period Japanese prints, you undoubtedly have dozens if not hundreds of books in your art library, but few will match the quality of this volume or give you access to such a rich lode of information on the earliest of the Japanese printmakers (1650-1765). Nor will many other books stand up to the quality of the text provided by an all-star team drawn from the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, and Dartmouth College. The text entries present: poems in romanized Japanese as well as English translation, aesthetic assessments of the prints, biographical information on artists, interpretations of symbolic devices, and details--where relevant--of the kabuki plays, actors, locations, and activities depicted. Even the footnotes, printed at the inner margins of the pages devoted to text, are fascinating and will help intellectually curious readers to readily locate the best of source material.

Dick Allen is a word master, a poet whose work should be required reading by all poets, all Americans, all world citizens, and by anyone interested in life, language, and literature. Not only is this book physically beautiful, but the poems are wonderful. There is kindness, depth, awe, humor, and such a wide-ranging sensibility in Allen's poems that this book, although seeped in the modern (computers and all) will be timeless. Highly recommended.