Edward Norton Books

Ed Regis is an exceptional writer.

This book is actually based on research, or least we anticipate a journalist's report of details. If you read his earlier book Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition you might choke on a few missing details. Ever hear of a transhuman? Regis applied this title grabbing "transhuman" to a few people who didn't know what the word was, let alone meant.

Regis' use of "transhuman" was wide of the mark. His writing was marginalized when he neglected to point out the transhuman futurists in Los Angeles. Even one who coined the term, let along with a hundred others. At least they called themselves transhumans, unlike the Silicon Valley geeks. But then Wired magazine appealed to Silicon Valley and LA was Hollywierd. Sounds like Regis was noshing his editors at Wired.

At least Regis is moving in an interesting direction with alchemy, can't factualize that.

Roy Whitman

This is a well researched, well written, interesting book about scientists in Santa Fe developing entrepreneurial start-ups based on complexity science. The science and business combination is fun and wide ranging. It belongs to a genre of books about the Santa Fe Institute, of which Michael Waldrop's Complexity is one of the earliest and best. Many of the characters are the same in both books. My criticism of the Info Mesa is that much of it reads like publicity hype. It overstates the scientific accomplishments of the Santa Fe Institute and the importance of complexity research. It overstates the health of the tech business climate in Santa Fe. It romanticizes the people who work at SFI. It romanticizes the town in which they work. The descriptions of Santa Fe are so over the top as to be laughable to those of us who live here. Not even our tourist brochures hype Santa Fe so well. So, in conclusion, the Info Mesa's story isn't really so. All of you should just stay home, and leave Santa Fe to those of us who got here before you. ;-)

4 stars for decent writing (I do enjoy Wolfe's style; AFB was my first encounter with this author)
5 stars for a terrific reading by Edward Norton
4 stars for a story that started strong
2 stars for a weak 4th quarter and lousy non-ending
Overall: 3 star average
Equal parts humorous and repellent, AFB is worth checking out for Wolfe's style alone. I gather Wolfe has deployed his talents to much greater effect elsewhere. If your choice is between AFB and some other Wolfe novel, I'd recommend going with the other.

Tom Wolfe presents an even-handed tale about a head-twisting attempt of a newsmagazine crew to ambush military men accused of killing a gay fellow soldier. This short story will leave you wondering, "Who actually got ambushed?" The soldiers? The murdered victim? The newscrew? The American public? Possibly everyone.

In comparison to other Wolfe works, AMBUSH is relatively shallow. It's still a work that might make a number of other best-selling authors green with envy. Wolfe explores the minds of soldiers and newspeople whose motives and actions are far more complex than they appear on the surface. One would be tempted to initially label both parties in black and white judgements, but Wolfe's rich internal monologues make that difficult. The murder and it's criminal investigation ultimately become secondary to the news story and the circumstances surrounding it.

Wolfe's even-handed approach to presenting the complex details of what appears to be an open and shut case will have folks from opposite sides of life react to different details with ire. It's easy to hate the accused rednecks. They're crass, unpolished, crude, and embody every bad southern male stereotype. It also becomes easy to hate the media moguls who twist and torment the story, not because they want justice (they don't REALLY care about gay rights or even solving the crime), but because they want huge ratings. They want their names up in lights. They'd sell their souls for things they don't even believe in. The converse observation of the accused soldiers is that they'd never hide behind false pretense, even to the point of death.

The audio book has its own set of issues. Edward Norton's reading certainly hits the mark on tone and atmosphere. He's earnest, but varied in quality. (Given, deep-south--nearly-unintelligible-redneck might not be an easy accent to emmulate, but sometimes it's just painful.) The producers seemed to want to throw in "mood music" at every opportunity, so the listener is bombarded with distracting backdrops of country metal and news-promo orchestrations that add nothing to the overall mix. Please don't let that disuade you from this quick listen (about 180 minutes) is you're interested. Just consider yourself warned.

AMBUSH at FORT BRAGG comes recommended to those seeking a quick and engaging tale to fit between your larger listening projects.

With all the books I have ever read this one comes to mind as the only one that has ever turned my stomach. I am sure there are many other ways of treating a subject like homophobia without going this route. I gave it one star because there was no option lower.

I like Tom Wolfe, but this novella was a disappointment. It is surprisingly unhumorous, the story's climax comes too early, and the novella trails off at the end. The two protagonists at first seem like perfect targets for Wolfe's satiric genius. One is the TV newsmagazine producer: male, jewish, unattractive, and self-pitying. The other is the TV newsanchor: female, WASP, beautiful, and shallow. It's too bad that Wolfe gets so little comedic mileage from them.

Wolfe seems to have thrown in a pornographic section in the novella for no other reason than salaciousness. (Certainly it was not done as a plot device -- it is absurd and unbelievable.)

Edward Norton does funny redneck voices, but otherwise his narration is dull and flat.

Despite all the bad things I've written, there are some funny moments, and some of the satire hits the mark. Overall, this recording is so-so.

By the way, this novella now is in print in Tom Wolfe's new book Hooking Up.

This CD naration was done by Edward Norton. And he is a good at doing the stero-type "redneck" voice. It is easy to listen to.

This Tom Wolfe novella has a self-important prime time TV producer, Irv Durtscher, trying to get the rating bust show that will get his genius recognized. He belives he can prove that three soldiers from Fort Bragg were resp[onsible for the savage beating and murder of a member of their company because he was of a differrent sexual orientation. Through the use of hidden cameras and mic's, he records these three soldiers over a period of weeks. What he gets is incriminating, but he wants to get them to admit to the crime conclusivly.

So he attempts to do the standard TV news ambush. Irv arranges the three to see the footage they have recorded showing them talking about the night of the murder. When he thinks he has them, he sends out the awarded winning Anchor to grill and shock them into admitting they murdered the soldier. But the ranger takes control of the interview.

What we see is that the special would have been ruin. All sympathy and support would have gone to this thug. But because Irv wants to show how smart he is. He uses editing to make the trio of soldier look guilty. This just shows how far the media will go to show their version of the truth. And to get ratings!

I felt that Wolfe did not tie up all the loose ends. Who was the missing witness? What happened to the soldiers? If it went to trial, what happened to the producer when it was discovered the extent of the editing tha that taken place?

As a Board Registered Art Therapist and instructor, I made the error of recommending this book to students before I actually laid eyes on it. What a mistake! When one of my students, also a trained art therapist, received it, we literally laughed. This is such a poor example of literature on how to understand children's art. Even more disturbing were the strange pseudo-drawings of children's art made by the authors. Clearly not recommended when there are so many better books available.

As a graduate art therapy student who has been working with children for years, I found this book to have very few realistic examples of children's artwork. Many of the images were clearly created by an adult and therefore provided very little help as to what to look for in childrens art. In addition to the poor images, I didn't find much of the information to have therapeutic value.

I strongly disagree with the art therapists who did not like the book. Maybe it's because I am a mental health therapist who uses many methods, including visual arts, to work with kids, but am not exclusivly an art therapist. If you are looking for a clearly written, data-based method for screening children's drawings in a clinical or school counseling setting, this is an excellent resource. If you are looking for an art therapy text, this isn't the top choice. Make your decision based on your clinical needs. This book has the strong advantage of empirical evidence of accuaracy, which is a very big deal in civil and criminal courts.

Hey, it is erroneous to say that these are "new techniques," when in fact they are 50 to 60 years old. What the authors did was do a new study with these techniques and then try to offer a convincing book on analyzing children's drawings. The problem is, it is not very convincing. One cannot use the indicators the authors note to establish child abuse in a slick fashion. We already know that the techniques the authors based this study on are not reliable, so they really just built on what was already unreliable to begin with. I understand their need to help children in distress, but that was not really accomplished here.

I understand the comments from those other reviewers sharing their concern that this does not honor the complexity of children's drawings. However, as a mental health professional who often testifies in court on behalf of child sexual abuse victims, this is a screening instrument, with experiential data, which can be used to PROTECT those same children. I also am a professor (I teach graduate school) and use this book as a text ... assisting future school counselors and licensed professional counselors and marriage and family counselors to have a screening tool which may validate clinical hunches.

This book was published in 1968 and contained 12 short stories by as many authors. The writers were translated from the German (Kafka, Benn, Aichinger, Böll), French (Sartre, Camus), Italian (Pirandello, Pavese, Moravia), Russian (Babel), Swedish (Lagerkvist) and Spanish (Borges). The pieces spanned roughly a half-century, from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," published in 1915, to Böll's "My Melancholy Face," published around the 1960s. The compilers included works and authors that they thought adequately represented the best Continental writing of their time. Borges obviously didn't really belong in the book but must've been included for the importance of his writing, and maybe also for his popularity at the time the collection came out.

In an afterword, the compilers argued that many of the stories reflected the 20th century existential sensibility whose roots are found in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: the absence of a traditional belief in God and traditionally accepted order in life, and the consequent need for man to choose actions and solutions for himself, with the inherent uncertainty and unease. In the resulting "age of inner insecurity," the objective style of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola was abandoned in favor of a variety of stylistic and esthetic approaches to explore people's estrangement from themselves, their surroundings and each other, and their search for authenticity.

For readers interested in this sensibility and pieces broadly reflecting it, this book isn't a bad place to start. If you've already read collections of great German/French/Italian modern short stories, though, then you may have encountered many of the pieces before ("The Wall," "The Guest," "Bitter Honeymoon," "The Bound Man," the stories by Kafka and Böll). And the collection was regrettably short, with the stories totaling only 150 pages.

Many others who wrote in a more or less similar vein during this period could've been added: Aymé, Audry, Hildesheimer, Bachmann, Buzzati, Hamsun, Borowski, Grass. Stories by writers such as Bunin and Capek would also have been nice. If Borges was included because he wrote in Spanish, maybe Beckett could've been included for what he wrote in French. And it's too bad an excerpt from a novel by Céline couldn't have been added, since in style and outlook he seems central to the tradition described by the compilers.

Almost nothing has been written on the pictorialist movement in California in the early 20th century, yet every well know photographer in California was active in it. This book is an imaginative look at one of the best and most mysterious practitioners. Mather and Weston found themselves in L.A. at the time in history when the movie industry was taking shape and a lot of creative and adventurous people came out here. This book captures some of that atmosphere.

Mather is interesting as a woman, as an artist and member of an eclectic group of West Coast artists, one of whom was Edward Weston with whom she worked and did other things for about 12 years. There is no question that they stimulated each other. Nothing could be less important except to get you to buy a book, I think.

Warren weakens Mather by linking her to Weston, trying to make the case that she influenced him. Her analysis is superficial to the point that her writing seems like an "infomercial". This is not surprising since the author used to work for an art auction house.

She would be far more informative if she had pointed out the differences between their approaches to the same subjects. Artists, particularly photographers of the place and time in question, met each other in clubs where they showed each other their work and talked about it. Everyone knew everyone and their influences helped define the differences between them. The Impressionists hung out together, the Dadaist hung out together as did almost every group or movement in art history. It is not informative for the author simply to restate this commonplace.

One of Mather's photographs of a boy wrapped in a kimono Warren compares with Weston's photograph of Tina Modotti in a kimono taken some years later. The subject is not new, and both photographs are wonderful but entirely different. Mather's is graphically 30 years ahead of its time, abstract, soft and easy.
Weston's is bold, sharp and explicit, and a dramatic break with pictorialism. It was probably influenced by Stieglitz, not Mather, according to those who wrote about Weston's meeting with Stieglitz. These two pictures, like many of the others Warren compares, are not even about the same thing.

In the end, this is a book about Edward Weston and not Mather. No new light is shed on either one of them, despite the huge bibliography of reference material. Not all of the works listed support Warren's case but she never mentions this of course.

There is a lot of art in this biography but not much art history. The photographs are well selected and presented. Margrethe Mather made some exceptional photographs which brought her a just amount of fame.

Mather's personal life would make a good movie. She was beautiful, talented and led a mysterious life which ended somewhat tragically. She died unknown mostly because she wanted to, and that is an important part of her story which Warren explores in this book.

Warren is working on a longer treatment of Mather. Hopefully she will pay more attention to the substance of the artist's work and her personal life and distract us less with her association with Weston.

This book is graphically rich and stimulating food for thought. Buy if for the art and dig up some of the material referred to in the footnotes.

I canceled the order because the book would not get to me in time, and I did not want to pay for the express shipping.

I find this book fairly understandable, easy to follow and a bit of interesting with good pictures!

A few years ago I read Ayers' book, "In the Presence of Mine Enemies," and was deeply impressed by his learned refusal to bow to the prevailing orthodoxy of what this war was about. "What Caused the Civil War?" takes up that theme again, though in more compressed essays. In the one on "Worrying " about the War, Ayers takes us off the grand boulevard of easy explanation, and shows us the little side roads, crooked lanes and byways that we hadn't glimpsed before. Some of the reviewers complain that the title is misleading. It is, but only if you're looking for a ready-to-wear answer. If you're looking for something more intricate, that gets you actually thinking and appreciating how difficult the question really is, you could do far, far worse. Judged by that standard, the book earns 5 stars.

This book is interesting for academics only. It is a good discussion as to where civil war literature needs to go in the future. It is a reflection on why the southern perspective in the war has not been undertaken and it outlines Ayers efforts to develop this history further. The title DOES NOT REFELCT what is in the book. Overall though for academics of the civil war this really is a must read.

Historian Edward Ayers explores the South past and present in essays that blend his personal relationship to the South with a history of its culture and concerns. Don't expect a military history alone in WHAT CAUSED THE CIVIL WAR? REFLECTIONS ON THE SOUTH AND SOUTHERN HISTORY: chapters explore sentiments about the South both within and outside of it, argue its biggest problems are misconceptions held on all sides, and provide an excellent survey.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

If you think you're going to find the answer in this book to what the title promised, then think again. Over the years, history of the Civil War, its causes and effects, has been "dumbed down" and simplified so that even a grade schooler can understand it. Slavery, of course, existed in this country since the late 1600's and indeed in several other countries throughout the world and didn't just "happen" in 1860 as many have been led to believe. And if this most bloody conflict, where 700,000 people perished, was solely about slavery, then why did every other country in the 19th Century where slavery existed, abolish it without firing a shot? A New York Times article from 1854 in describing slavery in this country, said this: "It was merely an incident of the real controversy....for possession of the Federal Government is what both North and South are striving for."
The author's meandering style throughout the book was entertaining, but did not fulfill anything except add pages to an already short book.
If you want to get an in-depth book on what this author tried to explain, then I would recommend, "The Coming of the Civil War" by Avery O. Craven which is well researched and explains in detail what Ayers' book could not.

Ayers is in a tough spot. He works in the South and his reputation is in danger. He tries to have it both ways, but he does, here and there, reveal "What Caused the Civil War."

On page 132 he says, "No respected historian has argued for decades that the Civil War was fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were mere hypocrites, or that only constitutional concerns drove secession." So state's rights were not the cause.

On page 134 he says, "Southern white men did not fight for slavery; they fought for a new nation built on slavery." Here he is saying that the South took their divine right to enslave others for granted and they saw themselves carrying on a new nation built on that evil. Plus by saying that the white men did not fight for slavery, he gives the apologists a quote to use out of context in their blog arguments.

On page 142 he says, "What caused the Civil War? If you have to offer a one-word answer, go ahead and just say slavery." So the Civil War was fought over slavery. Can't be much plainer than that. He goes on to confuse things so that the apologists can salvage their positions, but the damage has been done.


Writing about the aftermath of the war he says on page 155, "The white South,a grieving survivor of its own history, played out stages of acceptance, rejection, and redefinition of defeat." Can there be any dispute about this? Many white southerners tell a masterfully revised story of the Civil War.

Still on the same subject he says in pages 155 and 156, "The defeated people understood themselves to be those whom God punished and tested because they best upheld his teaching and example. Defeat became moral purification. The cause for which they fought was blameless..." So the South was right all along, but they were being tested by God because God loves them for doing His bidding. Again Ayers is correct. The current South is extremely holier-than-thou. One would think that piety is the main ingredient in grits.

On page 156 he explains that a new strategy emerged, "If the white South could push back African-American advances, it could in a real sense still win the war." We know what happened then, it is called KKK and Jim Crow and political deals.

On pages 40 and 41 he says, "Polls show us that Americans from all over the country picture the South as looking backward." "... the South appears to be dominated by nostalgia and dullness." True, and true again.

"People have not merely made up this story from whole cloth. There can be no doubt that the South has been poorer than the rest of the country, less technologically advanced, more wedded to racial exploitation and segregation." He said it, I didn't. I can only agree with him because he said, "there can be no doubt."

On page 43 he says, "The South eagerly defines itself against the North, advertising itself as more earthy, more devoted to family values, more spiritual and then is furious to have things turned around, to hear itself called hick, phony, and superstitious. The South feeds the sense of difference and then resents the consequences of difference." This is easily proven. Simply take a position of doubt about the rightness of religion or southern institutions and duck. Fury follows.

So Dean Ayers is doing the best he can. He dribbles out a little bit of truth here and there while trying to stay below the searchlight.

Freudian analysis has its place in scholarship. There are also ways of taking it too far. One glaring example is Edward Lucie-Smith's construction of Joan of Arc's supposed Electra complex. In the best of times this Freudian hypothesis is rather doubtful. This is the corrolary of the Oedipus complex and supposes that young girls experience subconscious sexual attraction to their fathers.

How does Lucie-Smith attribute an Electra complex to Joan of Arc? He analyzes her father's dream. This unsound approach can offer no insight into Joan of Arc's state of mind.

Sex figures large in this book's analysis. Why did Joan of Arc go to confession frequently? Lucie-Smith concludes she obviously confessed sexual impulses. Never mind that not a single original document hints at such a thing. Never mind that this young woman spent long hours at prayer. Never mind her involvement in power politics. Never mind all her battles or all the men who died following her orders. Never mind several eyewitness accounts of her grief at that loss of life: to an extremist Freudian it's all really about sex.

Lucie-Smith carries this misguided reasoning so far that he even suggests Joan of Arc's attempts to avoid sexual assault were prompted by some kind of subconscious desire to be raped. It is rather surprising that a serious academic could advance such a claim in the late twentieth century.

This is mainstream scholarship but it's rather poor mainstream scholarship. Lucie-Smith privileges the condemnation trial text, apparently because the somewhat falsified record of a kangaroo court offers the best potential for interpolating psychological disorders upon the defendant. He barely acknowledges the existence of the many documents that contradict his theses.

If Lucie-Smith's interpretation is even remotely accurate, then one wonders how Joan of Arc gained the support of reputable people and how veteran soldiers trusted her with their lives. At one point Lucie-Smith profiles obscure contemporary religious visionaries and asserts that Joan of Arc was no different from them.

Then why was she the one who changed history?

The author draws heavily from firsthand accounts of the period with some attempts to weed out the falsehoods. The story he tells flows fairly well and the naration is smooth. The book made for a good read.

My only detraction was that the author attempted, wherever possible, to explain the actions or motivations of Joan of Arc through the use of psychoanalitic techniques, with heavy emphasis on Freudianism.

After reading this textbook one might decide hang him/herself out of sheer despair to ever be able to follow the logic of the conclusions and assumptions presented by the authors. Nevermind mistakes, lack of explanations of seemingly incosistent statements (perceived, perhaps, but that says enough about the clarity of the writing), ostensible deficit of insight and dull presentation... Thankfully, my professor did a much better job during the lectures and hopefully managed to salvage some credibility of the field and preserve students' interest in behavioral theories.

I am not sure if there are alternatives to this textbook out there, but they are definitely needed. Considering the quality of my other textbooks on various academic subject including psychology, this was a very unpleasant surprise... quite inhibitive, CS+.