F Books

A colleague who likes to call himself "Captain Suction" and I were debating the exigencies of a client's flow leak detection problem, and needless to say, things got quite hot. At least they did until I slammed O'Hanlon's volume on his cubicle and yelled, "Look it up, sucker!" I didn't hear a peep from him for weeks.

Thankful we found more complete data on vacuum system.

John f. O'Hanlon is so thorough, and has so much to offer. Whether the reader is an engineer or an operator of a vacuum system there is plenty here for each. This is a reference book, so never lend it to anyone!

Since I work in a very big semi' fab as field service engineer I looking for a good description of any tool part's on several manufacturing machines. But i work in Germany and it isn't so easy to find much more and better information as for an student without experience. It is my second book about vakuum technologie, all new kinds of engineering and also standard technologie is well prepaired in this issue. Some description of Pump's could be better or more funktionplan's , but all in one book is maybe too much. I was very surprised of this universal Handbook for engineer's and technician, best offer for all who need information about PVD, CVD, Implant vakuum etc. A lot of basic's in introduction part, well to understand, intresting gas properties, cluster technologie and last but not least - a big appendix with all what you need , very fine. Thank's for this good book.

I borrowed this book from a colleague here at Applied Materials. After looking at it for a few minutes, I offered to buy it from him. Of course, he refused. So here I am at Amazon (physically at work) to purchase the book. It is extremely practical and I intend to keep it here at work as a reference for problems I encounter. By the way, my web address is http://www.netcom.com/~kvick/main.html. Please feel free to visit or email me

Gregory Michno has a talent for researching a subject and presenting the knowledge he's gained in an interesting and easily understood way. He turns a non-fiction story into something which holds the interest of even those not particularly interested in history. he's done it again with USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel. We aren't encumbered with technical stuff but feel as though we're slicing through the water with the crew of this sub. The Pampanito served the U.S. well then suffered personal anguish when they learned they had helped sink two Japanese ships which held Allied POWs. The sub risked their own safety to return and rescue many of the POWS.

This is an excellent portrayal of life on a WWII submarine. It is a good picture of what life was like for the enlisted men, and for the service in general. I served on the Pampanito with the author's father. This is what it was REALLY like on a submarine in the Pacific during WWSII. I commend the author for his thorough research into the history of an unusual submarine and the living conditions aboard them during the war.

There have been many books written about individual US Navy submarines during World War Two in the Pacific, but almost invariably they are written from the viewpoint of the commander or executive officer. "USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel" is different. This is a book which, for the most part, tells the story of a submarine at war through the eyes of her crew, the men who kept her engines running, who scanned the skies for enemy aircraft when surfaced, who strained to load the torpedoes into her tubes during convoy attacks.

Sparked by the stories told by his late father, a crewman aboard the Pamapanito during her first two combat patrols, Greg Michno collected the tales of fifty of the men who served aboard her from her launch in 1943 till the end of the war. Together with extensive research into official records, Michno has woven these firsthand accounts into an absorbing portrait of ordinary men at war. His recounting of a harrowing depth charge attack with the Pampanito at a depth of over 600 feet could have come right out of "Das Boot". But the story is more than just combat. Day-to-day shipboard life in insanely cramped quarters, jury-rigged repairs upon vital malfunctioning equipment, wild R&R escapades ashore which could cause as many casualties as a battle at sea, conflicts and comradeship among the men and officers ... it is all here in this book.

The Pampanito appeared on no one's list of "top" submarines as measured by merchant tonnage sunk or major warships sent to the bottom. All too often her successes were more than balanced by bad luck or, perhaps, less than stellar leadership. But on one remarkable occasion, the boat rescued 73 Australian and British POW's whose ships had been sunk during an attack on a Japanese convoy. The story of this rescue and the subsequent close bond formed between these former prisoners, many of whom had worked on the notorious "River Kwai" railroad construction, and their saviors creates an emotional high point of the book. Many of the Pampanito's crew felt that saving those men was more important than the sinking of any ship.

As it happens, the Pampanito is still afloat today. Spared the scrapyard, the fate of most of her contemporaries, the Pampanito has been declared a National Historical Landmark and is docked at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco for visitors to board.

The book is well illustrated with maps of the combat operations plus numerous photographs of crewmembers, both as impossibly young men during their war and as elderly veterans visiting their boat during a recent crew reunion.

"USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel" is an excellent look at ordinary men on an ordinary submarine during an extraordinary time.

This is a well-written, refreshing look at submarine warfare in the Pacific during World War II. Unlike many previous submarine books, including fictitious ones, which are written by the skipper or the exec and therefore put the sub in the best possible light, this book is written from the point of view of the enlisted men with "warts and all". Instead of concentrating on target data computers, gyro angles, and attack solutions, the story concentrates on the ultimate success or failure of individual torpedo attacks, descriptions of depth charge attacks, the rescue of P.O.W's and shore leave. Rather than reading yet another description of the intensity of being in command, the reader learns of the intense dislike of the captain by most of the crew which did not prove a hindrance in causing some damage to the Japanese war effort.

The author is particularly adept at describing interesting facts or procedures in context, sometimes glossed over or ignored by other sub authors, without becoming bogged down in unnecessary detail. These topics include distilling "torpedo juice", decoding mechanisms, how a torpedo arms itself after it is fired, a comparison of Japanese convoys to U.S. ones, ordinary shipboard routine, venereal disease, and the mechanics of carbon dioxide exposure in a submerged sub.

The author also achieved the number one objective of all stories--he kept the narrative moving forward.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the "silent service". I look forward to visiting the "Pampanito" someday.

After a recent tour thru the actual USS Pampanito (twice!) at Fishermen's Wharf in San Francisco, I bought the book at the bookstore next to the sub which is run by volunteers of this wonderful floating National Historic Landmark. What a thrill to actually see the sub in real life and then read a book about its' six patrols during WW2. As a son of one of the sailors who served on it, author Michno said he used to listen to his dad's war tails with some disinterest as they grew with each beer and retelling. Later he visited the sub with his own son and after realizing that it was his father's boat he was inspired to research and write a book about it, saying he wished that he had been a better listener. The book starts by giving a brief early biog. of six or eight men, where they were born, educated, etc., and how they came to be on the Pampanito. How it was built in New Hampshire, its' commissioning and shakedown and then an interesting and never boring account of each of its' six wartime patrols in the Pacific. It brings alive the details of the boats' activities and daily lives of the men, developed through oral histories given by them. Containing numerous photos, especially interesting were the recent photos of and recaps by the men, now in their eighties, who attended the fiftieth reunion in 1995, aboard the Pampanito. Touching was reading about the tolling of the bells ceremony where the ships bell in rung once as each of the names of the fifty-two subs lost in WW2 was called off. Well written and researched, Michno provides an exhausting list of footnotes on many of the details in the book. An interesting and scholarly work that is a fascinating and easy read.

I return to this book off and on. (I wish I can study this book with someone who has mastered this material.) The only epiphany I have had in my life is/was when I read Chapter 2 of this book about two decades ago (and understood that Skinner was analyzing language utterances as law of effect conditioned behavior).

Simply a brilliant book. Most underrated,as people have pointed out.

I just reread Chapter 1. It only has 12 pages. However, the brilliance can clearly be seen. As is the difficulty. There are about 12 sentences (in these 12 pages) that I do not understand almost completely. (For instance, the one about speaker also being a listener.)

Added on 6/12/2004
------------------

I happened to come across Chomsky's critique of Verbal Behavior online and started studying it closely, especially Section 3. I noticed several misunderstandings almost right away and started answering them, in a writeup. (I will post the details on these later.) On a lark, I sent a copy of this to Noam Chomsky, not expecting to receive a reply. I was surprised to get a reply. We exchanged several e-mails. However, Chomsky stubbornly refused to see my points. His answers were mostly non-sequiturs. Are may points valid? You be the judge when I get around to posting my two specific points. In the meantime, you may want to look at

http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305940

A key finding of Radical Behavorism is the role and power of operant behavior. An importance of "Verbal Behavior" is that it suggests that operant behavior can explain much of human language and, with that, much of human thought. So with this book, Skinner could feel that his findings on operant behavior had the power to help us understand "mental" and "psychological" aspects of being human that hitherto had been no better defined that a Tarot deck could do.

My only one reading so far seems quite inadequate. I had to make an effort to get through the first half, in which a lot of fundamentals are introduced. Fortunately, all the preparation paid off for me in the second half, which I found quite exciting. Much of it, oddly, given that I was struggling at times to understand, felt familiar. I thought "Yes, that's how I revise my speech, yes, that's how I think, yes that's how I adjust what I am saying with my audience in mind."

Skinner's hypothesis that thinking is a behavior (verbal and nonverbal) of the same basic kind (albeit of its own nature and complexity) as other human behavior hit me with the greatest force. It implies that, although for each of us there are private events, dualism is overcome. It may not be that we're "beyond freedom and dignity" as that we've rendered such terms obsolete - because we now we have the knowledge to do what needs doing instead of spouting empty words about it.

"Verbal Behavior" lives: for example, extending Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" work, Barry Lowenkron from California State University has added to our understanding of an area not well covered by Skinner: how a listener comprehends what is said. Lowenkron goes to great pains to provide clear examples of his finding of what he calls "joint control", which is fully based on Skinner's own findings regarding tacts and self-echoics. It can take much longer to find the truth than make up a story, but the ignorance that supports cognitive fictions is being brushed aside to be replaced by behaviorist knowledge.

Skinner's VB is a fascinating read and is the bedrock on which subsequent analyses of VB stand. It was and is an ambitious, risky, brilliant work. Despite its flaws in the final few chapters, the influence of this work on modern clinical- and applied-behavior-analysis is significant. Skinner's chapters on tacting (the VB of accurately, usefully labeling one's own behavior and the objects or qualities of one's world) and manding (asking for what one wants or needs from others) should be required reading for every psychotherapist. Contrary to popular opinion, VB was not refuted by Chomsky and never died. The proof of this has been in its usefulness for analysis, intervention and the improvement of human behavior. This is not BFS's most accessible work. Thus, three suggestions: (re)Reading BFS's _Science and Human Behavior_ OR _About Behaviorism_ may be an advisable refresher before tackling VB. Additionally, Kohlenberg and Tsai's (1991) Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (especially their chapter on the Self)will make clear, simply and compellingly, the importance of a rich, carefully trained repertoire of verbal behavior to the healthy development of the human. Finally, spending some time looking at the data - actual studies of verbal behavior in the journals JABA or VB - really highlights that a useful marriage of theory, philosophy and technology were brought forth by this book. Sr+ reading!

Verbal behavior is a classic work and one the most neglected and underrated scientific texts of century, erroneously believed by many to have been conclusively demolished by Noam Chomsky (whose work in competition with Freud's is possibly the most overrated). Skinners analysis of verbal behavior differs from other accounts both in psychology and linguistics in being entirely naturalistic and free of the quite far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about 'meanings' and 'rules' inherent in traditional approaches. The latter focus on an idealized and abstract entity (grammatically correct language) which does not really exist, whereas Skinner analyses the verbal behavior actually performed by people. He demonstrates that a large amount of linguistic phenomena can be interpreted and explained by the principles of operant conditioning which have been demonstrated in laboratory experiments and he explores the consequences of this analysis for problems normally only addressed by philosophers, such as the nature of meaning, the social aspects of language, the possibility of a private language and the nature of thinking. Many philosophers will surprised to learn that some of the best ideas of the later Wittgenstein can be found more clearly and elegantly expressed by Skinner.

This is not just an excellent book for those of us who are students of behavior; it is also an effect tool for those unfamiliar with the scientific principles of behavior analysis.

Dr. Skinner describes the different kinds verbal behavior, behavior that is reinforced as a result of the mediation of other people with similar repertories, produced by the contingencies of reinforcement on the one hand, and the way in which they are formed into effective verbal discourse and successful action on the other. Therefore, it is primarily with behavior of the former and latter that a behavioral understanding of what you are doing and saying is profited.

Dr. Skinner's approach to verbal behavior is derived from countless experiments in the analysis of behavior, experiments in which the principles of behavior have been rigorously studied, demonstrated, and verified. It is consequently not unnatural that finding it practicable and convenient, as undoubtedly it is, to verbal behavior is justifiable. Such a view obviously renders it easy to welcome behavior as an appropriate subject matter in its own right. Moreover, it is downright profitable to welcome behavior, which its first implication is the fact of objective and successful action!

Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing... Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois common to anyone wanting to gain broad attention, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of Toronto's Centre for Culture and Technology in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
A true understanding of the coherence of McLuhan's vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly explains McLuhan's , unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug,"

and gives his reason for being satirical and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This seems a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan , like Joyce is constantly punning - a strategy for multiplying meanings.. He was never definite or linear like a list of either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as dedicated to a both/and approach to events - medium and message together.
Theall, is one of the few who know the deep scholarly background to McLuhan's critique of contemporary culture and he is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan seems neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and toys with post-modernism by becoming beyond himself a virtual icon.
Theall, and very few others, perceives the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly]
against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because
("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall

who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature.
His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at St.Michael's college in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
Many commentators flirt with the ambiguities of McLuhan's vision but a true understanding of the coherence of this vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly links McLuhan's , at the time rather unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the very early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug," the prophetic huckster gives his reason for being satiric and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This is a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, a sort of poet who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan follows Joyce in his unrelenting punning ambiguities - a strategy for multiplying meanings. There is never anything linear, logical or definite in the "probes" that Dr. McLuhan injects into situations. But it is never a matter of listing either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as learning how to follow a both/and approach to events that most interests McLuhan in his Joycean and satiric posture.
Theall, being one of the few people knowledgeable of the deep background of scholarship behind McLuhan's contemporary façade, is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan is neither fish nor fowl, neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and planted the first oar in the side of post-modernism by becoming himself another virtual self.
What is almost always missed except by a very few and Theall foremost, is the perception of the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because ("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature. His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at jfraim@symbolism.org. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

The author's anthropological training and perspective, in conjunction with his keen wit and understanding of the human condition, enable him to relate insights about people and places that are both entertaining as well as extremely educational.

In particular, the chapters on South and Central America, and North Africa and Mallorca, provide fascinating insights into the time and place, and the people who populated them.

I hightly recommend this book.

Brion Morrisette

I thoroughly enjoyed reading John F. Mason's account of 50 odd years of living, traveling and experiencing life in so many different places. It reminded me of trips and experiences of my own that I had long since forgotten. His laid back sense of humor and wonderful ability to relate and entertain made for a very readable and delightful book. I think any age could relate to and enjoy this book.

If you've ever longed to travel, but somehow have never gotten around to it, this is a great book to read. I have traveled, but this book made me yearn to see all those places I missed at a time that is now gone forever. John Mason"s insight, his compassion and his sense of humor permeate the pages of this marvelous book. He makes you laugh, cry and see the world as he sees it. Good stuff!

A delightful book! I read it as slowly as I could as I din't want to finish it. John's descriptive powers make all the places come alive, and his insight into people is above average. A good bok for any age, and a marvalous geography lesson. Eleanor FitzHugh

We are thoroughly enjoying John F. Mason's "Visits to fascinating places...". He has a wonderful talent for understatement and painting vivid pictures, not just of the physical environment but also of the emotional and cultural lay of the land. We are savoring it, reading it in installments every night, out loud, before we go to bed. It is not a travel book - although he does take the reader to some twenty or more countries; it is not a history book. It is a book that records the thoughts and observations of an acute (and immensely friendly and sympathetic) observer. We love it. Frank and Katherine Baughman, London,UK

Although I would not recommend this as a guide to work with on your own, that is because I do not consider this (nor do the creators) a process in which you gain maximum benefit without a facilitator. That having been said, for counselors, therapists, etc. this book presents case studies, in individual session format, with clear explanations of why a particular "self" was addressed. Then, you, as the therapist are challenged to decide an alternative. In addition, you are consistently assured that this is an easy means of working with others. Overall, it provides a good basic understanding, as well as the means to professionally go beyond that in working with clients.

As teachers and innovators, we have always hoped that the people who work with us will understand the work and grasp the very basics of what it is that we are trying to present to the world. Miriam Dyak has done just that in her brilliant and marvelously readable new book, The Voice Dialogue Facilitator's Handbook. In this, and its accompanying Voice Dialogue Facilitator's Teaching Kit, she presents a detailed, step by step picture of how to do Voice Dialogue and extremely valuable suggestions about what you can do to become a truly top-notch facilitator.

Over the years there have been many changes in our approach to working with selves using Voice Dialogue. First of all, we have increased our emphasis upon the energetic components of the work with selves. Second, and perhaps even more important, we have emphasized the use of Voice Dialogue not only to explore the selves, their history, and their impact upon the way we live our lives, but to use it quite deliberately to create an Aware Ego.

The new Voice Dialogue Facilitator's Handbook outlines the basics of Voice Dialogue and provides clear guidance on our most recent approaches to the work. Miriam has been active in the Voice Dialogue community since 1983, is a senior Voice Dialogue teacher, and is an author in her own right. She has served on staff with us at "Summer Kamp" and for our Level II and Level III trainings at Delos. While writing The Voice Dialogue Facilitator's Handbook, Miriam spent three years attending our training intensives as both staff and observer to gather and organize the most up to date information on this body of work. She listened to our presentations, watched us conducting sessions, watched our very best facilitators at work, and watched novices as they began their very first facilitations. She taught facilitation to workshop participants at all levels of expertise and carefully observed what was needed to help them to do their very best.

A tremendous amount of material in the form of notes and audiocassette tapes was generated in this way. This information covered both the theoretical and practical aspects of the work. To add to all of this, Miriam also interviewed other senior teachers and facilitators, soliciting input based upon their expertise. She also brings her own extensive experience as a very gifted and insightful facilitator to the understanding of Voice Dialogue. All of this information is combined into a remarkable handbook that truly invites the reader to explore Voice Dialogue facilitation through its clarity of presentation and simplicity of language.

So we say to you, if you are - or wish to be - a Voice Dialogue facilitator, we urge you to buy, enjoy, and use this incredibly valuable tool. It is currently the definitive "how to" work on Voice Dialogue facilitation.

Hal & Sidra Stone Albion, California January, 2000

I am thankful to Miriam Dyak for producing such a complete reference guide for Voice Dialogue facilitation. As I study and practice this work, this book continues to be an invaluable resource. The information on energetics is especially insightful. Even if you are an experienced facilitator, this guide will illuminate new and creative ways of approaching the work.

This 312-page manual is the definitive reference book on the how-to of being an effective voice dialogue facilitator, whether beginner or advanced. Author Miriam Dyak has been a senior trainer for Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone, the originators of this body of work, since 1983. The book leads the reader step-by-step through each important element of the facilitation process. It is thorough without being complicated and effortless to digest. The reader is drawn into participation by the numerous sample sessions along with invitations to assume the facilitator's role and decide on the best course of action. Drawings, diagrams, and interesting design lay-out all contribute to greater ease and fullness of comprehension.

Facinating Psychology...understand yourself and others, choose your own behavior and responses to life's challenges...be your best Self! I've read many books by Hal & Sidra Stone and Shakti Gawain. Their work speaks to me at a soul level and so I was curious about this book...not to become a Voice Dialogue Facilitator, but to enhance what I have learned so far. Dyak's knowledge of the subject and conversational style make her book a top-notch companion for self study.

This is a fascinating and brilliantly written book that allows you to a feel very close to seminal American wars. This private but heroic family deserves our attention,

Wars and Peace is the work of a Vietnam Veteran, Rory Quirk, whose father, James served in WWII and later Korea, as a behind-the-scenes major player. For a seemingly humble, low-keyed guy, James is an eloquent writer as is his wife, Elizabeth; although we see far too little of her work, since it was apparently difficult for James to hang onto her letters as he traveled the front with the likes of Generals Bradley, Paton and Ridgeway. James' letters offer never before published insights into these leaders with some comical anecdotes about Paton that suggest we heard more of Quirk than Paton in earlier press releases, in stark, often amusing, contrast to post-Quirk Paton statements. The Korean letters, researched painstakingly by the younger Quirk, reveal frightening historic events that need to be responded to by those who might still know the truth. Matthew Ridgeway, about whom I read nothing in my history books, is depicted as an incredible leader and strategist deserving of great recognition and adulation. On the other hand, General MacArthur; about whom we spent so much time; comes off as an egotistical, narcissistic insubordinate. Go figure. It would have been good to hear and know more of Elizabeth Quirk, whose letters on VE day and the first birthday of their son, Rory, portray an intense love and loneliness that suggests that perhaps this is all we need to know. This is Elizabeth. Quirk brings us through the third family war with the devastating effect his service in Vietnam had on his father, the loyal patriot. Contrasted are his views of this war then and now, through his memories of 3 former college classmates who died young for something we either don't understand, or worse, for nothing at all. Quirk's father wrote his letters almost 60 years ago and they are remarkable if one thinks of his writing them late at night after, harrowing experiences. We are fortunate to read them unedited. It is uncanny to detect the similarity of style if not language, between father and son who have not exchanged a word in over 30 years. Quirk connects these human stories with flawless historical research, offering a context to the events depicted in the letters. I still don't know how I missed this when it came out. I hope it will be out in paper soon and in print large enough for seniors. It should be on tape for the visually impaired who may well hear this as their last human connection to their past. And if they haven't yet, and I believe I would have seen it, The New York Times must review this important work. This would be great book club material for serious readers interested in the human impact of war beyond the obvious.

A great inspirational book for young and older families. After all is said and done, whether success is achieved through financial rewards or attainment of immense power, the most cherished parts of our life are, and should be, our loved ones.

An emotional and gripping story quintissential to the 20th century American family experience. I loved every page.

This is a family memoir, in the form of parents' letters and a son's narrative, gracefully written by three individuals who lives were touched by World War II, Korea, and Vietnam: a father, who served with Bradley, Patton, and Ridgeway; a loving and supportive wife who served on the homefront; and a son who served as a U.S. Army Ranger in Vietnam. It's a fine memoir of an American family's courage and sense of duty during this American century.

Absolutely Five Stars (don't know why it shows up as 4 out of 5). Donn Draeger's "Weapons and Fighting Arts of Indonesia" is the definitive Western work on Indonesian fighting arts, and is "must" reading for anyone interested in Indonesia's martial history and culture.

This book is excellent,you will find allot of information in it.I think it might need to be updated,it's missing a few weapons and many styles of pencak silat.Many styles are not even known about outside some families.You know,keep it in the family!Some styles are not that old in terms of how long silat has been in Indonesia.I also wish they had more about inner power.I have seen it with my own eyes.But their is nothing close to this book out there.I stayed in Bandung for about 3 years.

Draeger offers a relatively detailed overview of the martial arts of Indonesia. An invaluable starting point for anyone with an interest in Silat or Kuntao.

This book was out of print for years and thankfully it has been reprinted. If you have any interest in SE Asian martial arts this book is essential reading. It is very wordy and does not, by its own admission, cover all of Indonesia, but it is very thorough and covers so much more than just the Tjimande and Harimau based styles that we see in the west. The chapters are by island and are broken up into sections on silat, kuntao and any other odds and ends. There are some wonderful black and white photos. The style is a little dated but there is no other book of its kind in existence.

this is the best book of it's type.this book is the most in-depth book on the Indonesian fighting arts I have seen.it's an excellent source for the armed/un-armed fighting arts of this region,as well as a resource for the history and culture/anthropology of Indonesia.some of the descriptions of the people in this book are rather outdated and ideo-syncratic. there are tons of photos and illustrations in this book.there are also great descriptions of how some of these things are made such as boobie traps,poisons,clubs with fish bone edges,etc. if you are an avid collector,beginning collector(especially),practicioner,or someone with an interest in the country and people of this region this is a must.

How JFK kept sane we will never know , obviously the JCS wanted to send us all into god knows where but you can bet they would have been safe in their hideaway . Seems to me , like Churchill had his mission in life , there at the right time , then so JFK was put in charge for his ability to change the thinking.

Sheldon M. Stern's aptly chosen title recalls that wonderful science fiction film of the 1950s, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." It is good to have that echo in mind as you look back upon the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Mid-century Hollywood reminds us of what the Cold War was like and Mr. Stern's book expresses what nearly happened. Aside from age and place of birth - I wish an aversion to war was a presidential requirement. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had it. He had been to war and in his heart he did not wish to start another.

This is a great book for History Students and we should all be students of our history. While it is a condensation it seems more like an explosive compression of "Averting the Final Failure" (2003), which I have reviewed earlier -- describing it as, "a chilling, provocative page turner." So is this book and there are fewer pages to turn; this would have gratified me in my student days. If you would like more information, thoughts and opinion please turn to my earlier review.

Sheldon Stern has presented a harrowing study of one of the most dangerous events in World History - The Cuban Missile Crisis. In his book, The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis, we are presented with an event whose story line reads like it was written by a Robert Ludlum-like mystery writer, this story, however, was frighteningly true history. With the careful, thoughtful, and thorough research that is Mr. Stern's trademark, the reader is presented with the complete inside story of that fateful week. This is a must read for, not only students, but adults as well. Kudos!

Sheldon Stern takes us right into perhaps the most important decision-making in U.S. history. This account has been scrupulously put together from the primary sources, including the taped deliberations. Kennedy no longer emerges as a simplistic "cold warrior" but as a statesman whose value has even been enhanced by subsequent events. This is about as definitive account as we are likely to get, and is essentially reading for anyone who wants to be informed about those days of crisis.

Herbert S. Parmet

The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous moment of the Cold War and has received numerous analysis in other titles and articles. What makes Sheldon M. Stern's The Week The World Stood Still: Inside The Secret Cuban Missile Crisis different is its focus on a narrative written for students and general readers. The author's own transcriptions of the secretly recorded ExComm meetings serves as a foundation for an analysis which captures the striking moments of tension behind the scenes. The newest addition to the "Stanford Nuclear Age Series", The Week The World Stood Still is an impressive work of scholarship that is also highly recommended for non-specialist general readers with an interest in the history of the Cold War era.

We bought this for our 5 year old son, who will be soon entering kindergarten. We read it everynight and he loves it! The text of the story is neat and the pictures are very colorful, has alot of detail, and my son asks many questions. We like it because it provides important information to a child entering kindergarten and gives them a chance to understand the transition and what to expect. At open house, my son's teacher had this book on the classroom shelf and it made our son think this is cool and we really enjoyed that! Good Book! Would buy again or recommend it to a child entering kindergarten!

Anne Rockwell's calm "Welcome to Kindergarten" is a winning way to introduce any preschooler to the idea of what comes next in the way of schooling. Tim, a little boy about to enter kindergarten, goes to the school with his mother--he's clearly nervous and comments on how foreign everything is, and how big the furniture, halls, and classroom are. But after his teacher has had an opportunity to show him around the different classroom areas (art, science, reading, math, and so on), Tim finds that he's more than ready for kindergarten--he's positively excited about it.

Rockwell's simplistic paintings accompany concise text and they complement each other beautifully. The colors are strong and clear, the details just right, and the movement from one classroom area to another helps to mimic what an actual kindergarten school day will be like. Just right for young kiddos who may harbor a little nervousness about that all-important first day!

I just used this book in the first storytime of the school year and it was a hit! The illustrations are very inviting and it really explains school in easy-to-understand terms for preschoolers. It takes some of the fear out of it all. :)

A visually winning and educational book for preschoolers reading for school. Tim is a 5 year old visiting a kindergarten class before he starts school. In self-narration, he tells the reader that he is nervous, but he soon learns of all the fun things he will do, including crafts. Tim also discovers that he will learn how to count, write, and how to measure and make cookies. At the end of the day, Tim concludes that kindergarten will be an exciting place.

Rockwell's use of color is the main highlight of this work. The primary colors burst forth in vibrancy, accentuated and augmented by the use of watercolors. The art looks as if it could have been drawn by a child, which surely will create a sense of realism for the young reader. The absence of lines and pencils presents depth and texture to the art, but children will be drawn into the book by the actions of their peers in the story. A good book for preschool storytime to prepare children for school.

Welcome to Kindergarten is a wonderful book for those with children about to enter this new world of school. Anne F. Rockwell takes you on this journey through the orientation day of kindergarten. As most children, Tim is afraid to enter this big school with these big children. After entering the classroom, this book takes you through each learning center in a typical kindergarten classroom. Each page shows Tim playing and learning in each center as he becomes more comfortable with the environment. A great tool as well as a fun book to read.