Oliver Books

This was written way back at the turn of the century. Long out of print, they are excellent observations of birds that is very hard to read about now. Any of this series should be owned by serious or even casual birders.

Starts with a description of the habit of typical flower gardens. General introduction to flowers including such topics as sun needs, life cycles, size, etc. Shows how seeds grow and discuses pollination. Briefly mentions soil. Touches on quite a number of animal, insect, and various life forms that inhabit gardens. Illustrations are clearly labeled and include a good mix of photos and drawings. Book design is colorful and page layout varies nicely. Includes a glossary, reading list, and extensive index. Karen Woodworth-Roman, Children's Science Book Review

How marvellous it is when, after bumping into the furniture in a darkened room for so long, somebody switches the light on! This book is a godsend. It doesn't matter how old you are, or what stage in your life you are at: Jack Oliver gives you so many easy entry points into the life-long process of financial planning that you can find your way in next to no time.

As the title suggests, the book is broken up into 7 "ages": Birth & Education, Work, Marriage, Parenthood, Career Development, Retirement and Old Age. The book is peppered with "decision trees", which allow you to start reading at the best "age" for you. Each "age" section has its own decision tree which makes it easy to review the options appropriate for that age, and allows you to back-track to elements from earlier ages if you skipped them at the time (e.g. not having proper life assurance with your mortgage). The decision trees are very clear so that you can decide for yourself what sort of provisions you might want to make. He shows you the benefits of making those provisions, and the typical costs you can expect.

I am a shareholder, a company director, a pension fund trustee, a company secretary, a husband, a father and a house owner. I have been subject to a great deal of financial advice over the last 5 to 10 years, but it does not hang together in a coherent picture. Oliver's book contains everything I have ever worried about, and more besides, and all of it in the most organised and accessible fashion. I would recommend it to anybody.

Great new interpretations on slavery, emancipation, and the pivotal role they played in nineteenth century history. A very insightful, enlightening, and interesting read.

Carl Sandburg revels in the Lincolnia of his contemporaries and provides insight into the world of the Lincoln Collector of the late 1940s and 1950s. Much more than the story of Oliver Barrett (although this is very interesting), this book presents many obscure letters and speeches with their historical context and is an excellent complement to the Sandburg biography of Lincoln. If you can find it, read it!

Teresa Brennan's life was abruptly cut short and the death of such a wonderful, extraordinarily generous and challenging scholar is a terrible loss. These essays, drawn from a conference on Brennan's work will ensure that her intellectual fecundity lives on. Kelly Oliver, author of the stunning The Colonization Of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory Of Oppression contributes an essay that unpacks Brennan's notion of social pressure and the ways in which the traffic between the psyche and the material world runs in both directions.

Post-structuralist and cultural studies debates have been raging on for some time now around the question of what constitutes the "material." Older marxist notions of historical materialism have been put aside in favor of arguments concerning the materiality of the signifier, the body, and more recently the materiality (externality) of ideology (specified in work by Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek among others.)

What has, to a great extent, slipped under the radar of debates around the body, signification, and ideology is the vexed question of the psyche and its supposed evanescent qualities. Why does the psyche continue to be thought of as a non-material entity? The place of psychic activity and the Freudian and Lacanian topographies of the psyche are regularly excluded from the domain of the material, including the materiality of the signifier. We are all familiar with Lacan's commonplace: "the unconscious is structured like a language." Surprisingly, that notion has not been significantly challenged, though Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe did so in a cogent piece entitled "The Unconscious Is Destructured Like An Affect," though this is not the place in which to elaborate further on that striking essay.

Brennan was one of the few cultural theorists, who have consistently argued for the materiality of the psyche and psychic life. Beginning with her path-breaking The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity and the subsequent History After Lacan (Opening Out) Brennan has published numerous essays in which she takes for granted the materiality of psychic life.

The current vogue for the work of Slavoj Zizek has produced a partial eclipse of the scholarship of other radical psychoanalytic theorists who are committed to social justice. Brennan falls into that category.


To read Brennan is to grapple with a thinker for whom the materiality of psychic life is a fact. Taking up the question of affect and its relation to feminism, we might say that the old Cartesian mind-body split, far from disappearing, has moved elsewhere: it is now, in the late modern era, an ego-unconscious split that posits men as subjects of rational thought (the processes that take place in the ego, all the while chided along by the super-ego) and women as subjects of affect (located in the unconscious and therefore considered "out of control"). What do these observations have to with a "psychic materialism"? Brennan answers that question cogently by linking the physical and the economic to the psychic.

Her arguments have shown how Freud's concepts of freely mobile energy and bound energy are the two energetic forces that govern the movement of psyche. She links an increase in bound energy to the slowing down of energetic forces in the psyche and in the zeitgeist. Her discussion of "psychic forces" hinges crucially on the latter term of that phrase: forces. She begins with the assumption that just as a reductive biologism cannot account for gender differentiation nor can an exclusion of the social and material.

However, Brennan takes this line of thinking one step further by insisting that the material processes of the psyche project their force outwards onto the "material world" in which they have their real (in the non-Lacanian sense) and quite definitely material effects upon the technologized and built-up modern environment. One usually expects to find, in post-marxist, feminist criticism, the well-rehearsed argument that the speeding up of everyday life in the west since the Industrial Revolution has had deleterious effects on the psychic life of the gendered subject.

Brennan suggests, in a somewhat disturbing move, that the reverse might also be the case. In other words, the process of alienation (in the marxist sense) is a two-way one: between the psyche and the "outside world."

By invoking the Freud's notions of psychic forces, she insists that the "traffic between the biological and the social is two-way; the social or psycho-social actually gets into the flesh, and is apparent in our affective and hormonal dispositions." In other words, for Brennan, the psyche and its powerful forces are material in much the same way as a tree or a rock. From this, we can infer that affective responses, indeed affect itself, is located in the domain of the material. The importance of such a claim is that it reclaims affective psychic processes for a materially grounded historicity.

Kalpana Sahita Seshadri's moving and intellectually provocative contribution to this text, 'After Teresa Brennan' signifies on the title of Brennan's 'History After Lacan'. Seshadri takes a Freudian and Fanonian journey through her correspondence with Brennan, and finds novel ways to link affect to the drives and talk further about the idea that affects are "perhaps chemical changes".

Instead of relegating the psychic, and to a great degree, the psychoanalytic, to the realm of pure theory, Brennan places the force of the psyche squarely in the realm of the material. The psyche has already been granted, as it were, the dignity of a political formation. If Brennan's scholarship continues to find a wide audince, the psyche's materiality will perhaps be taken seriously by even the staunchest of marxist historical materialists. Marx himself said that the "only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain." Why? Brennan's work will help answer that enigmatic but important question, as well as many others that have yet to be asked.

The endless talk of 'trans-disciplinarity'and 'cross-disciplinarity' in the academy has the effect of obscuring the work of intellectuals such as Brennan, who has never operated in one field. Teresa Brennan exemplifies post-disciplinary scholarship insofar as she wrote on feminisms, philosophy, cognitive theory, economics, critical theory, and sociology

I strongly suggest reading Brennan's other work, in which you will find an ethics for living in an anti-feminist, neoliberal state/world. Globalization and Its Terrors: Daily Life in the West, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy, The Transmission of Affect, Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight

This was a gift to my dad who loves tattoos, old photos, and German culture. He loved looking through it, and so did I.

Short biographical sketch of the life of Dr. Livingstone. His very eventful trip up the Zambezi and Shire rivers and discovery of Lake Malawi.

His evangilizing the Africans to Christianity and establishing churches that still are active.

The account of slave trade as late as the 1920's as slaves were shipped across the lake to the east coast of Africa.

The account of the first naval battle of World War II which was fought on Lake Malawi.

If I were to say that this book were the hit if the month, or even the hit if the year I wouldn't be doing it justice. This book is so much more touching than Scott O'Dell's version. I cried almost all of the way through it. Can you imagine being stranded on an island for twenty years all by yourself? The only company that you have being wild dogs? If you read this book you will discover how it feels. So, if you only read one book in your whole lifetime, READ THIS ONE. It is fantastic.

Lord Harry is forced to marry for money since his father and grandfather squandered the estate. Harry's brother even stole his fiancee. Angela is the daughter of a wealthy businessman and the granddaughter of an earl, but still a Cit. She is more of a lady than most women in Harry's class, but all he sees is the money she will bring to him. I don't know what Angela was thinking in this book. She gets absolutely nothing out of this deal but a worthless title. I love her spunk and the way she fights for what she is due, but it is an uphill battle until her husband finally wakes up and realizes what he is in danger of losing. The cover blurb was written by someone who did not read the book, so ignore that and enjoy a good story of a woman who overcomes everything for love.