Conferences Books

This is not, as the reviewer below suggests, a book for "die-hard fans". Rather, it is a book for Tolkien *scholars*. Most Tolkien scholars, of course, are fans-- and a good number of fans are also scholars-- but the two sets are not identical.
Essentially, this book consists of the proceedings of (i.e. the papers presented at) the 1992 Conference on Tolkien that took place at Oxford on the 100th anniversary of his birth. It comprises several dozen short papers on a variety of Tolkien related subjects. The papers are divided into ten major sections: 1. Recollection and Remembrance, 2. Sources and Influence, 3. The Lord of the Rings, 4. The Silmarillion, 5. Linguistics and Lexicography, 6. Response and Reaction, 7. Tolkien Studies, 8. Middle-Earth Studies, 9. The Inklings, 10. Flights of Fancy. Some sections are much longer than others, and a few papers that were presented are not included because no written copy was submitted.

Of the various papers, a few are by renknowned scholars of Tolkien-- philologist Tom Shippey, bibliographer Wayne Hammond, literary scholar Verlyn Flieger, etc. There are also a few other 'surprises' by folks who are clearly among the up-and-coming crop of new Tolkien scholars. There is, however, some non-scholarly material mixed in here. Most of really kooky stuff is in the last section, butto be honest, quite a few of the purportedly scholarly articles in the other sections have an amateurish character to them-- both in style and substance (And, of course, the reminscences in part 1 aren't especially scholarly themselves... although they are still valuable to the Tolkien scholar for their anecdotal/historical value)
Of the various papers here, the most successful are those in the sections on Sources and Influences and on Linguistics. Of these, the most insightful are Chris Seeman's article on Tolkien's relation to, and reconceptualization of Romantic literary theory (a very astute piece of intellectual history) and T.A. Shippey's discussion of Tolkien and the Gawain-poet (i.e. the author of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"). Sadly, those works which address Tolkien's fiction directly-- i.e. those in the sections on the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion sections-- tend to be on the weaker side., while those in the rather vaguely defined sections (i.e. "Tolkien Studies" & "Middle-Earth Studies")are very weak indeed. The two exceptions to this are Hammond's "Tolkien and the Critics" (which perhaps ought to be called "Tolkien and the Reviewers" since he's really speaking about reviews that appeared in newspapers), and Anders Stenstrom's "A Mythology? For England?" (a careful piece of analysis that shows that Tolkien never appears to have really used the phrase 'mythology for England' to describe his fiction, but rather indicates that this overused catchphrase seems to be the result of Humprey Carpenter's conflation of some other references). A big disappointment here, though, is Shippey's paper on "Tolkien as Post-War Author", which just seems somewhat thin and vague-- a real surprise considering the strength of his other article here and his book _The Road to Middle-Earth_.

This conference took place nearly ten years before the time I write this review-- but it does reveal several things about the state of Tolkien studies then and now. The first of these is that Tolkien scholarship is still strongly rooted (peraps too strongly?) in a biographical approach. As one looks at the footnotes in this volume, one discovers reference after reference to Tolkien's letters, to Carpenter's biography, and to works like "On Fairy Stories", in which Tolkien outlines his theories of literature. There are very few footnotes for references to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. (Also, I think it is no accident that those sections on LotR and the Silmarillion happen to be the shortest and the weakest ones in the book-- or that there is no section devoted to _The Hobbit_ at all!_) This seems to me to be a bit of a shame-- as Tolkien's literary legacy is far more important and profound than his thoughts on philology or his theories of authorship, or his trip to Holland... and it also seems to me that more effort ought to be spend discussing Tolkien's fiction on its own terms, as works that can stand on their own, without such an overwhelming focus on matters of authorial intent and self-interpretation.
When all's said and done, this is certainly a worthwhile book for the Tolkien scholar-- or a research library-- to acquire. Not everything in it will be equally useful, but it's certainly better than a lot of other collections of Tolkien scholarship.

One malicious Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about the Nazis' choice of Poland as the site of the death camps because Poles welcomed them or at least wouldn't object much to them. No doubt, this libelous canard is facilitated by the countless misleading accounts in the western press of "Polish death camps". At the risk of belaboring the obvious (e. g., the spherical Earth), one must consider the anti-Polish Israeli Holocaust historian Yisrael Gutman, who nevertheless repudiates this malignancy: "It is indeed true that the Poles were not granted any form of autonomy--even within the reduced boundaries of the General Government--as was the case in other occupied countries such as Belgium and Holland. Consequently, they were not asked to express their consent--in one form or another--to the various decrees enacted by the Germans, nor were they consulted regarding the establishment of the extermination camps on Polish soil and the initiation of the murder campaign against Polish Jewry and the Jews of other countries, which was carried out in these places." (p. 400).

Sijes shows that the virtual nonexistence of prewar Dutch anti-Semitism is a myth (p. 528). Leni Yahil alludes to the unbelievable degree of freedom in "German-occupied" Denmark that permitted the much-romanticized October 1943 shipments of Danish Jews to safety in Sweden: "After the escape of a group of Jewish fishermen to Sweden in the spring of 1943, the Germans threatened the Danish authorities, and the latter in turn warned the Jewish community against a repetition of such acts. Yet, at a later date, it was the ambivalent nature of the relations between the Germans and Danes which made the existence of the rescue organization possible. The Germans did not make a serious attempt to suppress it." (p. 621). (In German-occupied Poland, such a situation would have been unimaginable in the least!)

Henry Feingold (p. 168) defends the genuineness of Nazi plans, from 1938 through (at least) mid-1941, to massively resettle European Jews instead of exterminating them. Yehuda Bauer, a proponent of Holocaust uniqueness, unwittingly undermines his position when he admits that Jews (just as Slavs) had a "right" to live as long they had utilitarian value to the Nazis (and beyond that already held as forced laborers): "One part indicates that the Nazi policy was the total annihilation of the Jewish people, while another part views the Jews as an object, which can be exchanged for merchandise." (p. 120).

In discussing the mid-1941 Soviet evacuations, Dov Levin (in contrast to Jan Tomasz Gross) tacitly affirms the large scale of Zydokomuna: "Since many Jews were members of the Communist Party, one can assume that the proportion of Jews among those evacuated was greater than their percentage of the population, especially since in many instances their families accompanied them." (p. 233).

Yitzhak Arad informs us that Soviet partisans killed fugitive Jews (pp. 345-348), and then levels the same charge against the Polish Underground. He mentions, but actually tries to belittle the fact (p. 341), that bands of fugitive Jews frequently robbed Polish peasants!

A better title for this volume is: "Disparaging Polish Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust", as the two articles dealing with Poles carry a pronounced Polonophobic bias. Indeed, the informed reader may be amazed at the creativity of the pseudo-reasoning used by Joseph Kermish (Kermisz) and Yisrael Gutman in their belittling of Polish rescue attempts at every turn and the impugning of Polish motives behind aid to Jews. Not surprisingly, they offer no constructive counterproposals as to what Poles were presumably able to do, considering their situation. Interestingly, during WWII, Stanislaw Kot reportedly hinted that, if Jews didn't stop portraying Poles as anti-Semites, the Poles would respond by publishing details about the ignominious deeds of the Jewish ghetto police (p. 457).

Ironically, Gutman is exhibiting the same mentality towards Poles as Hitler did towards Jews. In HITLER'S TABLE TALK, the Fuhrer rejected the idea that there are some good Jews. He contended that, whenever Jews (such as Jewish philanthropists) do something good, it is always for some ulterior motive, such as positive publicity for Jewry. In a similar vein, Gutman and Krakowski disparage Zegota, insinuating, among other things, that Poles helped Jews for public relations purposes. In a published discussion, Miriam Peleg (p. 455) soundly rejects this insinuation.

In a similar manner to David Engel, Yisrael Gutman accuses the Polish government-in-exile in London of deliberately delaying, and then understating, its knowledge of the spring-summer 1942 gassings of millions of Polish Jews (pp. 408-409, 461), allegedly to escape responsibility for saving Jews. But if the Polish government-in-exile couldn't lessen the German murders of 2-3 million Polish gentiles, how was it supposed to have lessened the murders of 3 million Polish Jews?

Consider the fact that Germans usually murdered Poles openly, but gassed Jews secretly. Note also that observations of Jews being deported is not yet proof of them all being murdered, and such things as odors of burning flesh emanating from the death camps don't lend themselves to a close approximation of the number of victims. So why invoke nefarious motives to explain the fact that the Polish government-in-exile knew much more about the extent of Polish deaths than Jewish ones, and did so much sooner? Also, recall the incredulity which had already greeted its June 1942 report of the murders of 700,000 mostly-Soviet Jews. Does it not make sense that the Polish government-in-exile, to protect its credibility, would prolong its collection of evidence? And then it would present, in November 1942, a death toll of Polish Jews based only on the most incontrovertible evidence it had? Given these factors, and still others that could be mentioned, is it surprising that it undercounted the actual Jewish death toll by a factor of two?

This book of readings on spiritual well-being of the elderly, edited by James A. Thorson and Thomas C. Cook, Jr., was published in 1980 by Charles C Thomas of Springfield, Illinois. The editor at Thomas asked me to put together an updated, revised edition, Perspectives on Aging and Spiritual Well-Being, which has 19 new chapters and retains several of the originals that have stood the test of time. The new book will be available in the Spring of 2000. It should be of interest to seminary faculty, clergy, and people who work with older persons in churches and synagogues. There is also an expanded section on ethical issues as well as scientific developments in the field of spirituality and gerontology.

Don't get me wrong - Spencer is a master when it comes to the probabilistic method and his style is engaging. This book just doesn't compare to the book of Spencer of Alon on this topic. If you can afford that one, get it.

However, this book is a concise, solid introduction to the probabilistic method if that's all you want. (I just feel like there's been so many more interesting results that have been produced since it was published.)

I love all of you, know all of you, feel all of you, I guess, and want to be part of this energetic, riveting, (ravishing) smiles :) project <> I know two minds are better than one {power received is power achieved} {flexiblity} {strength} {ethics} {need/fullfillment} {smiles (or a dream} {faith} {a vision} TWO Example only says expert please help: new equipment really {yields} worth, {A} simple thought: a new foundation overcomes ridiculous deceit. I am coming with you, i dont know how.

This book is a collection of ten papers on the Washington Naval Limitation Conference in the early 1920�s. The emphasis of each paper is on the position of each of the participants of the conference. Since the book is rather short � 319 pages � the papers are not very detailed. These papers primarily stress the political and strategic aspects as they affected each participant. There is little on the technical effects although these were rather important (see A. D. Baker III�s �Battlefleets and Diplomacy� at www.warships1.com/W-INRO/INRO_Battlefleet.htm). The coverage of the U. S. and British positions offers little that is new, but the material on those of France and Italy is not so well known. There is a tendency to interpret the arms control negotiations from the viewpoint of Cold War arms control negotiations which leads to rather anachronistic interpretations.

I've ordered this product at the beginning of June. It should have arrived in July. In August, I hadn't received it. I called Amazon.com and complained about this. I was told that the package had probably been lost and that a new package would be sent to me as soon as possible which should arrive at the end of August. It's September and I still don't have my ordered book. What is happening??

For anybody in the construction, engineering, design, or code enforcement/verification fields this book is a must. It is an excellent reference & resource book with tons of valuable information.

1. The overwhelming amount of format changes since '94 edition were unnecesary and confusing. Reference books such as these need a standardized format to allow for easier access to information. 2. Removal of many convenient tables and charts make this book less useful. 3. Calculations too complex to be of practical use. Complexity will certainly lead to errors.

Russell Quacchia, long-time Bay Area architect and active member of the American Society for Aesthetics, has produced a remarkable book on Julia Morgan's Asilomar campus. The previous Amazon reviewer must not have actually read the book as it contains orginal research (for example from Special Collections at the Kennedy Library at Cal Poly) as well as excellent background information on Morgan's life, the Arts and Crafts Movement in California, the histories of Pacific Grove and Asilomar, and a comparison between Asilomar and Morgan's other major work, the Hearst Castle at San Simeon. The last two chapters go into issues of aesthetics, making us aware of the ways in which Morgan anticipated our contemporary interest in site-specificity. Her architectural work at Asilomar is noteworthy for its emphasis on natural materials. Her architectural style was eclectic, but often, as at Asilomar, she followed the Arts and Crafts style of her mentor, Bernard Maybeck. Quacchia is especially insightful in his comment that Morgan sought a flexible balance between rigorous symmetry in building facades and casual asymmetry in the pathways she laid out between buildings. Each of her buildings, as Quacchia observes, was built to have its own feeling, to express a personality. As Quacchia writes, "In arranging buildings at Asilomar, Julia Morgan actively looked after the logistical needs as well as the social and environmental implications" of her work. The book is also well-illustrated with historical photographs. The bibliography is fine, but at eight pages, could hardly be said to form the bulk of the book, contrary again to the previous reviewer.

I was looking forward to reading a this book but was quickly disappointed.

I don't think Mr. Quacchia took much time to put together this book. The information is ALL second and third hand. The entire book is other writers accounts and information. The book is mostly a bibliography. Mr. Quacchia put a few narratives between each bit of information but he or his editors might want to use spell and grammar check next time. A college writing course might also be helpful.

I guess anyone can write a book if they do alittle research.

My copy of the book was not put together very well. Many of the pages were either omitted or put in after the index.

Please, think twice about reading this trash. That is where my book is now.

This books contains the scripture readings used at Mass for Sundays, Solemnities and Feasts of the Lord and the Saints for USA. It is beautifully crafted, with an elegance that befits its use in the Liturgy of the Word. Its handy size of 8 1/2" by 11" makes it a handy size for all ambos, yet it is large enough to draw attention to the sacredness of the Word of God in the liturgy. The words are easy to read, including the responsorial psalms. It is slightly more expansive than a similar edition published by Catholic Book Publishing, but I think it is worth the price.

Note to potential buyer: the Lectionary has been revised and a new version is currently in press and available. Much of this is the same. I gave it one star only to alert would-be buyers. If using just for a study, or if your church is still using the old version, this would be perfect ... while your church awaits the new one in the mail ;-)

First of all, don't pay too much heed to Dr. Carlson's review of this book, since he apparently didn't read more than a page or two (cf. my comment on his review). While much of the book discusses Donaldson's work on the moduli spaces of anti-self-dual connections over a closed 4-manifold, that isn't really the focus or purpose of this work. The real purpose is to (sort of) prove the following theorem on anti-self-dual (ASD) metrics (i.e., Riemannian metrics with zero self-dual Weyl curvature; W+ = 0):

Let M be a compact, oriented, 4-dimensional manifold (w/o boundary). Then there exists a positive integer N such that the connected sum of M with n copies of -CP^2 (i.e., 2-d complex projective space with the reverse orientation) has metrics with W+ = 0 for all n >= N.

So the author is interested in proving an existence theorem, one which bears much similarity to the earlier existence theorem ("Taubes's existence theorem") he provided for anti-self-dual connections on the same kinds of 4-manifolds, which was one of the key steps in Donaldson's theorem in gauge theory. Thus in this book Taubes first gives an overview of Donaldson theory (which is why Dr. Carlson was confused) and then sketches a (30-page) proof of its existence theorem. Afterward he returns to self-dual metrics, and provides another 30-page proof of the aforementioned main theorem, semi-modeled on the preceding one and involving many of the same analytic techniques. Finally he concludes with some open (at that time, and still open as far as I know) problems concerning self-dual metrics and Donaldson theory.

I say sketch because even though he devotes 30 pages to the proof, he doesn't quite succeed in proving it, having to refer to other papers at a number of points and making frequent errors. Infact, he botches the proof so badly (and shockingly, considering that it was his theorem!), I had to supply my own. He tries to make the proof easier to digest for novices by first considering several special cases and working up to the full generality, but he ends up repeating a number of statements and equations and even unnecessarily reproving things in different ways. What's worse is that some statements are in fact incorrect, such as eq'ns (4.26), (5.6), (5.4), and especially (5.27) and the condition derived for E immediately after it. I wrote a page of equations and attached it to p. 53 of the book to replace the disorganized mess that concludes the proof. Ironically, he made this proof much longer than the versions that appear in his original paper and in Freed & Uhlenbeck's Instantons and Four-Manifolds, Lawson's Theory of Gauge Fields in Four Dimensions, and Donaldson & Kronheimer's The Geometry of Four-Manifolds in an effort to appeal to students, and while this does have the advantage of making it easier to understand what he is trying to do, it also has the unfortunate result of seeing him fail miserably in doing it.

The proof of the main theorem on ASD metrics suffers from many of the same deficiencies. While it is much longer, with more detail and background information, than the proof in his original papers, it also contains several serious errors and there are gaps where technical results are only stated but not proved. Most embarrassing are a statement on p. 72 where it is stated that a certain function is square integrable when it isn't and the equations (9.9) and (9.10), which are not only incorrect, but even if they weren't, still fail to provide an expression for Q-bar over the entire manifold in terms of Q. This latter point is so serious, it is unclear whether the theorem has even been proved - it will be necessary to consult the original papers.

The editing for the book is also virtually nonexistent; infact, I seriously doubt it was edited at all. Among the plethora of typos include "have" instead of "half," "a priori" spelled as one word on a number of occasions, and even more mysteriously "in fact" written as one word ("infact"), not once but a dozen times or more (I have done it twice in this review as an illustration). There are also problems with the references to theorems and equations (it seems that they were renumbered but the references weren't amended) and variables are often written in roman instead of italic font, which becomes a problem when the variable is an "a."

Despite all these demerits there are a few positives. First of all, the level is a little lower than most of his original papers, with definitions provided for such basic concepts as the connected sum, the Fredholm property, connections, and the contraction mapping theorem. Second, his explanations of how the theorems work, rather than the details, are valuable in introducing the beginner to gauge theory, which is notoriously difficult to learn. Third, the main theorem itself may be of interest to some differential geometers. Fourth, the problems in the final chapter, and even more significantly, the connections between ASD metrics and connections alluded to in the all-too-brief Chapter 6, although not relevant to the rest of the book, offer a glimpse into a potentially deeper and more fascinating theory, in which the Donaldson polynomials are encoded in twister spaces of manifolds with ASD metrics and in which knowledge of the moduli space of based ASD metrics leads to information about the group of orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms of a manifold.

The results in this book have been superseded by the results of Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten that appeared a short time after this book was published. The Seiberg-Witten theory caused great excitement among the mathematical community who do research in differential geometry and differential topology, particularly in the area of the differential toplogy of 4-dimensional manifolds. Proclaiming the "end of the Donaldson theory", mathematicians moved on to study the properties of the Seiberg-Witten equation, which is still nonlinear enough to be interesting.

Thus the discussions in this book are somewhat dated, but still could be of interest from a mathematical history standpoint or with the goal perhaps of motivating the Seiberg-Witten theory, although the self-dual Yang-Mills equations, a cornerstone of the Donaldson theory, are not discussed in the book. Instead the author studies the anti-self dual equations. These arise uniquely in four dimensions due to the fact that the Lie algebra so(4) of the special orthogonal group SO(4) is not simple, but instead decomposes as the direct sum of two copies of the Lie algebra so(3) of SO(3). This enables one to decompose the tangent bundle of the manifold into a direct sum of two oriented 3-plane bundles. The curvature of the Levi-Civita connection then splits with respect to this decomposition, the decomposition having entries involving the scalar curvature, the traceless Ricci tensor, and the self-dual and anti-self dual Weyl curvature tensors. The question of the existence of metrics on the manifold for which the anti-self dual part vanishes is the subject of the book, with particular attention paid to complex vector bundles over the manifold. The anti-self dual equations are consequently a set of algebraic equations for the curvature, which are equivalent, over an open set in the manifold, to a first-order differential equation involving a 1-form over this open set and taking values in the Lie algebra of complex 2-space. The main strategy the author employs for studying these equations is to show that they linearize to Fredholm equations. Thus a kind of generalization of the Fredholm property holds here in the context of (infinite-dimensional) vector bundles. A section of an infinite-dimensional vector bundle which linearizes to a Fredholm operator acts essentially like a section of a finite dimensional bundle over a finite dimensional manifold.

The book could also be used to motivate a study of the connection between the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds. That there is such a connection was recently conjectured and some promising work in proving this conjecture has appeared lately. There has also been recent interest in examining the anti-self dual equations on noncommutative four-dimensional Euclidean space, because of its connection with string theory.