Arnold Books

Arnold is a great mind and should be read by anyone who wants a greater understanding of our own humanity. Just excellent.

This was probably Arnold's greatest work, and it can still be read with profit today. Mainly a reaction to the social and cultural uncertainties of mid-Victorian England, Arnold attempted to analyze and solve the problem of anarchy and cultural uncertainty as he saw it in this witty and articulate collection of essays. The U.S. is in a similar uncertain state today, but unfortunately we're more likely to see more false pundits pandering nonsense rather than another Matthew Arnold, whose intelligence, wit, and uncommon sense seem to be all too rare today in this country. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "Arnold saw in the idea of "the State," and not in any one class of society, the true organ and repository of the nation's collective "best self." No summary can do justice to this extraordinary book; it can still be read with pure enjoyment, for it is written with an inward poise, a serene detachment, and an infusion of mental laughter, which make it a masterpiece of ridicule as well as a searching analysis of Victorian society. The same is true of its unduly neglected sequel, Friendship's Garland (1871)."

I have repeatedly dipped into the book over the last few years as I am a health care worker with an interest in anthropology and health. The book reflects the key interest areas in the health care arena and uses anthropological interpretations to uncover new meaning and understanding. The topics covered include reproductive health, new technologies in health care, gender issues and places the interpretation of culture as the cornerstone to real understanding. I heartily recommend it to all my colleagues as well as my students.

D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow" is a very good book that has been rated as one of the 150 most influential books of the 20th century by many lists. But even classics go out of print. The book is about a young couple, how they meet, and their sexual relations. The couple produces many children which causes the mother to be more of a mother than a lover. Will, the eccentric, masculine father, is confused by this lack of interest in him and frightened by his dominating wife. This book is a classic of psychological realism.

This is a fresh new look at a man who is only remembered for treason. Without Benedict Arnold, the British might have won the revolution, and the author goes to great lengths to prove his point. Even though the book is fiction, it makes you ask the question. Was Arnold a tratior? Or in the end was he acting on behalf of the people of America against what he was seeing develop as a new corrupt government for our new nation? The book is a must read for Revolutionary War fanatics.

"Part 2: Relational Modeling" (especially normalization) and "Part 3: Entity-Relationship Modeling" are the heart of the book. Howe's treatment of these two topics is the best I have ever seen in print. He is a marvelously clear writer. No other book I know (and I own several, and have inspected a dozen or more others) would get more than three stars from me on this subject.

The book is much more suitable for self-study than most. Each section of each chapter ends with questions and exercises, and suggested answers and solutions are at the end of the chapters.

The ideas will also be indirectly useful to practitioners of object-oriented analysis.

The first 3/4 of "Part 4: Implementation" shows how to do physical database design for a network-style (CODASYL) database management system. This has little practical value, as CODASYL-compliant DBMS products are no longer actively marketed. But even this material will be useful to OODBMS designers. Just substitute "collection" or "container" (an OOD concept) for "set" (a CODASYL concept), and you will be well on your way.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in a survivor's story. It is moving and at times hard to read but you will never regret reading it. I was moved to tears at one point.

The tenth volume in the Progress in Self Psychology series begins with four timely reassessmnts of the selfobject concept (Basch, Rowe, Bacal, Gilbert ), followed by a section of clinical papers that span the topics of homosexuality, alter ego countertransference, hypnosis, trauma, dream theory, and intersubjective approaches to conjoint therapy. Section III, "A Dialogue on Self Psychology'" offers Merton Gill's astute appreciation of "Heinz Kohut's Self Psychology," followed by commentaries by Leider and Stolorow and Gill's reply. The concluding section offers Stolorow and Atwood's "The Myth of the Isolated Mind," followed by discussions by Gehrie and the Shanes. A forum for the kind of spirited, productive exchanges that have long found a home within the self-psychology community, A Decade of Progress builds on the past in responding to the theoretical and clinical chalenges of the present.
--- from book's back cover

Arnold Brackman's book on the 'delicate arrangement' concerning Darwin and Wallace is an important, now out of print and no doubt too little read, text on the enigma of the sources of the theory of evolution, and the suspicion about Darwin's delay and sudden breakthrough on the principle of divergence. The issues raised are shocking, and keep getting shunted aside by Darwinists in general. Brackman's book is not so easily dismissed. And beyond the specific questions which struggle for correct proof lies the more general picture of Darwin, which is clear and not very flattering, to say the least, irregardless of the actual facts of what skullduggery was occurring here that required such clear stealth tactics abetted by Hooker and Lyell, stretching to the staging of the joint announcement at the Linnean Society.

From Brackman's A Delicate Arrangement

Among Darwin's letters and journals that June morning of 1858 was a relatively thick envelope containing some twenty sheets of a thin 'foreign' stationary, probably rice paper, and probably pale violet in color. The manuscript was accompanied by a note from Alfred Russel Wallace, who had initiated a correspondence with Darwin only some twenty months earlier from Sarawak, Borneo... (Chapter 2)

(Chapter 3) Since the manuscript Wallace mailed from Ternate contained--in complete form--what is today known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the date of its arrival at Down House acquires profound historical significance.

A quartet of dates is in the running as the date on which the postrider handed Wallace's envelope to Parslow. The first of the four-Friday, June 4--is speculative; the second--Tuesday, June 8--is the day Darwin wrote Hooker that he had suddenly found the missing 'keystone' of his theory; the third--Monday, June 14--is suggested by Darwin's 'little diary'; and the fourth--Friday, June 18--is the date publicly advanced by Darwin himself. Wherever the chronological reality may rest, June 1858 clearly marked for Darwin the moment of truth.
The problem is compounded by the disappearance of the Darwin envelope. The envelope...In all probability it no longer exists. It has either been misplaced or, more likely, destroyed.
The postal history of the period, the survival of a number of other Wallace letters from Ternate, and a consensus among philatelists is that it would take a letter from Ternate some twelve weeks to reach Down. According to the evidence found in Wallace's papers, he wrote out his complete theory of evolution toward the end of February and posted it March 9, when the first available Ductch vessel dropped anchor at Ternate. This is corroborated by a letter Wallace sent that same day by the same ship to Frederick Bates, the brother of Henry Walter Bates with whom Wallace had scoured the Amazon for species some years earlier. H. Lewis McKinney, a memeber of the University of Kansas faculty, was the first to draw attention to the Bates letter....

Wallace's letter to Darwin should have arrived the same day as Bates', June 3, or perhaps a day or two later. "It is only reasonable to assume that Wallace's communication to Darwin arrived at the same time and was delivered to Darwin at Down House on 3 June 1858, the same day as Bates' letter arrived in Leicester," said McKinney. "If this sequence is correct, as it appears to be, we must ask ourselves what Darwin was doing with Wallace's paper during the two weeks between 4 June and 18 June (when Darwin claimed to have received it)."

Two other books, John Brooks, "Just Before the Origin"
and
Raby's recent Alfred Rusell Wallace

I think that this book is the most complete and modern manual on demography at the moment. There is a lot of information packed in its 300 pages. The author was able to offer both a good summary of the current state of the discipline and a very good presentation of its more advanced methods. With this book one can gain a good knowledge of demography, and as the author was able to present the material without unnecessary complication, and with a lot of examples, it is quite possible to read and understand a lot without a teacher.